Abstract
According to Lizardo (2016), the concept of culture, as it originated with Parsons, is one of the “foundational notions” of modern sociology, such that “the most basic theoretical debates in the discipline…now take place largely under the auspices of ‘cultural theory.’” Unfortunately, to the extent that contemporary conceptions of culture are traced to Parsons, contradictions in cultural theory are also blamed on his legacy: with cultural theorists turning to anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy for solutions. We argue instead that problems in cultural theory are not a consequence of Parsons’ legacy per se, but of a one-sided focus on his early work that ignores the interactionism of Parsons’ later position. The resulting emphasis on the symbolic side of Parsons’ legacy, as developed in anthropology by Geertz (Parsons’ PhD student, 1950–1956), to the exclusion of the social practice-oriented side developed in sociology by the later Parsons and Garfinkel (Parsons’ PhD student, 1946–1952), has left cultural theory in a state of incompleteness. We propose a rapprochement between Garfinkel’s interactionism, which treats the order properties of practices as interactional media of cooperation in the making of culture, and the prevailing symbolic approach, to reintegrate the two sides of Parsons’ conception of culture.
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Notes
Garfinkel wrote the first five chapters of Parsons’ Primer for the first seminar in 1959. After receiving feedback from Parsons, Garfinkel revised the fifth chapter (on pattern variables) and wrote four additional chapters, all of which he used in his second Parsons seminar in January 1963. The Primer is being published for the first time in 2019, along with correspondence between Garfinkel and Parsons and materials from the seminars.
When we presented an early version of this paper at ASA in 2018, it was suggested that Parsons had noted in a short article (Kroeber and Parsons 1958) that he was giving the conception of culture over to anthropology. But, what Parsons actually says in this article is that both sociology and anthropology have valid but quite different approaches to culture that neither should give up. Parsons: “We therefore propose a truce to quarreling over whether culture is best understood from the perspective of society or society from that of culture…anthropology and sociology should merge into a temporary condominium leading to a differentiated but ultimately collaborative attack on problems in intermediate areas in which both are concerned.”
Garfinkel was at Harvard for the fall semester 1959 with a Fellowship to the Law School. Harvey Sacks, who was at MIT and also sitting in on Parsons’ courses that semester, attended this seminar. Audio recordings of some of Parsons’ lectures for this seminar are in the Garfinkel Archive.
The Garfinkel Archive houses audio and video recordings of Garfinkel’s lectures, seminars, conferences, and conversations, along with many recordings of others. It also houses manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials that Garfinkel both produced and preserved over the course of his 72 years as a sociologist from 1939 to 2011. These materials not only include lectures, unpublished manuscripts, and conversations of Garfinkel’s, but also lectures, unpublished manuscripts, and conversations by other notable scholars. Those interested in these materials should contact the authors.
Those on the symbolic/structural side of the culture debate often make a parallel complaint that interactionists “leave meaning out” (e.g., Axel Honneth’s comment on Anne Rawls’ interpretation of Durkheim’s epistemology at NYU, September 2016), by which they mean that interactionists are not focusing on symbols. This communication failure in which one side treats symbols as meaning, while the other treats interaction as constitutive of the meaning of symbols, and the positioning of the later Parsons’ on the interactional side of the debate, is one of the points that has led to a great deal of misunderstanding which we hope to clarify.
There is a widespread misperception that Parsons and Garfinkel did not have an intellectual relationship, and following from that, a belief that any version of Parsons that Garfinkel offered could not possibly be a serious one, and that surely Parsons would have disapproved. We quote from a letter Garfinkel wrote to Parsons in 1963 about an ongoing collaboration over Garfinkel’s Parsons’ Primer manuscript to demonstrate that Garfinkel was sharing his interpretations of Parsons with Parsons, and that Parsons knew very well how Garfinkel was interpreting his work. This letter demonstrates not only that Garfinkel was serious about Parsons’ work, but that their relationship was close enough for Garfinkel to share with Parsons not only how he was explaining his work, and his pleasure when he succeeded in explaining Parsons to those who were skeptical, but, as he says in the letter, that he has been “pleased to the point of laughter” when his explanation solves the problem (Garfinkel, January 14, 1963, p 2, in [1962] 2019a: Appendix I, emphasis added):
I have found it useful to such various interests as teaching persons how to read your materials, to formulate researches, and of course to win arguments, to summarize your solution with several rules of interpretive procedure. In the Primer I referred to them as “theorems.” So far I have three: (1) The real social structures consist of institutionalized patterns of normative culture. (2) The stable properties of the real social structures are guaranteed by motivated compliance to a legitimate order. (3) Only those legitimate orders can be enforced as definitions of a real world for members – i.e. can be institutionalized – that satisfy the functional problems as conditions for the problem of real, stable social structures.
