Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist at Harvard University and the dominant figure in American sociological theory through the middle decades of the twentieth century. In The Structure of Social Action (1937) he synthesized the work of Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Marshall into a general voluntaristic theory of action, and he went on to develop structural functionalism, a systematic account of how social institutions work together to maintain social order, formalized in his AGIL scheme describing the functional requirements every social system must meet. His comprehensive, highly abstract theoretical system shaped the discipline for decades and became the primary target of the conflict and interactionist theories that reacted against it.