Parsons, Homans, and Their Critics

Homans and Parsons have long agreed on several important points. They agree that Parsons' theory is not a rigorous deductive system such as classical mechanics. They agree that development of a carefully considered conceptual scheme is a necessary step toward arriving at scientific generalizations. They agree (with differences of emphasis and theoretical integration) that in human action rational calculation of self-interest, sentiments, exchange, and positive and negative sanctions are all very important. They agree that learning-theory is important in the sciences of action, and they both use it. These points of agreement between the two theorists are quite impressive, and should not be forgotten when we consider where they part company. Parsons thinks that Homans' deductive scheme is not very helpful for understanding some of the problems in which he, Parsons, is most interested; that critically sifting social scientific concepts, redefining them, and carefully relating them to one another and to empirical evidence are tremendously demanding tasks; that these tasks are more pressing at our present stage of development than is the obviously desirable effort to state a grand deductive system in a small number of propositions; and that it is desirable, in working out a conceptual scheme for a theory for general use in the social sciences to start with large-scale empirical systems as the systems of reference. Parsons, of course, regards small-group research as entirely legitimate and has profited from it a good deal himself, but he thinks that such research will inevitably be deficient and perhaps misleading if the conceptual scheme within which it is conducted does not systematically take account of the fact that any small "group" is intimately bound into larger systems at several levels of organization. The criticisms of Homans by Parsons and by Morton Deutsch in this volume should be taken seriously, it seems to me. To say that one can "explain" macro-social phenomena by reference to "psychological" mechanisms is roughly analogous to saying that one can explain biological phenomena by reference to chemistry. Even if the social psychology were adequate, one would still have to have a sociological framework (a "theory" in one sense of the word) within which to use it. One could not begin to apply chemistry to biology, or even adequately to conceive of the task, without an elaborate biological conceptual scheme that has taken some generations to develop. Sim-iilarly, general sociology must have an elaborate, well-considered scheme for the tasks of defining and comparing empirical "action" systems, for analyzing structure and process, and for assessing the relevance of processes and other events to the system, its subsystems and their units. One should not simply take such a scheme for granted or deal with it on an ad hoc basis. Homans' comments on Parsons in this volume amount to the contention that his theory is not a neat set of postulates, and are hardly exciting, since Parsons has several times pointed out that, while such a thing would be great, his own ambition is different and more modest. In the course of making some perfunctory, not especially wellchosen remarks about "functionalism," Homans has nothing at all to say about the important contributions that Parsons has made to the important task he is interested in. Among these should be mentioned at least his analytical distinctions between cultural, social, psychological, and behavioral-organic systems; his elucidation of the place of the economy among four functional subsystems; his development of the far-reaching conception of generalized symbolic media; his relatively careful discrimination of four levels of social structure; the pattern-variable scheme; and his significantly new conception of social evolution. The twenty-two essays in this book are all interesting in one way or another, although no reader could possibly agree with them all. Eleven are mostly about Parsons; nine mostly about Homans; and two about both. Eight are reprinted, five are modified versions of previously published papers, and nine are published for the first time. Twenty authors are represented. Of special interest, to many readers, will be the essays in which Parsons and Homans comment upon their critics,