Talcott Parsons: Other

Talcott Parsons was American sociologist. Explore interesting quotes on other.
Talcott Parsons: 34   quotes 2   likes

“Culture has been distinguished from the other elements of action by the fact that it is intrinsically transmissible from one action system to another from personality to personality by learning and from social system to social system by diffusion. This is because culture is constituted by "ways of orienting and acting," these ways being "embodied in" meaningful symbols.”

Talcott Parsons

Source: Toward a general theory of action (1951), p. 159

Way , Learning , Personality

“Every social system is a functioning entity. That is, it is a system of interdependent structures and processes such that it tends to maintain a relative stability and distinctiveness of pattern and behaviour as an entity by contrast with its - social or other - environment, and with it a relative independence from environmental forces. It "responds", to be sure, to the environmental stimuli, but is not completely assimilated to its environment, maintaining rather an element of distinctiveness in the face of variations in environmental conditions. To this extent it is analogous to an organism”

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (1942) "Propaganda and Social Control". in: Parsons (1954) Essays in sociological theory http://archive.org/details/sociologicaltheo00pars , p. 143

“A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the "optimization of gratification" and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.”

Talcott Parsons

Source: The social system (1951), p. 5-6

Motivation , Optimism

“As a formal analytical point of reference, primacy of orientation to the attainment of a specific goal is used as the defining characteristic of an organization which distinguishes it from other types of social systems.”

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (1956: 64); Partly cited in: Chiara Demartini (2013). Performance Management Systems: Design, Diagnosis and Use. p. 17

“A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed. In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set.”

Talcott Parsons

Source: The structure of social action (1937), p. 8

“Without deliberate planning on anyone's part, there have developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others, mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment sanctions.”

Talcott Parsons

Source: The social system (1951), p. 319-320 as cited in: Paul Gingrich (2002) " Functionalism and Parsons http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/n2202.htm," Sociology. 250. November 15-22, 2002

Lying , Parting