Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology E-Book

John Heritage

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 568

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The writings of Harold Garfinkel have had a major impact on the social sciences and linguistics. This book offers a systematic and innovative analysis of his theories and of the ethnomethodological movement which he has inspired.

It is the only full-length study focused on the writings of Harold Garfinkel and will be essential reading for all those concerned with understanding and evaluating one of the most radically original social scientists of recent times.

Leseprobe

GarfinkelandEthnomethodology

John Heritage

POLITY PRESS

© John Heritage, 1984

First published 1984 by

Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.

Reprinted 1986, 1989, 1992, 1995, 2007 twice

Editorial office:

Polity Press,

65 Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:

Blackwell Publishers, the publishing imprint of Basil Blackwell Ltd

108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK

Basil Blackwell Inc.

238 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-0-7456-0060-4 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-7456-0061-1

ISBN 978-0-7456-6718-8 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN 978-0-7456-6719-5 (Multi-user ebook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey

Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents

   Preface

1 Introduction

2 A Parsonian Backdrop

3 The Phenomenological Input

4 The Morality of Cognition

5 Actions, Rules and Contexts

6 Accounts and Accountings

7 Maintaining Institutional Realities

8 Conversation Analysis

9 Epilogue: An Uncompleted Quest

   Appendix

   Bibliography

   Index

Preface

Notwithstanding his world renown, Harold Garfinkel is a sociologist whose work is more known about than known. My own contact with his writings began when, quite by chance, I exercised my newly acquired rights as a graduate student to request the loan of a doctoral dissertation from the Widener Library at Harvard. The dissertation was entitled ‘The Perception of the Other: A Study of Social Order’ and had been written by Garfinkel some sixteen years previously. It contained a profound and arresting analysis of social action which quite transcended anything I had previously read in the field. Eager to locate more of Garfinkel’s work, I quickly discovered that he had recently published a collection of papers entitled Studies in Ethnomethodology. My subsequent encounter with this volume was one of considerable shock. There seemed to be scarcely any connection between the Garfinkel of the dissertation and the new and puzzling sequence of studies. I had little idea of what to make of them and it was only after a considerable period that an understanding of the newer work could be co-ordinated with my knowledge of its background.

That initial puzzlement and the difficulties of understanding Garfinkel’s work, which are still widely experienced today, have informed the writing of this book. In it, I have attempted to set Garfinkel’s major theoretical contributions in the context of the traditional preoccupations of social theory and, through these continuities, to make the character of his thinking available to a wider audience. I am only too conscious of the pitfalls and difficulties inherent in this enterprise of making ‘good sociological sense’ of Garfinkel. The strains towards oversimplification and even downright revisionism which inhabit any expository work press all the more insistently on those who would expound truly innovative perspectives. The danger of traducing newly minted insights by rendering them in a more traditional conceptual coinage is an ever-present one. Nonetheless, the risks will have been worth running and this book will have served its purpose if it enables others to have more direct and productive contacts with the originals it represents.

In writing this book I have been more than fortunate in the encouragement and criticism which I have received from friends and colleagues who have read it in whole or in part. Margaret Archer, Max Atkinson, Robert Dingwall, Paul Drew, Anthony Giddens, David Greatbatch, Christian Heath, Martin Hollis, Mike Mulkay, William Outhwaite, Ian Procter and Rod Watson have generously helped in the task of eliminating weaknesses of substance and presentation and I am indebted to all of them. Two outstanding Warwick undergraduates, Peter Burnham and John Mattausch, did their best to reassure me that the text was reasonably accessible to student readers and I am grateful to them for their advice. My greatest debt is to my wife, who has been a constant source of encouragement and has survived the writing of this book with cheerfulness and patience.

Stratford upon Avon, June, 1984

The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce the figures: The Mary Evans Picture Library for figure 1, Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd for figure 2, and Professor Richard Gregory for figure 3.

CHAPTER I

Introduction

In studying a man’s empirical work the questions asked will not merely be, what opinions did he hold about certain concrete phenomena, nor even, what has he in general contributed to our ‘knowledge’ of these phenomena? The primary questions will, rather, be, what theoretical reasons did he have for being interested in these particular problems rather than others, and what did the results of his investigation contribute to the solution of his theoretical problems?

Parsons, The Structure of Social Action

Any attempt to give an account of Garfinkel’s work and the subsequent development of the ethnomethodological movement which he founded is immediately confronted with two formidable obstacles. There is, firstly, the character of the work itself. Garfinkel’s entire published output has appeared in essay form and on a diversity of substantive topics. An essay on rationality rubs shoulders with an analysis of studies of intake decisions at a psychiatric clinic. Accounts of jury deliberations, the behaviour of a person seeking a sex-change operation, interpersonal conduct in a range of extraordinary, yet quasi-natural, experiments all jostle for attention, each in its own terms, seeming to lack any connecting theme. These studies are discussed in a difficult prose style in which dense thickets of words seem to resist the reader’s best endeavours, only to yield, at the last, forceful and unexpected insights which somehow remain obstinately open-ended and difficult to place.

Then again there is the curious ‘off-stage’ role of theory. Although the writings convey an immediate sense of theoretical power, the theory itself is nowhere systematically stated, let alone used to integrate the various studies. Programmatic statements crop up, but they are formidably abstract and remain largely detached from traditional sociological reference points. The reader is thus confronted by a series of essays which, in their singularity and lack of compromise with conventional sociological sensibilities, both invite an engagement of an absolute kind whilst simultaneously resisting the assimilation of their perspectives and subject matter to any extant sociological framework. In both style and content the work is self-consciously revolutionary, demanding the abandonment of a range of widely held sociological assumptions before its message can be perceived fully.

The second obstacle lies in the reception accorded to Garfinkel’s work during the past decade. The publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology in 1967 coincided with a period of widespread dissatisfaction with the prevailing orthodoxies of sociological theory and methodology. Parsonian systems theory, with its analytic subordination of the actor to an environment of functional requirements, had lost its appeal in a decade of libertarian social movements and political protest. These latter found theoretical expression within sociology in an upsurge of interest in frameworks which stressed the analytic primacy of the actor’s point of view and the social construction of reality. A related critique, which spread into social psychology, stressed the weaknesses of social science methodologies which were based on a view of social actors as simply the passive bearers of sociological and psychological attributes. Common to both critiques was a renewed stress on the role of human agency in social life, a novel emphasis on the cognitive bases of action and a focus on the situation of action as a means of resolving previously intractable research dilemmas.