They are best read, which is to say that their power is most easily demonstrated when some actual setting or some actual account of activities is addressed under their auspices. Indeed, it is hard to overstress that they be read with an actual situation “in mind”; with a monograph close at hand. I have used this procedure several times to deal with local colleagues who offered the criticism of your work that it lacks relevance to empirical materials and that it is neither concerned with, useful for “handling,” or controlled by “data.” I was immensely pleased to find the criticism give way, and pleased to the point of laughter to encounter a standard expression of surprise: “So that’s what he’s up to?”
The letter also addresses the relationship between the conceptual and the concrete for both scholars. It is Garfinkel’s point that Parsons’ conceptual points can be “most easily demonstrated” with actual concrete materials.
A constitutive criterion is a necessary and defining criterion of an action, meaning, or object. Garfinkel’s Trust Conditions specify these criteria: (1) that participants/players orient a set of basic constitutive rules that they expect to use regardless of personal preference; (2) the participants/players expect that the same set of constitutive expectations are binding on the other participants/players as are binding on themselves; (3) the participant expects that as they expect conditions 1 and 2 of the other participants/players, the others expect 1 and 2 of them (1963, p. 190).
This interpretation often comes via Saussure, in the mistaken belief that Saussure was interpreting Durkheim. For a discussion of how Geertz and Bellah elaborated on this issue, see Bartolini and Cossu (2019) and Cossu (forthcoming).
It matters that Garfinkel was a student of Odum from 1939 to 1942. He had encountered the idea of an independent level of interaction in American social theory before he got to Parsons. It was also under Odum that Garfinkel did his first research on race. See also Rawls 2018 and forthcoming for discussions of Odum.
That Durkheim later illustrated his constitutive practice argument with observations of religious ritual has been a source of some confusion. It was Durkheim’s explanation, however, that he chose a society with rituals that had not yet developed the elaborate accompanying beliefs and symbols of modern religions so that he could demonstrate that constitutive practices came before and generated those beliefs and symbols. In modern societies, by contrast, beliefs and symbols have become so well developed that people tend to mistake them for the reason things happen, when they are only the consequence.
Goffman also built on Parsons to craft an approach to “Interaction Orders” and did so while in close touch with Garfinkel. He was also at some of the meetings between Parsons and Garfinkel. However, he never explicitly said he was interpreting Parsons. We do not attempt to explain Goffman’s relationship to the development of the culture/interaction argument here, nor do we elaborate the extensive interconnections between his perspective and those of Garfinkel and Parsons although they are substantial and important.
Durkheim’s epistemological foundation for sociology rests on the same premise as Garfinkel’s approach (Rawls 2009, 2019b). The categories of the understanding, he argued, are produced and experienced cooperatively; they do not begin in individual experience, and they are not durable residues of aggregated individual actions that can live on in organized symbol systems without being regenerated. Rather, they emerge in concrete collective actions that need to be periodically enacted or they cease to exist (Rawls 1996a, 2004). This approach is empirical. By focusing on the assembly of social facts, it overcomes positivism. It is not neo-Kantian, Cartesian, or idealist, as many critics have supposed. Durkheim argued that sociology can properly be an empirical science because its fundamental phenomena, social facts, are public, empirical, and objective: the result of coordinated collective cooperation. This cooperation is moral because producing social facts is necessary for human social existence (Rawls 2019a, b).
Here, we reference an unpublished paper from the Garfinkel Archive that Garfinkel wrote during his first semester as a PhD student at Harvard in 1946, for a seminar that Parsons also participated in. In that paper, “Some Reflections on Action Theory and the Theory of Social Systems,” Garfinkel criticized Parsons for his “ethnocentrism,” by which he meant that Parsons made cultural assumptions and took mutual understanding for granted, rather than demonstrating how it is actually achieved in interaction. Even if we could drop the ethnocentrism, taking the “actor’s point of view” still makes it impossible to explain how two or more actors manage to make sense together. To solve the problem, Garfinkel argues, we need to shift the position of the observer (i.e., the social scientist), so that “Instead of restricting ourselves to the model of the actor and his multitude of universes of discourse, we try backing off a little so as to bring into view not only our original actor, but the fellow he was tangling with” (Garfinkel 1946, p. 8). In other words, Garfinkel is advocating that we start with the interaction as the primary site of sociality, rather than treating it as an epiphenomenon of the actor’s point of view. As Garfinkel argues in Parsons’ Primer ([1962] 2019a, Chapter 4), the early Parsons (1937) had already recognized the ontological centrality of interaction, specifically in his solution to Hobbes’ problem of order: according to Garfinkel, Parsons inverted Hobbes by putting social contract before any agreement between actors, as Durkheim had with his implicit conditions of contract, since there are no social actors, rational or otherwise, prior to the practices through which they are constituted. Thus, while Parsons did not fully work out the implications of this insight until much later, it was present in his work from The Structure of Social Action onward.
