Clifford Geertz was a key protagonist in the development of “interpretive social science,” but much of our understanding of his position as an intellectual neglects the crucial years before the ...publication of
The Interpretation of Cultures
. In this article, I argue that there is a common thread in Geertz’s early work and that it addressed, quite sophisticatedly, the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. This research program was first developed in the context of the “basic social science” that characterized Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, and it had the support of key figures in that network. Geertz’s position in that intellectual debate was as a contributor to the development of a theory of culture that could address issues left unsolved by structural-functionalism and action theory. In that process, Geertz gradually developed a more interpretivist reading of the cultural system, while maintaining the support of his original network. The article offers some conclusions about the role of support within attention spaces in cases in which emergent intellectual positions can lead to the definition of new research programs.
Desde diversas áreas de las ciencias sociales, recientes investigaciones ponen en cuestión el diagnóstico sobre la obsolescencia del funcionalismo. El presente trabajo pretende efectuar un ejercicio ...similar e indagar su vigencia en la teoría sociológica contemporánea comparando el modo en que Talcott Parsons y Niklas Luhmann conciben el método funcional. Para realizar la tarea, la primera sección detalla la evolución de la postura metodológica de Parsons; la segunda examina el contexto de crítica al funcionalismo parsoniano y la emergencia de alternativas teóricas, con especial atención al neofuncionalismo; la tercera desarrolla la peculiaridad del método funcional luhmanniano; la cuarta contrasta el posicionamiento de los autores seleccionados sobre el tema y evalúa si es posible asociar a Luhmann con el neofuncionalismo; finalmente, las conclusiones argumentan que la distinción que tanto Parsons como Luhmann establecen entre teoría y método representa un aporte clave. En primer lugar, porque permite diferenciar teoría de método funcional y, en base a ello, afirmar que ambos aportan al desarrollo del segundo. A su vez, porque proporciona un criterio útil para evaluar críticas externas e inconsistencias internas del funcionalismo.
Following reflections by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, this paper is concerned with the changing meaning of the profession as a sociological category for analyzing modern society. Professions ...are practical academic occupational groups oriented to certain social values, to which a special significance for society was attributed in the social sciences for a long time, thus marking a connection between professions' research and theory of society. This paper now describes that the causal relationship between profession and society is limited to a historically relatively early period. In the transition to modern society, this close network of relationships begins to dissolve, and now professions operate in the context of some function systems of society whose task is the professional assistance of single clients, such as in the fields of health, law, and pastoral care. However, the professions' highlighted position in the knowledge and action structure of single function systems seems to dissolve more and more today so that one can ask whether we can speak here already of an end of the social form profession. This would correspond with the observation that actually the professions no longer appear at all in the newer theories of society and therefore their function as an important mechanism of social structure formation is no longer attributed to them.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Considering the current crisis of politics and the lack of the political studies the essay tries to define what is the politics and how to study the political processes through an effective method. ...This analysis is carried out on the shoulders of leading authors such as Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Harold D. Lasswell, Hannah Arendt, Julien Freund and Giovanni Sartori. The final section deals with the issue of interdisciplinary construction of a new general theory of politics.
El presente artículo explica la génesis y el desarrollo del concepto de comunidad societal del sociólogo funcionalista Talcott Parsons. Se parte del supuesto de que dicho concepto implicó cierta ...novedad respecto a los planteamientos iniciales de Parsons. El artículo ofrece un rastreo del concepto siguiendo la obra del propio Parsons y la bibliografía especializada, que se procura sintetizar. Se presentan al final dos tensiones del propio concepto: respecto de la inclusión de grupos no miembros y el uso de la coerción.