In this context a number of ethnomethodological tenets, pillaged from their carefully constructed frameworks, seemed to speak directly to the mood of the moment. The enduring ethnomethodological emphasis on the local, moment-by-moment determination of meaning in social contexts appeared, in itself, an important prophylactic against the mystifying consequences of ‘grand theorizing’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’, while the collateral focus on the contingency of meaning resonated happily with the humanistic overtones of theories which stressed the interpreted and constructed nature of social reality. By the same token, the ethnomethodological vocabulary of ‘accounts’ and ‘accountability’ seemed to many to give straightforward access to that most elusive phenomenon, the actor’s definition of the situation. The dramatic oversimplifications embodied in these borrowings were facilitated during this period by the apparent alignment of several of the more significant empirical studies – such as Cicourel’s and Kitsuse’s The Educational Decision Makers (1963) and Cicourel’s The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (1968) – with the more readily understandable sociological approaches prominent at the time. The net result was an assimilation of a range of perspectives – symbolic interaction, labelling theory, the phenomenological analyses of Berger and Luckmann, and ethnomethodology – into a single category: the ‘sociology of everyday life’. In this process, Garfinkel’s fundamental and enduring analytical achievements were lost from sight at the very moment at which ‘ethnomethodology’ became a household word in sociology.

Unlike such famous contemporaries as Foucault or Habermas, Garfinkel’s significance as a sociologist does not arise from the encyclopaedic range of his investigations nor from any attempt at large-scale theoretical synthesis. Rather it derives from his sustained attack on a narrow range of problems which have preoccupied him throughout an intellectual career spanning nearly forty years. These problems – the theory of action, the nature of intersubjectivity and the social constitution of knowledge – have been central areas of investigation throughout the history of the discipline and, in their various aspects, have persistently concerned its most distinguished practitioners. The positions adopted on these topics have been among the most distinctive hallmarks of the major schools of sociological theory. They are universally acknowledged as fundamental to the discipline.

Garfinkel’s contribution has been a strikingly original re-analysis of these problems and a highly integrated treatment of their various implications for the conceptualization and analysis of fundamental aspects of social organization. This analysis, which has been widely influential across a range of social science disciplines, has emerged in a succession of papers in which Garfinkel has repeatedly returned to, and reworked, the foundational issues which have concerned him. Like Husserl, Garfinkel has consistently sought to be a ‘true beginner’ and he has never attempted to follow Weber or Parsons in building outwards from his analysis of social action towards a large-scale systematic theory of social structure. Instead, he has persistently worked to secure and deepen the analyses of foundational social processes which he began as a doctoral student at Harvard in 1946.

By the mid-1950s, Garfinkel had coined the term which would subsequently make him famous. ‘Ethnomethodology’ was originally designed simply as a label to capture a range of phenomena associated with the use of mundane knowledge and reasoning procedures by ordinary members of society. The term, Garfinkel relates (Garfinkel 1974: 16), occurred to him as he was writing up a study of jury deliberations. The jurors, he found, were preoccupied with a variety of ‘methodological’ matters such as the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’, between ‘what we’re entitled to say’, ‘what the evidence shows’ and ‘what can be demonstrated’ (ibid.). The jurors worked with these kinds of distinctions seriously and methodically as part of a deliberative process which all of them knew to be highly consequential and through which they determined the reasonableness of particular evidences, demonstrations, conclusions and, ultimately, verdicts. These distinctions were handled in coherently organized and ‘agree-able’ ways and the jurors assumed and counted upon one another’s abilities to use them, draw appropriate inferences from them and see the sense of them. Although the systematic use of the distinctions was an essential part of the jurors’ tasks, Garfinkel found that the distinctions themselves were not made or employed by using a special ‘juror’s logic’. Quite the contrary, they were overwhelmingly made by reference to common-sense considerations that ‘anyone could see’. As Garfinkel put it, ‘a person is 95 per cent juror before he comes near the court’ (Garfinkel 1967d: 110). The term ‘ethnomethodology’ thus refers to the study of a particular subject matter: the body of common-sense knowledge and the range of procedures and considerations by means of which the ordinary members of society make sense of, find their way about in, and act on the circumstances in which they find themselves. The term was designed to be cognate with a number of related anthropological terms, such as ethnobotany and ethnomedicine, but its scope is not restricted to any particular domain of knowledge. In its open-ended reference to any kind of sense-making procedure, the term represents a signpost to a domain of uncharted dimensions rather than a staking out of a clearly delineated territory.

As the preceding discussion suggests, by the mid-1950s Garfinkel was already working in a terrain which was largely alien to the majority of sociologists. During this period every form of sociology simply took for granted and left out of consideration the key questions of the construction and recognition of social activities by the actors themselves. In this context, it fell to Garfinkel to point out that these questions are analytically primary to any theory of social action and ultimately to any form of sociological investigation. His achievement has been to show that a consideration of these issues can be made an integral part of the theory of action and that they can be addressed as productive research questions in concrete empirical investigations with significant analytic results.

Although these achievements can be simply stated, they are in fact the products of a complex reconceptualization of both the theory of action and the sociology of knowledge aimed at wresting each from its preoccupation with the phenomenon of error. In the theory of action this is manifested in the longstanding distinction between rational and (normatively determined) non-rational action as a fundamental theoretical axis. Garfinkel has consistently opposed the use of this distinction in the analysis of action, arguing that it is an irrelevant and misleading distraction from the most central features of the organization of social activity – its inherent intelligibility and accountability. An emphasis on these latter characteristics, however, places a new weight on the kinds of knowledge that the actor might be viewed as possessing or drawing upon in devising or recognizing conduct; Here the older neo-Kantian sociology of knowledge, with its parallel focus on the distinction between rationally founded knowledge on the one hand and error and ideology on the other, was simply insufficient to carry the burden. Hence Garfinkel drew extensively on Schutz’s writings to develop a sociology of mundane knowledge-in-action and, in accomplishing this, then found it possible to proceed to an adequately grounded analysis of institutionalized conduct.

