7: A Revised Theory of the Social System

Following the reworking of the pattern variables into a scheme of four ‘functional’ subsystems, the system concept moved to the centre of Parsons’s attention. Prior to Working Papers in the Theory of Action, the idea of a system had served as a way of understanding the organic or holistic properties of societies and personalities through the physiological ideas of Claude Bernard and Walter Cannon. The research for the Working Papers led him to pursue more rigorously Cannon’s emphasis on ‘self-regulation’ in systems together with the advances being made in cybernetics and general system theory. Parsons developed the approach to social structure taken in The Social System through using system theory to develop his functional analysis. He saw this work as moving towards the more dynamic form of analysis that the idea of an ‘action space’ and the pattern variables implied. Though the pattern variables were seen as dichotomies rather than true variables, they held the promise of the eventual construction of the kind of analytical theory achieved in economics. To this end, he saw the functional categories as pointing to variable system states and introduced a number of variables relating to system processes. Inability to manipulate the variables mathematically led to an increased reliance on their diagrammatic manipulation, and the number of diagrams in his work multiplied.