Parsons' scholarly engagement at Harvard during the 1930s

How did Parsons ‘fit in’ with the Harvard of the 1930s? We can answer this question by looking at the collection of journal articles which were published at this time. They represent the progressive refinement of an argument which came to culmination in The Structure of Social Action. In that work he achieved his ‘quantum leap’ from ‘theories’ to ‘theory’. He had also established himself at Harvard.

We must now consider how Parsons came to view himself as a theorist. Harvard required original work of its faculty (Morison 1936: 53ff.). It sought out ‘first raters’. In this competitive atmosphere Parsons finally produced ‘the book’. There was more than just institutional pressure from ‘without’; Parsons laboured to produce an original response to the intellectual environment of the American university, from within the discipline of economics.

Parsons acknowledged that he was a ‘maverick’. He fought a running battle against rigid lines of division between disciplines (T. Parsons 1959: 5–6, n. 3).