Finally, in both its positive recommendations for the study of common-sense knowledge and its rejection of analytical frameworks premised on the assumed, in-principle superiority of social science knowledge over its lay equivalents, Garfinkel’s work also issues in a programme of study which focuses on the social constitution of knowledge. Here we encounter the obverse of Garfinkel’s insistence that the analysis of action must take account of the actor’s use of common-sense knowledge, namely, that the social constitution of knowledge cannot be analysed independently of the contexts of institutional activity in which it is generated and maintained. This position is most obviously asserted in Garfinkel’s ‘ “Good” organizational reasons for “bad” clinic records’ (Garfinkel, 1967f) and it has recently found exemplification in a range of detailed studies of organizational knowledge as it is produced and reproduced in the mundane work of scientists and professionals of various kinds (Garfinkel, forthcoming).

The full depth of the theoretical innovations through which Garfinkel has come to stress the profoundly reflexive relations between knowledge and action has tended to remain dimly perceived or badly misconstrued in the reception of his work. The unhappy result of this has been a widespread failure to appreciate the major advances in the analysis of knowledge and action which he has accomplished and which remain, partially submerged, in the particulars of his various studies. Accordingly, I have thought it right to begin this book with a fairly extensive account of the theory of action which Garfinkel encountered as a graduate student in the late 1940s and to discuss at some length his transformation of the main features of this theory. Subsequently, I have used this discussion of action as a basis from which to consider Garfinkel’s analysis of institutionalized conduct and his treatment of the social organization of knowledge. Finally, it has proved valuable, if only as a background, in situating both the development of conversation analysis and of the more recent studies of organizational work which, in their different ways, have been strongly influenced by his teachings.

CHAPTER 2

A Parsonian Backdrop

In most available theories of social action and social structure rational actions are assigned residual status.

Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology

Garfinkel’s career as a theorist effectively began when, in 1946, he enrolled as a doctoral student at Harvard University in the newly formed Department of Social Relations. The department was the recent product of an amalgamation of several social science disciplines (incorporating sociology, social anthropology, and social and clinical psychology) and had been expressly created in order to promote the development of integrated interdisciplinary research. A primary focus was to be social theory and, within five years, a group of faculty members was to produce a first interdisciplinary synthesis, Towards a General Theory of Action, which represented ‘a kind of intellectual stocktaking of what underlay the social relations experiment’ (Parsons 1970: 843).

This novel, even revolutionary, emphasis within the Harvard department on theory and, in particular, the theory of action was due largely to the influence of its first chairman, Talcott Parsons. During the previous decade Parsons had consistently advocated the significance of systematic theory construction in the social sciences in a largely empiricist intellectual climate which stressed the importance of piecemeal empirical research over against the claims of theoretical work. In The Structure of Social Action (1937) Parsons had insisted against this prevailing orthodoxy that theoretical development is the hallmark of science. No discipline, he argued, is simply created as an assemblage of ‘raw facts’. On the contrary, empirical findings and the disciplines which are based on them are always and inevitably the products of theoretical interpretations of available evidence. In this context, the theorist has a vital and essential role to play. It is one of explicitly formulating, clarifying and developing the conceptual frameworks in terms of which evidence is evaluated, interpreted and integrated within a discipline’s corpus of scientific fact.

Parsons coupled these claims with an extensive discussion which introduced American sociologists to a range of European theorists whose work was not widely appreciated at the time. Moreover he presented a powerful case for the latent convergence of the major theorists (Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Weber) on a single basic theoretical framework – the ‘voluntaristic theory of action’ – which made the actors’ treatment of their circumstances in terms of subjectively held norms and values central to the analysis of social institutions. The effect of these claims was two-fold. They created a case for the significance of theory which was to become increasingly influential during the post-war period while, additionally, proposing a major site for theoretical development based on the voluntaristic theory itself.

It was these proposals which became central to the early development of the ‘social relations experiment’ at Harvard. The voluntaristic theory provided a coherent and viable focus for the department’s initial endeavours, not least because the theory’s emphasis on the normative aspects of conduct permitted a satisfactory intellectual division of labour among the constituent social science disciplines. Thus, in both its constitution and its objectives, the Department of Social Relations represented a radical departure from prevailing patterns of research in American sociology. Its novel and distinctive institutionalization of theoretical work as a legitimate form of sociological research in its own right proved a powerful attraction for a new post-war generation of graduate students and it was to this department, during its most richly innovative period, that Garfinkel came to participate in what Parsons later recalled (Parsons, 1970: 843) as a ‘golden age’ of graduate studies at Harvard.

Yet, although written under the supervision of Parsons and extensively occupied with his thought, the theoretical viewpoint of Garfinkel’s dissertation was not derived from the ‘structural functionalist’ conceptual system then emerging through a stream of publications from the department. Instead, Garfinkel sought to dig still deeper into basic problems in the theory of action which had been raised, but incompletely dealt with, in The Structure of Social Action. In particular, he was dissatisfied with – and sought to remedy – the sketchy treatment of the actor’s knowledge and understanding within the voluntaristic theory. Garfinkel summarized the differences between Parsons’ achievements and his own interests in the opening paragraph of his dissertation:

At least two important theoretical developments stem from the researches of Max Weber. One development, already well worked, seeks to arrive at a generalized social system by uniting a theory that treats the structuring of experience with another theory designed to answer the question, ‘What is man?’ Speaking loosely, a synthesis is attempted between the facts of social structure and the facts of personality. The other development, not yet adequately exploited, seeks a generalized social system built solely from the analysis of experience structures. (Garfinkel, 1952: 1)

The objective of the dissertation was ‘to go as far as possible in exploring a theoretical vocabulary to transform [the second development] into a working scheme for the experimental investigation of the sociological phenomenon of social order’ (ibid.). From the outset therefore, Garfinkel was in search of a theoretical framework which would directly catch at the procedures by which actors analyse their circumstances and devise and carry out courses of action. Such a framework would, in turn, result in an account of social activity which was more directly based on an analysis of the organization of experience itself. While the theoretical vocabulary to be used in this task was to be drawn from the phenomenological writings of Schutz and Gurwitsch, it would be used to analyse classical problems in the theory of action and to propose entirely novel avenues towards their solution. The differences between Parsons and his student would ultimately crystallize around the question of whether the actor’s point of view, and its role in the organization of action, should be analysed and treated by means which were intrinsic to, or external to, the structure of the actor’s experience. Although the distinction might seem to be a slender one, it entailed a transformation in the analysis of action no less complete in its consequences than the previous shift – from the utilitarian to the voluntaristic framework – canvassed by Parsons himself.

