From Conscious Values to Tacit Beliefs: Assessing Parsons’ Influence on Contemporary Sociology

Abstract

Much sociological research is now focused on demonstrating how culture both motivates individuals to act and provides them with justifications for their actions (Vaisey, 2009). However, I argue that this sociological work relies on a model of action that sees culture itself as driving action beyond individuals' reflexive use of culture. I argue that it does so by conceptualizing the internalization of culture as pre-subjective and impersonal, essentially committing what is often deemed the Parsonian problem of diminishing the contingent nature of social action through the use of abstractions. Just as Parsons was charged with placing undue emphasis on various social systems rather than on persons, dominant strands of sociological inquiry overemphasize the salience of shared norms and schemas at the cost of individual perception. The major difference, however, is that while Parsons justified his focus on the system level by framing individuals as highly conscious and deliberate in their actions, contemporary sociologists tend to frame individuals' actions as largely unconscious and reliant on situational logics. In doing so, the consciously and normatively overdetermined actor in Parsonian sociology is now unconsciously and situationally overdetermined in contemporary sociology, a perspective ironically anticipated and deliberately positioned against by Parsons himself. Thus, I assert that efforts to de-Parsonize the discipline have given rise to theoretical problems that need resolution. I demonstrate how utilizing some of Parsons' key insights on the importance of simultaneously considering multiple levels of analysis when studying action could be a fruitful way to proceed.

Synthesizing Proximate and Distal Levels of Explanation: Toward an Evolution-Informed Sociology

“…Tracing this perspective back to Weber's "switchman" metaphor, where cultural ideas send individuals down clear tracks or lines of action, she claimed that culture can better be thought of as a toolkit or amalgam of potentially fragmented and even contradictory ideas that individuals can use to plan their own "strategies of action" (Swidler, 1986, p. 273). This view sparked a wave of research which continued to focus on the pragmatic and opportunity-based nature of action rather than its socialized aspects (see Williams, 2017a). While not rejecting the idea that there are indeed socialized aspects of human behavior, sociologists following Swidler's lead tended to take a more implicitly pragmatist approach to social life by focusing on its practical, routine, and situated nature.…”

“…Debating the role of biological factors in their own broader field of psychology, theories developed by these individuals were mobilized by sociologists to add a cognitive and, thereby, "biological" explanation to human behavior. The reason these theories resonated with sociologists, however, was because they endorsed the same position implicitly supported by mainstream sociologists and explicitly supported by their neoKantian forefathers: that the human mind is a blank slate which develops cognitive structures when assaulted by brute, personally unmediated socialization (see Campbell, 2013;Williams, 2017a).…”

“…By converting homo duplex into what could be interpreted as homo habitus, or a being guided by internalized experience so devoid of personal interpretation that it can independently guide behavior (see Williams, 2017a), Bourdieu-perhaps unintentionally, but effectively-maintained both Merton's (1949) call for middle-range theorizing and Mills' (1959) call for socially meaningful research. Despite offering a relatively grand theory of how objective conditions result in subjective states of being by way of internalized bodily schema, the habitus became a testable theory of how culture shapes individual action due to how it could, allegedly, be traced to clear and measurable forms of social stratification.…”

“…The idea that the "purified" (Meloni, 2016) social is the sole domain of study for sociologists persisted long after Durkheim's lifetime and indirectly impacted the rejection of Parsons' (1949) attempts to produce a more fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to social life (see Williams, 2017a). Parsons (1949) attempted to unify what he saw as separate yet fundamentally similar theories about the nature of human action.…”

“…Key in this line of work was the claim that individuals have a capacity for reflexivity, or internal conversation and self-reflection, that cannot be reduced to language or linguistic competence (see Archer, 2007;Williams, 2017aWilliams, , 2018. This maxim is central to the critical realist perspective, as it emphasizes how the process of socialization does not go "all the way down"-there is a biological substrate which can never be entirely permeated by socialization and which, as such, should be taken seriously in any analysis (Archer and Donati, 2015).…”