ABSTRACT
Max Weber puts social action at the foundations of sociology. Action is an agent’s meaningful doing something, or omitting to do something, or having something done to him; the attribute social indicates that the content of the action always relates to others as well as to oneself. In his 1937 opus, telling entitled The Structure of Social Action, and again more markedly in 1951’s The Social System, Talcott Parsons, though also building on Weber, develops a different conception of social action, adopting an objectivist approach. In a clear antithesis to the idea of the social system as an entity which is predetermined for the actors, at the same time ignoring or “readapting” the Weberian lesson, theories of action have gained ground which could more appropriately be called theories of the social actor. The latter then tend to be generalized, accreting into institutions that define social roles, which the actors in turn take as a framework and interpret in concrete situations.