THE ACTION FRAME OF REFERENCE

One of the central claims of The Structure of Social Action is that all of the various social sciences essentially deal with systems of social action. The basic units of such systems, Parsons argued, are ‘unit acts’ which, in turn, are composed of the following irreducible elements:

(1) An actor, the agent of the act.

(2) An ‘end’, a future state of affairs which the actor seeks to bring about by the act.

(3) A current situation within which the actor acts and which he or she seeks to transform by his or her action. The situation is analysable into two kinds of elements: the conditions of action over which the actor has no control and the means of action over which he or she does have control.

(4) A mode of orientation, comprising at least one selective standard, in terms of which the actor relates the end to the current situation.

These elements which, together, comprise the action frame of reference are, according to Parsons, ‘the indispensable logical framework in which we describe and think about the phenomena of action’ (Parsons, 1937: 733). Here Parsons made a specific analogy between the action frame of reference in the social sciences and the space-time framework formulated by Kant as the a priori basis of Newtonian mechanics. As he put it, without the irreducible framework of the action frame of reference, ‘talk about action fails to make sense’ (ibid. 732).

Two important consequences flow directly from this conceptualization of action. First, Parsons argued, action must necessarily be viewed as involving the use of effort over time. For an end is, by definition, a future state of affairs – something which has yet to come about and which must be brought about by the overcoming of obstacles. In the course of overcoming the obstacles to an end (the conditional elements of situations), energy will be expended and time will elapse. In stressing this aspect of action, Parsons particularly sought to counteract the tendency which he identified in the German idealistic tradition to view action as simply an automatic ‘emanation’ of cultural ideals.

The second major consequence of this conception of action is that it necessarily involves a thoroughgoing analysis of the subjective point of view of the actor. It is, of course, axiomatic that an ‘end’, as a future state of affairs, can only presently exist ‘in the mind’ of the actor. Additionally however, the ‘selective standards’ by reference to which the actor relates aspects of the present situation to the end cannot be conceived as anything but subjective in character. Finally, since what will appear as the ‘means’ and the ‘conditions’ in the situation will depend both on the goal which the actor has in mind and the ‘selective standards’ which he or she brings to bear, the actor’s conceptualization of the situation of action in terms of ‘means’ and ‘conditions’ will also be subjectively determined. In sum, the specification of each of the elements of the action frame of reference will inevitably involve some recourse to the subjective point of view of the actor. This stress on the subjective direction of human effort to overcome real world obstacles – Parsons’ ‘voluntaristic metaphysic’ (Scott, 1963; Procter, 1978) – lies at the very heart of the Parsonian conception of action and gives rise to his most fundamental preoccupation: how to conceptualize and account for the fact that, rather than passively adapting to their external circumstances as they are originally encountered, human beings act positively (and sometimes at great cost) to transform recalcitrant environments in accordance with the dictates of subjectively held normative ideals.

Examined from the perspective of this conception of action, it is possible to review the various preceding accounts of action as involving different emphases or ‘loadings’ on the various terms of the action frame of reference. Thus within the utilitarianism of Hobbes and his intellectual successors (Parson, 1937: 89 et seq.) the ends of action were treated as random and no attempt was made to give an account of either their origins or interrelationships. The actor was treated as having a veridical grasp of the objective features of the situation which included the objectively given conditions of action, the range of available means for the achievement of ends and the full range of consequences of their use. Finally, the utilitarian theorist characteristically assumed that the sole selective standard governing the actor’s choice of means to an end would be that of ‘intrinsic rationality’ in which ends are pursued ‘by the means which, among those available to the actor, are intrinsically best adapted to the fend for reasons understandable and verifiable by positive empirical science (ibid. 58). As Parsons viewed it, the utilitarian theory of action was acutely indeterminate on two counts. Firstly, it lacked any account of the ends of action and thus could shed no light either on how the individual could establish priorities among ends or, even more seriously, why the conflictual pursuit of ends should not result in a Hobbesian state of war. Secondly, in its reliance on a single selective standard of ‘intrinsic rationality’, the theory could only account for the actor’s divergence from a rational choice of means by treating such divergences as the product of the actor’s ignorance or error. These latter, like the ends of action, were treated as random in occurence (ibid: 65–6).

Subsequent positivistic variations on the utilitarian framework designed to remedy these defects, Parsons argued, simply resulted in the destruction of the action frame of reference altogether. The positivistic theory of action explained the formation of ends as a product of hereditary factors or environmental conditioning. Similarly, the actor’s ignorance or error in departing from ‘intrinsically rational’ choices of means to ends were accounted for as products of the same factors. Thus, in each of the problematic areas, the actor’s action was viewed as the conditioned product of biological make-up or environmental circumstances. The result was a violation of the fundamentals of the action frame of reference and, in particular, of the analytical independence of the ‘ends’ from the ‘conditions’ of action. The positivistic theory results in a view of action as a process of adaptation to the environment – a far cry from action as Parsons conceived it. As he put it, ‘there can in the last analysis be no such thing as a radically positivistic theory of action’ (ibid. 762). To the extent that a theory of action is ‘positivistic’ in Parsons’s terms, it is not a theory of ‘action’ at all.

