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Reclaiming Parsons' Theory of Action Herbert Gintis Reclaiming Parsons’ Theory of Action Herbert Gintis August 30, 2016 Q: If you could c;onverse with Talcott Parsons today, what would you say? HG: I would explain succinctly his only serious mis- take and suggesta way to correct this mistake. Q: Would he agree? HG: In my dreams. Fantasy Interview This paper explains where and speculates why Parsons went wrong in aban- doning the theory of action developed in his masterpiece, The Structure of Social Action (1937) in favor of structural-functionalism. Briefly, between writing this book and the publication of The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action in 1951, Parsons weakened the stress on individual efficacy of his early work (e.g., in his critique of positivism and behaviorism) in favor of treating the individual as the effect of socialization that when successful produces social order, and when unsuccessful produces social pathology. In The Structure of Social Ac- tion, Parsons mentions the term “socialization” only once, writing (pp. 400–401): Ultimate values of the individual members of the same community must be, to a significant degree, integrated into a system common to these members...not only moral attitudes but even the logical thought on which morality depends only develop as an aspect of the process of socialization of the child. Moreover, in The Structure of Social Action Parsons uses this fact only to show the impossibility of a “utilitarian” theory of individual choice, by which he means a theory in which individuals fail to share a common moral dimension. He writes (p. 401), “This evidence confirms the negative proof of the impossibility of a truly utilitarian society.” By contrast, in 1951, in both The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action, “socialization” is used constantly throughout. In addi- tion, the term “voluntarist,” liberally dispersed throughout The Structure of Social Santa Fe Institute 1 Action, is replaced by “general” in later versions of the theory of action. The term “voluntarist” appears not at all in The Social System and only in the Index of To- ward a General Theory of Action—doubtless left there by mistake. Moreover, by 1951 Parsons has come to treat the demand for agents to fill social roles, which is determined by the social division of labor, and the supply of agents to fill social roles, which is determined by the socialization process, as not simply interrelated, but in fact identical. He writes in The Social System (Parsons 1951, p. 142): The allocation of personnel between roles in the social system and the socializationprocesses of the individualare clearly the same processes viewed in different perspectives. Allocation is the process seen in the perspective of functional significance to the social system as a system. Socialization on the other hand is the process seen in terms of the motivation of the individual actor. By the time he wrote Economy and Society with Neil Smelser in 1956, nothing is left of individual action at all, the economy being simply a system of intersectoral flows and boundary interchanges with other social subsystems. The individual be- comes for Parsons like a cell in the body, having important work to do to maintain the organism (the social system), but either doing it well or poorly. It cannot affect the organization of the system itself. The idea that the demand for agents to fill social roles and the supply of agents capable of and willing to fill these roles are identical is not simply false. It is pre- posterous. Parsons’ claim makes sense only if markets for social roles are always in equilibrium. In fact, the ensemble of social roles follows quite a different logic from the ensemble of individuals with the motivations and capacities to fill these roles. In a dynamic society, the two are rarely if ever in equilibrium, although there may be more or less effective tendencies towards equilibrium. Parsons’ possibly thought, following his assignment of “material motivations” to economics and “normative motivations”to sociology, that economic theorycould deal with the skills and incentives side of the supply and demand for role positions, leaving sociology to attend to the normative side of the equation. While it would be far-fetched to maintain that the supply and demand for various types of agent services are always in equilibrium, it is bordering on plausible that socialization could flexibly adjust to the motivational needs of society by suitably restricting which actions are allowed and which are not. Indeed, Parsons’ positive vs. nor- mative distinction between economics and sociology lends itself to this treatment. Then the economic subsystem could be in dynamic movement while the normative subsystem is in equilibrium. But this way of carving up the social world is not in fact tenable. 2 Two theoretical commitments appear to have led Parsons to identify economics vs. sociology with positive-rational action vs. normative-nonrational action. The first is his treatment of socialization as the internalization of a society’s universal and pervasive culture. This treatment, as opposed to a more plausible construct in which socialization reflects and codifies individuals positions in the variety of social networks in which they participate, leads directly to a deeply functionalist view of the supply and demand of role positions. The second commitment is that rational choice is instrumental to the achievement of material goals. Viewed in this way, much of human action, including morality-motivated choices, appears to be nonrational. Parsons’ instrumental understanding of the rational actor model appears early in The Structure of Social Action. He writes (Parsons 1937, p. 44): An “act” involves logically the following: (1)... an agent . ..(2)...an “end”...(3)...and a “situation”...This situation is in turn analyzable into two elements: those over which the actor has no control. ..and those over which he has such control. The former may be termed the “conditions” of action, the latter the “means”...Finally (4)...in the choice of alternative means to the end. there is a “normative orienta- tion” of action. It is challenging to cast this notion of an act (or what Parsons generally calls a “unit act”) into the modern rational actor framework. Parsons defines the “end” as “a future state of affairs toward which the process of action is oriented.” This concept is missing in the contemporary rational actor model. The reason for thisis that rational choice theory as developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) and Savage (1954), does not presume instrumental rationality—the notion that behavior is always oriented towards some specific goal and rationality takes the form of choosing the best action towards achieving that goal. Rather, we use the more restricted notion of formal rationality, which merely means that the Savage axioms, which say nothing about ends or goals, are obeyed. The problem with the instrumental interpretation of rational choice is that of- ten agents are in situations where they must make choices but they have no clear notion of what the goals of action are. For instance, if I see someone faint on a New York subway platform, I must choose how to react, but I have no obvious goal. Indeed several distinct considerations must be adjudicated in deciding how to act. Similarly, subjects in the behavioral economics laboratory may have no well-defined goals. They may have come with the goal of making money, but they often do not maximize their monetary rewards because they do not abandon their moral standards. 3 The “means” for Parsons include the agent’s capacity to choose among alter- natives according to his preferences and beliefs towards attaining the “end,” and the “conditions” are the objective and observable personal and social relations that form the context of choice. A search through Structure fails to elucidate Parsons’ notion of “conditions,” except that he tends to attribute to “positivism” the notion that “conditions” determine choices; i.e., that the voluntaristic and subjective fac- tors in behavior are absent. What appears novel, and what Parsons contends is preeminently sociological, is element (4), involving a “normative orientation.” One might expect Parsons to devote some effort to explicate this model. Does not one need a “moral preference function” of some sort to evaluate alternative choices leading to a particular “end”? Will not alternative choices leading to the same “end” have additional costs or benefits that must be balanced against the nor- mative value of the choice? Might we not actually choose our ends taking into con- sideration the normative costs and benefits of attaining these ends? Parsons never in his work directly addresses these obvious questions. He appears to hold that we cannot make utility calculations involving alternative material and moral aspects of our choices. Rather, for each given end there is a set of feasible choices leading to that end and normative considerations eliminate some of these choices while per- mitting others. The properly socialized individual will simply limit his choice set to those that are normatively permissible. The choice among what remains is then the business of economics, not sociology. Indeed, Parsons distinguisheseconomics from sociology precisely by defining the former as studying how agents rationally choose means to satisfy ends, while the latter studies the normative restrictions on choice that make the social order possible. For instance, Parsons’ study of the professions, as in his essay “The Motivation of Economic Activities” (Parsons 1949), supported the notion that physicians and other professionals internalize norms of social service leading them to consider the health interests of clients above their personal material interests. He writes in The Social System (p. 293): The “ideology” of the profession lays great emphasis on the obliga- tion of the physician to put the “welfare of the patient” above his per- sonal interests, and regards “commercialism” as the most serious and insidious evil with which it has to contend.
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