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Quotes from The social system — Talcott Parsons

1902–1979 United States

← All quotes by Talcott Parsons

5 quotes

Ideology is a system of beliefs, held in common by the members of a collectivity.

The social system (1951)

The most elementary communication is not possible without some degree of conformity to the “conventions” of the symbolic system.

The social system (1951)

A social system is a mode of organization of action elements relative to the persistence or ordered processes of change of the interactive patterns of a plurality of individual actors.

The social system (1951)

Without deliberate planning on anyone's part, there have developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others, mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment sanctions.

The social system (1951)

A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the "optimization of gratification" and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.

The social system (1951)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Talcott Parsons (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.