The concept of social systems became central to sociology with The Social System of Talcott Parsons, published in 1951. Parsons’s formulations were modeled on concepts of homeostasis developed in physiology rather than simpler notions of equilibrium used by Vilfredo Pareto and other earlier theorists. Parsons portrayed equilibria in social systems not as static balances among forces but as complex interdependencies involving mutual adjustments among many independent components. He emphasized that social systems are moving equilibria that accommodate change while maintaining overall stability. He noted that equilibria can break down, resulting in anomie, strain, and conflict.
SCOPE OF THE CONCEPT
For the system concept to be useful in sociology, Parsons held, it required adaptation to the empirical nature of social reality. Social systems are not concrete, directly observable entities but rather analytically defined domains of objects. They can be identified only by abstracting social interaction, relationships, and institutions from environing phenomena—physical-chemical, biological, psychological, and cultural. Yet, social systems also interpenetrate, or share elements with, their environments. They exist in time, space, and ecological settings. They gain structure by institutionalizing values and norms that have their sources in cultural systems. Their members’ affective attachments to normative orders and motivation to pursue socially validated goals derive from personality systems.
Social systems vary in size and duration. Brief interactions between individuals can be treated as social systems. So can large-scale societies that endure for centuries, such as Chinese civilization. Institutions of intermediate scale—the business corporation, medical practice, or electoral politics—are social systems. Complexes of institutions, such as modern metropolises or global trade, may be analyzed as social systems. Individuals participate in many social systems, typically adopting different social roles in each—employees in business firms, members of political parties, fathers or mothers in families.
Parsons viewed social interaction as a dynamic give-and-take of expectations among independent actors. Actors support their expectations with sanctions, invoked contingently on others as rewards when expectations are met or as punishments when expectations are broken. Parsons held that an actor’s behavior, even in simple relationships, is doubly contingent, dependent on expectations and sanctions held by both the actor and other parties. Because of different experience and exposure to social strains, actors often hold conflicting expectations for performance of their own or others’ roles. Conflicts in expectations emerge in everyday interaction, as between parents and children, and in role relations of macrosocial importance, as between a president and members of Congress over legislative oversight.
Conflicts over role expectations may release powerfully motivated pressures to change roles and the institutions that coordinate them. After adjustment in roles and underlying norms and values, new equilibria may emerge. Motivation that is deviant from previous role expectations may thus be a source of creative social change. Yet, role incumbents mobilize sanctions to counter deviant expectations and are generally able to suppress potential change. Social institutions tend to reimpose established equilibria, whether through informal interaction, the procedures of formal organizations, or legal procedures.
THE FOUR-FUNCTION PARADIGM
Parsons identified four general system problems that all social systems confront. He called them functions and treated them as general dimensions of the organization of social systems. The idea of a closed and ordered set of functions applicable to all social systems was a radical innovation. Previous functional theories had been based on open-ended lists of functions without limitation in theoretical principle. The four-function paradigm provided the conceptual frame for Parsons’s work after the mid-1950s. The four functions are:
Adaptation, or the gaining of control over conditions in environments of the system. Adaptive processes involve developing new resources or improving allocations of resources to strengthen a system’s capabilities and efficiencies.
Goal attainment, or the processes of organizing the activities of social units to bring about a valued state in the system’s relationships to its environments, typically including other social systems.
Integration, or the processes of mutual adjustment among a system’s components to promote their long-term dependence on one another and attachment to the system.
Pattern maintenance, or the processes of developing long-term commitment to values and other principles that distinguish the system from its environments.
Parsons proposed that the four-function paradigm might outline the primary dimensions of structural differentiation in societ