It has become an accepted tenet among many social theorists that the concrete and the conceptual are so different that a theory has to deal with either one or the other but not both—or at least not both at the same time. The problem with this is that social theory is supposed to be about the actual world in which people live and organize their lives. If sociologists theorize about this world in ways that do not connect with the concrete actual world, then what are they writing about? Both Garfinkel and Parsons were committed to the idea that their theorizing was accountable to the actual world, and therefore could be refuted by concrete actions. A reference that Garfinkel made to theoretical models as mock-ups (representations) in a 1963 paper offers a concrete example of the relationship between the concrete and the conceptual in social theory and everyday life. Garfinkel’s point was that in everyday life people do not make the mistake of taking the mock-up for the reality—but for some reason social theory does—and that this is a problem with social theory. At a conference in Colorado in April 1963 at which Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, and Egon Bittner all gave papers on “Mock-ups,” Garfinkel interrupted Sacks’ talk (1963, p. 1, emphasis added) with a “correction” that made reference to Garfinkel’s Air Force AAF experience with mock-ups during WWII (see Garfinkel [1943] 2019c and Rawls and Lynch 2019):
For example in the Air Force, men are trained as mechanics to service airplanes. Before they ever get a close look at, say, the hydraulic system that takes care of the landing gear, or the electrical system of the plane, they will have seen a board display …. They know that that [a mock-up] is not the way it is on the airplane; that it is a specifically false feature … but they allow that there is an actual situation in the service of coming to practical terms with, of dealing effectively with, that they consult this thing on the board and appreciate its specifically false features, with the additional provision that they are ready at any time when they crawl up into an actual airplane to let what is going on in the airplane make the mock-up right; not the other way around.
Garfinkel’s point is that, while there are legitimate uses for mock-ups/models, unlike sociologists who measure social reality against their models, the AAF recruits do not treat the mock-up as a basis for establishing criteria that the airplane must meet. Rather, they treat the actual plane when they finally “crawl up into” one, as the thing that finally resolves the “specifically false” features of the model. This is emblematic of Garfinkel’s overall approach to sociology: his insistence that theoretical models in sociology be held accountable to actual details of social actions in the same way mock-ups were for Army recruits.
Garfinkel ([1962] 2019a, p. 235) writes that it is not possible for there to be a game that involves norms but not values: there would not be field of possible occurrences in which a move could be constituted as a recognizable move-in-this-game. However, it is possible to have values without norms: in the limiting-case of ceremony, for example, actors are expected, at least in principle, to perform a fixed sequence of moves without variation.
It is important to distinguish values and norms as patterned actions-in-their-courses, from accounts that appeal to values and norms to justify particular decisions or actions. This distinction is easy to lose in Parsons’ writing, since he approaches actions and accounts analytically, rather than concretely. However, there is a difference: when accounts invoke values/norms, they represent or symbolize aspects of the social system as a system of interaction, on which they are dependent in the first instance. In the same way that religious beliefs symbolize rites in Durkheim’s (1912) analysis of religion, appeals to values/norms at the level of discourse refer to, and arise from, how members orient values/norms as normative patterns of action in interaction (see letter from Garfinkel to Parsons, January 14, 1963).
Parsons (1960, p. 467) himself says that “The pattern variables first emerged as a conceptual scheme for classifying types of roles in social systems, starting with the distinction between professional and business roles.” In a 1939 article titled “The Professions and Social Structure,” Parsons uses the conception of “functional specificity and diffuseness” in conjunction with “universalism” and “particularism” to distinguish professional and business roles from traditional personal, family, and community roles: a traditional/modern distinction that he had discussed in The Structure of Social Action (1937), but had not designated as such in the earlier book. In his Presidential Address in 1949, one of the first places he uses the formal term “Pattern Variables,” Parsons (1950, p. 10) explained that they were derived “by an analytical breakdown of Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft pair into what seemed to be more elementary components.” There is a section in SSA titled “Systems of Action and their Units” (1937, p. 731) in which Parsons talks in general terms about the “action schema” and its smallest unit the “unit act.” He also mentions “institutionalized patterns” of action. But he doesn’t mention anything that could be a pattern variable. The closest Parsons seems to get is on page 741 where he says that “A given concrete act is to be thought of, then, as a ‘knot’ where a large number of these threads come momentarily together only to separate again, each one to enter, as it goes on, into a variety of other knots into which only a few of those with which it was formerly combined enter with it.” In a footnote to this section, Parsons included a diagram with “means-ends chains.” He talks about the “variation of units,” “typical units,” and “secondary descriptive schema.” But for all the talk about a relationship schema, Parsons does not develop one in SSA. Nor does he name a pattern variable there.
