ABSTRACT
The perspective of structural-functional sociology is to encourage sociologists to construct an implicit or explicit idea of human nature. The sociologist's point of departure is an established social structure—a group, an organization, a society. Alfred Baldwin, somewhat confusingly, identifies Talcott Parsons's approach both with that of "the" sociologist in general and with "functional sociology". The sociologist is primarily interested in overt conduct because a group or social structure is no more than a set of observable interactions among individuals, "a system of action" in Parsonian terminology. The need of sociologists for a situationist psychology follows from their stress on action as opposed to the inner life. Social structures link individuals together in chains of role relationships, the action of one eliciting a response from another which changes the situation for the first actor, and so on. The sociologist, unlike the monographic historian, is committed to the systematic comparative study of historical social structures.
