行為理論と社会構造の概念
パースンズとガース=ミルズについて
1960 年 10 巻 2 号 p. 128-135,142
詳細
1960 年 10 巻 2 号 p. 128-135,142
No matter how we approach the society, We fit into one or the other of two basic approaches : German and American types. These two approaches are mutually exclusive and we can understand them as competing, but in the end we can in fact we must use both approaches. As Karl Mannheim has written, there were hardly ever two differnt styles of study as fit to supplement each other's shortcoming as are the German and American types of sociology. In such a context, it is one of the special obligations of the sociologist to build a working model in terms of which we can use both.
The persistent theme of American sociology, which can be succinctly described as “voluntalistic nominalism”, is the adherence to a psychological conception of society from subjective point of reference. There is no discussion of the society as a whole in an historical epoch. As Talcott Parsons has said in The Social System (1951), “Obviously most empirical sociological studies are concerned with partial social systems rather than with societies as wholes”. The society as a whole, which is called a “Society”, is a aggregate of social systems. A society, then, is not only “a” social system, which of course it is, but is also a very complex network of interlocking and interdependent subsystems, each of which is equally authentically a social system. The concept of society is distinguished from that of social system. In the context of the microscopic-macroscopic range of the society, We want to make two main points. One is, we think, that the social system is organized on the level of “role-unit”. Two, that the society as a total system is organized on the level of “social systemunit”
Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in their Character and Social Structure (1954), wrote that :
Just as role is the unit with which we build our conception of institutions, so institution is the unit with which we build the conception of social structure.
We must consider not only the psychology of social system but also, and primarily, the historical logic of the society as a total system. Our analysis always involve the articulatiou of two microscopic-macroscopic levels : the role-unit and the social system-unit.
