2006 special invited issue on Parsons and a dialogue between economics and sociology - Call for Papers - Talcott Parsons

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 2003

More than 20 years after his death, Talcott Parsons is still regarded as the most influential American sociologist. So broad was the scope of his theoretical inquiry, it transcended sociology and crossed into fields of other social sciences, of which economics played a particularly important role in Parsons's intellectual career. We seldom think of Talcott Parsons as an economist. But in fact he was an economist before he became a sociologist. Parsons graduated from Amherst with a B.A. in Economics in 1924 and went on to the London School of Economics and then to Heidelberg. He studied at Heidelberg from 1925 to 1927, when Max Weber's legacy of multidisciplinary research was still present in German academia. Parsons's doctoral thesis in economics was on theories of capitalism in works of Max Weber and Werner Sombart. He continued to write mostly on economic topics for five years. The Structure of Social Action was the first major work by Parsons that can be classified as predominantly sociological--predominan tly, but not entirely, as a large portion of it was devoted to discussion of Alfred Marshall's economic theory. Later at Harvard he conducted joint seminars on rationality with Joseph Schumpeter.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that building a bridge between economics and sociology was one of the major goals of Parsons's intellectual life. Was the bridge built' Did it withstand the test of time? Does it bear much intellectual traffic between the two disciplines? These questions are of great importance for economists and sociologists, as they are still looking for paths to mutual understanding more than 40 years after Parsons's Economy and Society (which he coauthored with Neil Smelser), and all too frequently discovering what looks like an unbridgeable gap separating their methodological and theoretical domains.

Today, a dialogue between sociology and economics acquires especial urgency, as the world, which seemed to have been neatly divided into domains of various social sciences for a large part of the 20th century, looks increasingly like the world of Max Weber, where answers found in separate disciplinary compartments provided a less than adequate picture of reality. Changing economies of the post-Communist world, globalization, and growth of the knowledge economy are among the phenomena that emerge and develop without regard to interdisciplinary boundaries. Once again, a multidisciplinary approach, Weberian in its essence, is needed. And Parsons may serve as a link between Weber's brilliant adumbrations and the analytical sophistication of modern social sciences.

In Economy and Society Parsons noted that economists tend to take social order for granted. In some circumstances this does not affect economic reasoning, as long as social order remains constant. Today, economists' attention is increasingly directed toward geographic areas and spheres of human activity where social order is either unknown or unstable. An economist who studies emerging market economies throughout the world is confronted with simultaneous changes of a social, as well as an economic, nature. The plethora of processes associated with globalization changes the social order in hitherto stable societies. The knowledge economy changes the very nature of transaction costs property rights, and the labor force, while requiring an as yet undetermined combination of old and new types of social institutions for its functioning. Taking social order for granted no longer seems to be a plausible option for economists.

Although a source of considerable controversy since the 1970s, Parsons's theory continues to influence modern sociology. At the same time, more and more economists and organizational theorists are discovering Parsons and recognizing his theoretical framework as an important explanatory tool. Indeed, Parsons's theory has been proven to possess strong predictive capacity, as he insisted that Soviet economy and society were unsustainable in the long run and would have to change or collapse. This prediction, made at the height of the Soviet economic and military power in the mid-1960s, illustrates the potential of Parsons's theory for social and economic research. Can it be used today to make equally bold projections?

We invite articles from economists and sociologists on Parsons's contribution to a dialogue between economics and sociology, the economic ideas discussed in his works, and the potential of his theories for illuminating a multitude of issues located on the border between the two disciplines. Authors interested in participating should submit a 600-word abstract to the journal editor, Professor Laurence S. Moss, Economics Department, Babson College, Babson Park, MA 02457, USA or LMOS@AOL.GOM. The deadline for the submission of the abstract is November 30, 2004. The proposed final version of the paper will be due on February 1, 2005.