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This article examines International Sign (IS), a mode of signed cross-linguistic communication, in the context of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD). I contend that the WFD General Assembly's ...language policy, which bans interpreters and requires that delegates use IS, formalizes the commonsense deaf notion that what is particular about deaf people is their capacity for connecting across differences, rooted in and materialized through the ability to use sign across language boundaries. While such an ability has been explained primarily in terms of the affordances of the visual-gestural modality, this article foregrounds and theorizes the irreducibly relational dimensions of linguistic commensuration. I argue that communicating in IS relies on and produces mutual moral orientation among signers, and that ultimately, it is the labor involved in using IS that deaf people value and that the WFD General Assembly institutionalizes. (International Sign, sign language, deaf, linguistic commensuration, moral orientation)*
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This article examines Talcott Parsons's efforts at building the theory of personality system as a special case of his general theory of action and places those efforts in historical context. I ...demonstrate how, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Parsons employed elements of classic Freudian thought to advance a new appreciation of the personality system and its relations to other action systems. I begin with an overview of the reception of psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Harvard Department of Social Relations, showing how Parsons's thinking on the personality system cannot be understood apart from his association with these three institutions. I then turn to how Parsons endeavored to integrate his particular brand of sociology with his own interpretation of Freud's writings to explain how the personality system functions and develops. I conclude by showing that while Parsons's involvements with psychoanalysis became more intermittent after the mid-1950s, to the end of his life he remained steadfast in his enthusiasm for Freud's theory of personality. In short, Parsons always believed that for sociological theory to progress, it needed to engage with psychoanalysis.
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Working within the functionalist perspective that he did so much to develop, Parsons (1951) conceptualized the physician-patient relationship according to a normative framework defined by the pattern ...variable scheme. As Parsons clearly recognized, this normative conceptualization was one that empirical reality at best only approximates. In the 1970s, two major studies established doctor-patient interaction as a viable research domain. In the present review, we consider approaches to the medical interview developing from these initiatives and that have a primary focus on observable features of doctor-patient interaction. Within this orientation, we consider literature dealing with social, moral, and technical dilemmas that physicians and patients face in primary care and the resources that they deploy in solving them. This literature embodies a steady evolution away from a doctor-centered emphasis toward a more balanced focus on the conduct of doctors and patients together.
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Die für moderne, westliche Gesellschaften feststellbare infla- tionäre Zunahme an Management-Imperativen mit ihrem Ideal einer formalen „Zweckrationalität“ der Effektivität und Effizienz sowie ihrem ...darauf beruhenden Potential zur Legitimation des Handelns in unterschiedlichen sozialen Kontexten lässt sich in soziologischer Perspektive als Prozess der gesellschaftlichen Institutio- nalisierung eines spezifischen Wertmusters interpretieren. Unter Rückgriff auf die system- und handlungstheoretische Heuristik von Talcott Parsons analysiert der Beitrag ausgehend von einem gesamtgesellschaftlichen Wertewandel der „longue durée“ in Richtung „instrumental activism“ und „institutionalized individualism“ die Funktionen und Folgen der Implementierung dieser kulturellen Werte in nor- mative soziale Strukturen durch „Management“ bei gleichzeitiger Berücksichtigung der analytisch unterscheidbaren, synthetisch aber untrennbar damit verbundenen Persönlichkeits- und Verhaltenskomponenten sozialen Handelns. Neben dieser Mehrdimensionalität erlaubt die Parsons’sche Perspektive eine Verbindung von gesellschaftlicher Makro-, organisationaler Meso- und interaktionaler Mikroebene, sodass es möglich wird, Management als genuin soziales Phänomen gesellschafts- und organisationstheoretisch informiert in den Blick zu nehmen. Dem evolutionä- ren Vorteil von Management, nämlich einer Stärkung adaptiver Funktionszusam- menhänge in Systemen („adaptive upgrading“), steht als Nachteil die Erzeugung integrativer Spannungen („integrative strains“) gegenüber. Daher ist es theoretisch nicht sehr verwunderlich, dass in den letzten Jahren sowohl praktisch als auch empirisch komplementäre und kompensierende Konzepte (wie z. B. Soziales Kapi- tal, Communities oder Corporate Social Responsibility Einzug) gehalten haben.
Rethinking individualization Cortois Liza; Laermans Rudi
European journal of social theory,
02/2018, Volume:
21, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article proposes a more culturalist and variegated conception of the individual than that presented by individualization theorists. Inspired by the approach of the individual advocated by Émile ...Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and John Meyers, it first outlines the general script of the individual-as-actor that informs modern individualism as well as the generic characteristics that are routinely attributed to persons such as agency and free will. It subsequently reconstructs three predominant interpretations of this general script, i.e. utilitarian, moral and expressive individualism. For each variant, the intellectual genesis and overall definition of the institutionalization in specific societal domains and the dominant articulations in social theory are briefly presented. With this threefold distinction, the aim is to synthesize the extensive literature on individualism and to show the sociological strengths of approaching subjectivity in terms of institutionalized scripts.
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