At the opposite pole from the utilitarian and positivistic streams of social theory stood the German idealistic tradition. This viewpoint had, since Hegel, been preoccupied with the uniqueness, reflexivity and moral qualities of the human subject. Expressed in German historiography in particular, these preoccupations emerged in an emphasis on the uniqueness of historical events and cultural complexes, their resistance to positivistic methodological techniques and, above all, in the view that the social order pre-eminently expresses the moral commitment of its members to a set of cultural values. It is, of course, this value dimension of the social order which is ignored in positivistic accounts of social action and which has, at best, a residual status in utilitarian economic thought. However, the idealistic tradition, with its focus on the unique cultural complexes underlying particular societies, tended to develop a view of action which emphasized the significance of values to the exclusion of the real recalcitrant conditions which actions are designed to overcome. As a result, both individual actions and social structures appeared in these writings as simple ‘expressions’ of cultural values. The truth of the matter, as Parsons saw it, is that

action must always be thought of as involving a state of tension between two different orders of elements, the normative and the conditional. As a process, action is, in fact, the process of alteration of the conditional elements in the direction of conformity with norms. Elimination of the normative aspect altogether eliminates the concept of action itself and leads to the radical positivistic position. Elimination of conditions, of the tension from that side, equally eliminates action and results in idealistic emanationism. Thus conditions may be conceived at one pole, ends and normative rules at the other, means and effort as the connecting links between them. (ibid. 732)

The task which emerges then is that of creating a body of social theory and empirical analysis which does not jettison one or another of the elements of the action frame of reference and which thus remains an analysis of ‘social action’.

As Parsons had conceptualized it during the thirties, the key to this task could be developed from the convergent works of the European social theorists. The emerging voluntaristic theory of action, he argued, sharply reduces both the extent to which actions are to be explained as the products of means– ends efficient choices and the degree to which the actor’s subjective point of view is to be likened to that of a scientific observer.

The basic tenet of the voluntaristic theory is that neither positively nor negatively does the methodological schema of scientifically valid knowledge exhaust the significant subjective elements of action. Insofar as subjective elements fail to fit as elements of valid knowledge, the matter is not exhausted by the categories of ignorance or error, nor by the functional dependence of these elements on those capable of formulation in non-subjective terms, nor by elements random relative to these. Positively, a voluntaristic system involves elements of a normative character. (ibid. 81)

Effectively, the voluntaristic theory intervenes at each of the crucial problem areas encountered by utilitarian thought. Firstly, at the level of the choice of means, the voluntaristic theory embodies the proposal that normative standards other than those expressed in the rational application of scientifically valid knowledge may constitute the basis on which a course of action is chosen. Secondly, at the level of ends, the voluntaristic theory provides that the ends of action, far from being random, are the products of systems of ultimate values. Further, such systems of values, if held in common among the members of society, will constitute a factor contributing to the explanation of social organization and social integration.

In thus breaking out of the narrow restrictions of utilitarian thought, the voluntaristic theory seemed able to handle a much wider range of social actions than its predecessor. In particular, religious and other forms of ‘value-rational’ conduct – the classical territory of the Geisteswissenschaften – were opened up for scrutiny on a similar footing with the more instrumentally rational forms of conduct. Nor was this the only advance enabled by the voluntaristic theory. In particular, Parsons took from Durkheim not only the idea that social integration is the product of collective subscription to commonly held norms and values, but also the conception that such values could be ‘internalized’ and thus not merely limit egoistic tendencies but become constitutive in the formation of the objects of desire. Finally, the voluntaristic theory provided a conceptual scaffolding which, in giving due weight to the full range of subjective considerations in the organization of action, seemed capable of development into a thoroughgoing analysis of social action in the Weberian tradition.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that Parsons asserts that Weber’s concept of action is ‘closely similar’ and ‘substantially the same concept dealt with all through this study’ (ibid. 640–2), the analysis of action which emerged from The Structure of Social Action and subsequent publications had little in common with Weber’s emphasis on the meaningful character of action and the necessity of its analysis from the actor’s point of view. This departure from the Weberian tradition resulted from two convergent trends in Parsons’s thought: his substantive preoccupation with ‘the problem of order’ and his distinctive conception of social science.

THE SUBJECTIVE ELEMENTS AND THE PROBLEM OF ORDER

The most significant theoretical advance represented by the voluntaristic theory of action lay, for Parsons, in its contribution to resolving the Hobbesian ‘problem of order’. Hobbes’s proposal that the ‘unloosed passions’ would naturally result in endemic social conflict had remained unanswered in subsequent utilitarian writings. Locke’s bland assumption of the natural identity of interests had merely evaded the problem and, in Parsons’s judgement, any solution to the problem based solely upon the co-ordination of individual interests was insufficient. Even if one assumes an ideal initial situation in which interests interlock harmoniously, he asserted, social order will remain inherently problematic because the interlocking of interests

is a brittle thing which comparatively slight alterations of conditions can shatter at vital points. A social order resting on interlocking of interests alone, and thus ultimately on sanctions, is hence hardly empirically possible … For, on the one hand the greater the need for sanctions, the weaker the ultimate force behind them; on the other, the conditions of human social life being what they are, alterations of sufficient magnitude to shatter such a brittle and unstable order can scarcely be avoided for very long. (ibid. 404–5)

According to Parsons the key to the Hobbesian problem lay in the analysis, convergently developed by Durkheim and Freud, of the internalization of norms. By this process, social actors would come to adopt value standards which would limit the range of ends they could aspire to and the means they could employ to achieve them. Given this outline solution, the task as Parsons saw it was to develop and systematize the theorem in application to institutional actions. The fulfilment of this task was Parsons’s core contribution to the manifesto of the ‘social relations experiment’ at Harvard – Towards a General Theory of Action.

In this volume and its companion, The Social System, social actors were viewed as orienting to the environment along three dimensions in which they (1) discriminate the objects of the situation, (2) invest these objects with (positive or negative) cathectic significance and (3) evaluate possible courses of action in relation to them. All three of these dimensions of actor orientation are., in turn, influenced by culturally transmitted value orientations (‘organized sets of rules or standards’ (Parsons et al, 1951: 60)) which are used to determine (1) the validity of cognitive judgements, (2) the appropriacy of cathectic attachments and (3) the choices of courses of conduct.

In order to depict how the internalized value standards integrate institutional activity, Parsons begins with an idealized situation in which:

(1) The actors share complementary role expectations.

(2) These expectations are themselves integrated with a more general value system which is also shared.

(3) Both the specific role expectations and the wider values are internalized by the actors.

