Culture, structure, and the “new” history: A critique and an agenda

The Elderly in Society

“…The work of Talcott Parsons and the "functional" approach to analyses of social structure provided the key reorientation. Building on Parsons's "pattern variables," sociologists moved away from the simple, traditional/modern typology, to concentrate on patterns of development within a given social system (Portes, 1976;Stout, 1975). Parsons (1964) formulated three main stages, which he further subdivided into five types: primitive, advanced primitive and archaic, historic intermediate, seedbed, and advanced societies.…”

“…Lest the foregoing make it sound as if sociologists or anthropologists are the only users of a modernization templet, it is pertinent to note that historians have also utilized the idea in then analyses of particular societies. In his investigation of Americar life, Brown (1976) clearly adopts the modernization paradigm, though he is by no means the first to do so (for a discussion, see Stout, 1975). Brown adopts a simple dichotomy to integrate what he considers to be the objective conditions of the American experience, and then fits the "data" into a scheme informed by the discontinuity wrought by industrialization.…”

History QUASSHed

“…Mainstream organs of the profession added tables to the usual prose and increasingly published not just counts, but regressions, correlations, even factor analyses. &dquo;Softer&dquo; social scientific approaches -psychohistory, vaguely &dquo;Marxist&dquo; analyses of culture, &dquo;anthropologi-cal&dquo; studies of mentalitiis-are currently voguish (Stout, 1975;Stone, 1977: 14). In the more specialized subdisciplinary organs of social scientific history, the trend was similar and the analogous figures markedly higher.…”