When there were five pairs in 1951, the pairs were (1) affectivity/affective neutrality; (2) diffuseness/specificity; (3) particularism/universalism; (4) ascription/achievement; (5) collectivity-orientation/self-orientation. In 1960, the fifth pair was dropped after Robert Dubin pointed out in his critique that Ego/Collectivity was not properly a pattern variable. Parsons agreed, saying that he had already made many of these changes, but had neglected to do so formally.
Already in 1949/1950, Parsons (1950, p. 12) was writing that his “central new theoretical insight” (i.e., the pattern variables) relates values to action in a way that establishes “the analytical independence of value-orientation relative to the psychological aspects of motivation.” Yet, according to Garfinkel ([1962] 2019a, pp. 204–206) it would be another few years before Parsons fully overcame the structure/agency dualisms in his earlier theory.
Garfinkel’s original example was of a husband and wife. Changes in the mutual obligations involved in that relationship over time complicated the example too much for several reviewers. We have changed it to a brother/sister relationship. The point is the same.
This is a point that was also stressed by Gregory Bateson in his critique of game theory. The reference is to Bateson’s (1952) unpublished critique of models of rational action, which was presented at a conference on Models and Modeling organized by Garfinkel at Princeton in 1952.
That The Gift was intended to convince the bankers who held the German Sudetenland loans that cooperation was constitutive of the value of money, and consequently that their loans could become valueless if they didn’t cooperate with the Germans to make it possible for them to pay back the loans, the reason Mauss wrote it in 1925, got lost. Mauss’ attempt to use the constitutive practices of a traditional society to make a point about modern money was lost just as the point Durkheim was trying to make about epistemology and constitutive practices in modern society was lost when he made the argument using materials from traditional societies in The Elementary Forms ([1912] 1995).
Lizardo (2016, p. 106) argues that Parsons read Durkheim as an idealist in the German neo-Kantian tradition, which led him to treat collective representations as ideal objects that are ontologically separate from, but nonetheless “constrain,” the social system. He contrasts Parsons’ “culturalized” Durkheim with more recent Durkheim scholarship, which shows that Durkheim did not separate the ideal and material aspects of society, and argues for a post-cultural sociology rooted in the Durkheimian tradition. However, if our argument here is correct, the later Parsons is actually much closer to the actual Durkheim that has recently been rediscovered than to the earlier culturalized Durkheim. Furthermore, Anne Rawls is identified, among others, as supporting the claim that the newly discovered Durkheim takes a “naturalistic” approach to social facts. This is not her argument - in fact it reverses the point. What Durkheim argues is that social processes are natural processes in the sense that they occur through witnessable material practices rather than beliefs/ideas. Therefore, the study of those practices can reveal the making of social facts. This sense of social processes as “natural” which Durkheim invokes is not naturalistic. It merely says that practices are material, and subject to the laws that govern material things, and therefore can be studied. It does, however, tie back to Durkheim’s functionalism in an important way. Practices are subject to functional constraints. If they don’t work - they don’t work. This is a very different sense of functionalism, also taken up by the later Parsons, that there is no reason for cultural sociology to detach from. The later Parsons followed Durkheim in treating culture as social facts that are immanent to interaction and created through constitutive practices, which for Parsons are built into the pattern variables. These practices and the social facts they produce must be seeable and hearable, which, even in Parsons’ more abstract approach, changes what “idealism” means and escapes the classical sense of subjectivity: It is not a matter of transferring ideas between “heads” or getting concepts to interact with materiality, as Durkheimian social facts they are already joined with materiality.
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Acknowledgements
Research in the Garfinkel Archive is being supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” (SFB 1187). We thank in particular our colleagues Tristan Thielmann and Erhard Schüttpelz at the University of Siegen.
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Rawls, A.W., Turowetz, J. “Discovering culture” in interaction: solving problems in cultural sociology by recovering the interactional side of Parsons’ conception of culture. Am J Cult Sociol 9, 293–320 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00079-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00079-6