In such a situation – an idealized microcosm of any routine social circumstance from the exchange of a greeting in a corridor, or a mother’s relationship with a child, to participation in a large-scale organization – the actors will cooperate with one another in a co-ordinated pattern of activity for three basic reasons. First, they will have become committed to the prescribed or expected course of action because each has internalized it as the appropriate or proper one; second, they have internalized other related values which may be threatened or strained by their failure to ‘live up to’ the demands of the present situation, causing painful internal conflicts or loss of self-esteem; and, third, they fear that others will punish them for not acting appropriately by frustrating their expectations and/or withdrawing love, approval or esteem from them. The ‘double contingency’ involved in this theorem of institutionalized action is such that any pattern of activity will tend to ‘crystallize’ and become self-stabilizing and self-equilibrating over time because any tendency (from any actor) to deviate from the standardized expectations will encounter sharply disadvantageous consequences.

The central theoretical significance of this account of institutionalized action is to limit substantially the importance of purely instrumental interests as motivating forces in conduct. Instead, the workings of the theorem of institutionalized action effectively provide that the actor will become positively motivated to co-operate with others and, in turn, the theorem underwrites the likelihood that actors will actually come to want to act in accordance with institutional necessities. As Parsons and Shils put it:

institutionalization itself must be regarded as the fundamental integrative mechanism of social systems. It is through internalization of common patterns of value-orientation that a system of social interaction can be stabilized. Put in personality terms this means that there is an element of super-ego organization correlative with every role-orientation pattern of the individual in question. In every case, the internalization of a super-ego element means motivation to accept the priority of collective over personal interests, within the appropriate limits and on the appropriate occasions. (Parson et al, 1951: 150)

This analysis was a tour de force. Suitably elaborated with an account, derived from Freud, of the psychological mechanisms of adjustment and defence (Parsons, 1951: 201–26) so as to admit more friction and slippage into the system, it enabled the explanatory role of the internalization of norms to be drawn deeply into the analysis of institutional processes. It greatly increased the extent to which institutions could be viewed as non-coercively maintained. Furthermore it suggested an inherent social psychological process through which a ‘skin’ of legitimacy would inevitably coalesce around, and sustain, stable interaction patterns even where the latter were initially established on a coercive basis. Finally, if the theory appeared at times to eliminate the possibility of conflict in social relations altogether (Wrong, 1961), the sceptic could always be reminded that the analysis was an ideal typical one and that, to the extent that the condition of full institutionalization was not met at the empirical level, the system would either be maintained through the operation of non-normative factors (e.g. coercion) or would simply undergo change.

Parsons’s use of the internalization formula to meet the motivational problems raised by the question of egoistic self-interest is well known and has been widely discussed. Yet in the welter of commentary, his emphasis on the motivational role of norms and values has scarcely been remarked upon. This emphasis was, of course, a natural one. Hobbes, after all, has generally been interpreted as posing his fateful problem as one concerning the motivational wellsprings of action and the internalization formula straightforwardly answered him in kind. Yet to address Hobbes in this way is plainly to treat norms and values, once internalized, as causes of action. And this treatment inexorably draws attention away from the ‘logic’ of action, that is, the interpretative bases on which actions are constructed and understood in terms which are meaningful to the actors involved. Starting from a framework which began with the subjective point of view of the actor, Parsons had arrived at an entirely external analysis of the norms and values which he treated as constraining and determining conduct. This development was fully consistent with his view of social science, to which we now briefly turn.

PARSONS’S SCIENCE OF SUBJECTIVITY

Although, in The Structure of Social Action, Parsons was concerned to reject positivistic analyses of social action in favour of the voluntaristic perspective, he did not extend this rejection of positivism to the methods or objectives of positive science. On the contrary, he committed himself at an early date to the view that ‘there is a methodological core common to all empirical science, no matter what its concrete subject matter’(Parsons, 1936: 679). In Parsons’s analysis, all sciences worthy of the name develop when discrete empirical observations are knitted together by abstract theoretical concepts and expressed as generalized analytical laws. Such laws do not, of course, spring fully armed from empirical observation. Rather they arise through an intervening process in which observations are increasingly formulated in abstract theoretical terms (which Parsons terms ‘analytical elements’) which then become the basis for analytical laws. For example, classical mechanics initially developed from piecemeal observations of falling bodies, balls rolling down inclined planes, the motion of pendulums and so on. These observations could not be integrated, let alone furnish the basis for the laws of gravitation, until they were expressed in terms of abstract concepts (‘analytical elements’) such as mass, acceleration, etc. In Parsons’s discussion, conceptual abstraction from the concrete is thus an essential precondition for theoretical advance towards the generalized laws characteristic of natural science. Parsons is adamant that, although the social sciences deal with ‘subjective’ phenomena, they are not on this account to be excluded from the general pattern of scientific development. If it is to develop as a science capable of expressing results as generalized laws, sociology must first pass through this crucial phase of conceptual development in which ‘analytical elements’ – the sociological equivalents of concepts like mass and acceleration – are formulated and used as a means of expressing the results of sociological observation.

In developing the implications of this view for the construction of a sociological science, Parsons began by making a key distinction between what he termed ‘unit’ and ‘element’ analyses. Unit concepts, he stated (Parsons, 1937: 31–3), make reference to entities such as the actor’s orientation which are concrete or, as in the case of ideal types, ‘hypothetically concrete’. Sociological analysis with the use of unit concepts will give the investigator treatments of social activity in terms of the meanings with which the actors invest it. However such treatments, Parsons insists, will remain collections of discrete observations approximately equivalent to the results of isolated experiments jotted into the physicist’s notebook. If they are to be knitted together with other, similarly discrete, observations so as to yield general laws, these particular concrete observations must be broken down into their underlying components – the ‘analytical elements’. If this is accomplished, each ‘unit’ observation will be found to comprise ‘a specific combination of the values of one or more analytical elements’ (ibid. 748). As for the ‘analytical elements’ themselves, Parsons identified these as the basic coordinates of the value orientations which lay at the heart of the voluntaristic theory of action. He specified them in terms of the ‘pattern variables’ – a logically exhaustive system of orientational possibilities collectively constituting a closed metric whose combinations and permutations would prove capable of expressing every humanly meaningful value stance, whether individual, institutional or societal. Integrated with his analysis of the functional imperatives for the survival of social systems, the pattern variables would subsequently be employed in Parsons’s comparative work on social systems and his analysis of social change.

