SATM 4.5 Sociology - Origins in the Systems Disciplines

It can be found in the work of Pareto, and his followers, in the belief that society is a system. Durkheim, Spencer and many others favored the organismic analogy: society was viewed as a system made up of interconnected parts functioning to maintain the whole. Aron is referring to Pareto's formulation of a general mechanism which underpins the movement of society. Four variables, called "interest", "residues", "derivations" and "social heterogeneity", are seen as being in a state of mutual dependence.

At the surface of society significant change may appear to take place as different elite groups succeed ont another in power. These changes are, however, merely the result of temporary fluctuations in the relationships between the key variables. Equilibrium will reassert itself sooner or later and social stability is, thereby, maintained. We may think we are seeing history in the making but, in fact, we are witnessing a repetitive process of readjustment between the variables.

This is important because systems are inevitably in a relationship with their environments
and in danger of being disturbed by them.

From sociology, the organismic analogy passed into anthropology and was given coherent theoretical expression by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown as "structural functionalism" (see Craib, 1992. Modern Social Theory: From Parsons to Habermas, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead.) In structural functionalist analysis, predictably, recurrent activities in a society are explained by the function they perform for the maintenance of the society's needs for survival.

In Talcott Parsons "equilibrium-function model", Parsons attempted to construct a system model for analyzing all elements of the social world. This consisted, nominally, of a combination of the notion that social systems are made up of the interaction of individuals (drawn from Weber), the mechanical equilibrium model and a form of structural functionalism concentrating on the functional prerequisites that must be met by social systems if they are to survive.

The most famous part of Parsons' equilibrium-function model is the elaboration, with Smelser (1956), of the four functional imperatives that must be adequately fulfilled for a system by its subsystems if that system is to continue to exist. The first letters of these four imperatives - adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency (or pattern maintenance), make up the well-known AGIL mnemonic.

• A = adaptation: the system has to establish relationships between itself and its external environment
• G = goal attainment: goals have to be defined and resources mobilized and managed in pursuit of those goals
• I  = integration: the system has to have a means of coordinating its efforts
• L = latency (or pattern maintenance): the first three requisite for organizational survival have to be solved with the minimum of stain and tension by ensuring that organizational "actors" are motivated to act in the appropriate manner

Parsons (1960, Structure and process in Modern Society, Free Press, NY) saw the management task in organizations as differing depending upon at which of three levels it operated. At the "technical system level", it was concerned directly with the transformation process; at the "managerial level", with integrating technical level activities and mediating between these and institutional level; and at the "institutional level", it integrated the organization with the wider community it was supposed to serve.

For Luhmann (1986, The autopoiesis of social systems, in: Sociocybernetic Paradoxes, F. Geyer and J. van der Zouwen, eds., Sage, London), social systems are autopoietic systems. This means that they are geared towards their own self-reproduction and this provides for their autonomy. Thus while they are "irritated" by their environments, they develop according to their own structural arrangements. The basic components constituting the autopoiesis of social systems are "communication."

In order to survive, a system tries to match its own variety to that of the environment, and achieve "requisite variety", by differentiating itself internally and so, simultaneously, restricting the way it perceives the environment.

Weber's work, along with that of Marx and Durkheim, is often seen as one of the three pillars upon which the sociological enterprise is built. Weber argued, sociology should be based upon the study of social actions. 
human behavior we must interpret 
Weber though, an advantage over those working in the natural sciences who can have only external knowledge of their subject matter. To model sociology on the natural sciences therefore, to the exclusion of this "inner-understanding" or verstehen, could only impoverish it. There are no social facts "out-there" whose existence can be demonstrated and whose nature can be analyzed by the method of the natural sciences.

Ideal-types are theoretical constructs related to some finite portion of reality selected according to the sociologist's interests and her view of significance. Weber's work is replete with examples of "ideal-types" - bureaucracy, Calvinism, feudalism, capitalism. They are always used for one purpose in empirical investigation; for comparison with reality.

Dilthey (1833-1911), working within the tradition of "hermeneutics", the theory of interpretation, has offered to sociology an alternative direction almost from its earliest days. He rejected the notion that human actions are governed by laws and are therefore intelligible, like natural events, through the use of the scientific method. To understand human behavior we must interpret it according to people's actual intentions.

Weltanschauungen are world-images constructed on the basis of our views of the world, our evaluation of life, and our ideals.

If interpretive sociology provided significant theoretical assistance to soft systems methodology, Marxist sociology, as a representative approach from "radical" social theory, played a similar role for emancipatory and critical systems thinking. There were systems ideas already at work in the Marxist tradition.

Some critical systems thinkers favor looking for an all-embracing theory (such as provided by Giddens or Habermas) to guide their practice, while others accept "paradigm incommensurability" and prefer to work with variety of competing positions.
      (Jackson, M.C. 2000, Systems Approaches to Management, Kluwer Academic /Plenum Publishers, NY. pp54-62