6: Refining the Functional Basis

Following the very rushed completion of The Social System, which set out a provisional and incomplete account of his structural-functional theory, Parsons returned to the collaborations with colleagues that he saw as likely to lead him beyond this initial statement. He worked particularly closely with psychologist Robert Bales to investigate and clarify the ‘functional problems’ faced by social systems, which he recognised was an important but underdeveloped aspect of his work. The pattern variables were used to produce a more generalised set of functional categories that became the organising principles for all Parsons’s subsequent work. These new ideas were published in provisional working papers with the highly technical titles ‘The Dimensions of Action-Space’ and ‘Phase Movement in Relation to Motivation, Symbol Formation, and Role Structure’. In these papers, Parsons and Bales set out their thoughts as they wrote, demonstrating how rapidly their ideas were developing.