Talcott parsons biography summary
Monthly E-magazine Current affairs Digest. Home » Social Thinkers » Talcott Parsons Talcott Parsons Talcott Parsons was for many years the best-known sociologist in the United States, and indeed one of the best-known in the world.
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He produced a general theoretical system for the analysis of society that came to be called structural functionalism. Parsons was an advocate of "grand theory," an attempt to integrate all the social sciences into an overarching theoretical framework. Later, he became intrigued with, and involved in, an astonishing range of fields: from medical sociology where he developed the concept of the sick role to psychoanalysis-personally undergoing full training as a lay analyst to anthropology, to small group dynamics to race relations and then economics and education.
Parsons is also well known for his idea that every group or society tends to fulfill four " functional imperatives ". Parsons contributed to the field of social evolutionism and neoevolutionism. He divided evolution into four subprocesses: division, which creates functional subsystems from the main system; adaptation, where those systems evolve into more efficient versions; inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and generalization of values, increasing the legitimization of the ever-more complex system.
Furthermore, Parsons explored these subprocesses within three stages of evolution: 1 primitive, 2 archaic and 3 modern where archaic societies have the knowledge of writing, while modern have the knowledge of law. Parsons viewed the Western civilisation as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out of all western cultures he declared the United States as the most dynamically developed.
For this, he was attacked as an ethnocentrist.