Thus Parsons’s project for a sociological science was one which, although formally rooted in the ‘action frame of reference’, effectively focused attention away from the analysis of social action per se. Observation of the latter – the province of ‘unit’ analysis – would certainly be a vital source of raw data, but a sociological science could only emerge when ‘unit’ observations were decomposed into their component (‘vector’) value elements and accounted for in terms of universal ‘analytical laws’ governing the combination of value elements in human affairs. The net result, as Schutz noted in his 1940 correspondence with Parsons (Grathoff, 1978), was a rapid and straightforward suspension of interest in what the actor concretely believes in and acts upon.

In sum, under the convergent pressures of his interest in the problem of order and his conception of the tasks of social science, Parsons’s analysis of the ‘actor’s point of view’ was one which was overwhelmingly geared to developing a causal model of the subjective elements in conduct in which the actor’s concrete reasoning was treated as epiphenomenal. Included among these ‘subjective elements’ were the normative phenomena, familiar from The Structure of Social Action, of ‘values’, ‘orientations’ and ‘attitudes’, but also, subsequently, psychological phenomena such as ‘complexes’ which could not possibly be meaningful to the actor in any straightforward sense. All of these ‘subjective elements’, for reasons to be discussed shortly, were conceived as opaque to the actor to varying extents and it is only in limiting cases, Parsons argues, that the actor’s ‘theory of his action’ adequately reflects the truly determinative ‘subjective elements’. Only on rare occasions do the actors become transparent to themselves and grasp their own motivating forces.

Parsons’s subsequent theoretical development from this position was one which involved increasing stress on psychological processes. The actor was increasingly seen as the ‘bearer’ of internalized value patterns – the ‘facts of social structure’ evolved in response to the functional imperatives – and was viewed as accomplishing this task by virtue of the ‘facts of personality’ – a set of psychological properties and processes which included the mechanisms of socialization. Thus, rather than opening up the question of the actors’ understandings of their practical circumstances, the properties of their judgements, the conditions under which courses of action might be initiated or abandoned, the scope and occasions under which actors might revise some view of the situation and so forth (Garfinkel, 1952), Parsons’s interest in the ‘subjective’ was narrowed to describing the psychological processes (for example, the mechanisms of adjustment and defence) through which the internalized values were sustained in the face of frustration and disappointment. In this context, the actor’s thoughts and feelings were viewed as simply ‘intervening variables’ (Parsons et al, 1951: 64). Indeed there was no other place for them, for the bridge between the ‘subjective elements’ conceived as causal determinants of action and the ‘actor’s point of view’ conceptualized as the focus of intelligibly organized conduct had collapsed without trace. Thus the overall trajectory of Parsons’s theory of action, established in The Structure of Social Action and maintained throughout his career, was towards a treatment of action in terms of concepts which were almost wholly ‘external’ to the point of view of the actor. Action was to be analysed as the product of causal processes which, although operating ‘in the minds’ of the actors, were all but inaccessible to them and, hence, uncontrollable by them.

A TROUBLESOME RESIDUE: THE PROBLEM OF COGNITION

Thus far we have seen that the outcome of Parsons’s treatment of the subjective point of view was an analysis which stressed the internalization of norms as causal dispositions to action. This analysis was consistent with Parsons’s view of the nature of social science and was conditioned by his determination to deal with the ‘motivational’ questions raised by the Hobbesian discussion of egoism. However Parsons’s emphasis on the ‘motivational’ aspects of the theory of action left open a series of problems which centre on the actors’ knowledge of their circumstances. Although these problems are complex and interrelated, three major problematic areas can be outlined.

First, while sociologists may have developed satisfactory analyses of the actors’ actions, they are nonetheless confronted by actors who can account for their actions by citing particular aspects of their circumstances as relevant to their decisions. In these accounts, actors commonly portray their actions as ‘chosen’ in the light of a range of considerations. A potential conflict thus arises between the causal and deterministic analyses of action developed by sociologists and the accounts of action developed in terms of self-subsistent reasons by the participants (Wilson, 1970; Hollis, 1977). This conflict does not simply involve difficulties in reconciling divergences between the sociologist’s and the participants’ substantive explanations of actions, nor even merely the problems of reconciling the alternative explanatory logics of the two types of account, though these problems are very considerable. There is also the problem that the actors treat one another’s accounts as intelligible and as objects of reasoned evaluation involving justification, blame and all the issues of moral entitlement which are associated with actors’ treatments of one another as agents. Moreover, actors treat such accounts as real by acting on them – in this way making them real in their consequences. These phenomena pose very difficult issues of reconciliation which have traditionally surfaced in the theory of action as the problem of rationality: the problem of what kind of significance to accord to actors’ accounts of their reasons for action.

Second, the actors co-ordinate their actions in terms of putatively shared knowledge of their circumstances and, in many cases, shared knowledge of the range of considerations which may influence choices among courses of action. The theorist of action is thus faced with the problem of intersubjectivity: the problem of accounting for shared or mutual knowledge and understanding among actors.

Third, actors may from time to time subjectively apprehend and describe their actions as the products of ‘strategic’ choices in which they manipulate the normative grounds of activities for some ulterior purpose – ‘finding an excuse’ to avoid going to a party is an obvious and commonly experienced example. This raises a third major problem of reflexivity: the problem of the extent to which the theorist of action will allow that the actors have ‘insight’ into the normative background of their own actions.

Characteristically, Parsons is fully aware of these major problems, but, to anticipate the following discussion, we shall find that his handling of each of them is strongly shaped by his desire to accomodate them to his pre-existing explanatory framework which stresses the internalization of norms as causal determinants of action.

The Problem of Rationality

Parsons’s approach to the nature of the actors’ knowledge involves the ploy, characteristic within utilitarian and neo-Kantian approaches to the topic, of describing the extent to which the actors’ knowledge of their circumstances overlaps with what is known with scientific certainty. This is more or less explicit in his definition of rational action:

Action is rational in so far as it pursues ends possible within the conditions of the situation, and by means which, among those available to the actor, are intrinsically best adapted to the end for reasons understandable and verifiable by positive empirical science. (Parsons, 1937: 58)

Since this definition of rationality intrinsically involves a comparison between the actor’s knowledge and the putatively complete and accurate knowledge possessed by the scientific observer, it will be obvious that questions concerning the rationality of action cannot, for Parsons, be divorced from questions concerning the theory of knowledge.

