ABSTRACT
Talcott Parsons was born in Colorado in 1902, the son of a Congregationalist minister and teacher, interested in ‘the social gospel’. In social science Parsons is unsurpassed in the sustained elaboration of a theoretical scheme-’the theory of action.’ The key concept of this stage of Parsons’ theorising was ‘value-orientation’. Regularities of choice between basic ways of relating to people formed ‘patterns of value-orientation’ which were a major part of the cultural system. Parsons developed the paradigm further, with Neil J. Smelser, to demonstrate that economic activity should not be treated as uniquely rational behaviour in a theoretically random environment, as if only economics could be a social science. While so far the general action level had been the highest, a higher one, called the human condition system, was now introduced, in which the general action system was only one of its sub-systems. The ‘upper’ environment of ultimate reality became the telic system as the L sub-system of the human condition.