Parsons’s approach to the theory of knowledge, which is developed within a broadly neo-Kantian framework, is that of ‘analytic realism’ in which ‘it is maintained that at least some of the general concepts of science … adequately “grasp” aspects of the objective external world’ (ibid. 730). This viewpoint, like others of a neo-Kantian stripe, starts from the assumption that the empirical world consists of externally given states of affairs whose existence and facticity are entirely independent of the ways in which they may be humanly known. Human beings will necessarily examine these states of affairs from a variety of particular perspectives which will be shaped by their theoretical and practical interests, but, provided that scientific methods and procedures are employed, objective knowledge of empirical states of affairs can and will be achieved by a process of ‘successive approximation’. The resulting knowledge will not, of course, be complete and total. On the contrary, it will be incomplete because it has been produced in response to particular problems and in the light of particular interests. But this incompleteness of knowledge does not undermine its objectivity which is guaranteed by the intrinsic rationality of the scientific method. Finally, it is implicit within this framework that objective knowledge is useful knowledge, if only because those who have objective knowledge of their empirical circumstances are more likely to succeed in their projects than those who do not.

Given these assumptions of an externally given world and the positive value of objective knowledge of it, it follows that social actors too will find it both possible and desirable to acquire such knowledge – although, once again, the objective knowledge they acquire will be shaped by their practical interests. It is possible therefore, within the Parsonian frame of assumptions, that the actor’s factual knowledge of a situation will approximate the scientific observer’s and, if the actor’s end is attainable and appropriate means are chosen, the actor’s action will be ‘intrinsically rational’. Here the actor guides an action by reference to knowledge which ‘adequately expresses’ its real empirical circumstances. This rational orientation of the actor to the situation cannot be the subject of further causal explanation without the threat of relativistic implications for the entire epistemological framework, and in these cases the actor’s ‘theory of his action’ is treated as an adequate explanation for it.

However, where the actor’s theory does not adequately express the circumstances, or where the actor’s viewpoint is cast in terms which, however adequately or inadequately, reflect his or her sentiments or ultimate values, then the actor’s concrete viewpoint is not of serious value or interest in explaining conduct (ibid. 270 et seq.). In these latter cases, we must make reference to internalized values or to the additional psychological processes comprising the remainder of the ‘subjective elements’ in order to account for the actor’s actions. Thus Parsons’s discussion of the role of rationality in the explanation of conduct accurately foreshadowed the now familiar distinction between rational action which is to be accounted for in terms of its self-subsistent grounds and non-rational action which is the legitimate object of causal explanation.

The net effect of this treatment of rationality is twofold. Firstly, it addresses the troublesome discrepancies between the theorist’s and the actor’s views of the actor’s situation of action by providing that the actor’s view of the circumstances will be permitted to stand only when it coincides with the theorist’s view of the matter. With this move, the superior cognitive claims of science are upheld in the face of the actor’s problematic tendencies to view the world differently. Secondly, the analysis putatively addresses the ‘problem of error’: the tendency for actors to persist in invalid or erroneous views of the world (and in non-rational courses of action) despite the fact that they would be more successful in their projects by correcting them. For the actor can be viewed as having ‘internalized’ invalid cognitive norms and as participating in systems of action within which such errors are institutionalized. And, at the limits of the argument, this institutionalized non-rationality can itself be accounted for in functional terms.

Overall, then, the Parsonian treatment of the problem of rationality is one which both preserves the superior cognitive claims of science and, at all points, emphasizes the role of institutionalization in the organization of action and hence the role of normative determination in conduct. However, in its insistence on a distinction between rational and non-rational action based on ‘hard’ methodological criteria, the theory routinely involves the portrayal and evaluation of the actor’s actions from a (scientific) standpoint which is discrepant with, and external to, the situation of action as viewed by the actor. Moreover, the election of such a strict criterion of rationality effectively reduces to a vanishing point the significance which can be attached to the actor’s interpretation of the circumstances. As Garfinkel puts it, generalizing the argument:

because sociologists find with such overwhelming frequency that effective, persistent, and stable actions and social structures occur despite obvious discrepancies between the lay person’s and the ideal scientist’s knowledge and procedures, sociologists have found the rational properties that their definitions discriminated empirically uninteresting. They have preferred instead to study the features and conditions of non-rationality in human conduct. The result is that in most of the available theories of social action and social structure rational actions are assigned residual status. (Garfinkel, 1967h: 262–3)

Given, in turn, that the ‘institutionalization theorem’ is waiting in the wings to provide an external, causal account for the vast majority of the actor’s actions, the net effect of this analysis is to further diminish the sociological significance of the actor’s interpretation of his or her circumstances, although at the cost of treating the actor as a ‘judgemental dope’ (Garfinkel, 1967b: 68) who unthinkingly (and, as we shall see, unknowingly) ‘acts out’ the institutionalized directives of the culture. Thus, at the end of the day, the causal analysis of action runs in parallel with, but insulated from, the common-sense rationalities of the actors’ judgements. The actors’ analyses of their circumstances thus remain at best ‘intervening variables’ through which the ‘hidden hand’ of institutional process determines conduct. Pareto is thus finally turned on his head and the rational properties of action have become ‘residues’.

The Problem of Intersubjectivity

In accounting for the intersubjectivity of knowledge, two basic avenues are open to the theorist operating within Parsonian assumptions. They closely correspond with the treatment of rationality already outlined.

An initial procedure for accounting for shared knowledge arises out of the conditions for gaining objective knowledge of the world. Given that, in Parsons’s analysis, objective knowledge of the world can be acquired by the application of scientific procedures, it follows that those actors who implement such procedures will converge in their objective knowledge of ‘the facts’ of their circumstances. It will be apparent, however, that this account of intersubjective knowledge is a narrow one which can provide for the shared knowledge only of those actors who are engaged in scientifically founded courses of action. It cannot handle the sharing of knowledge in the remaining, and empirically predominant, cases of norma-tively determined institutionalized actions which Parsons had laboured to open up for sociological investigation. Plainly the sharing of knowledge in these other spheres requires a different analysis.

Parsons resolves this issue by a variant of his ‘institutionalization