The long-term project

This and the following three chapters are the culminating chapters of this work. In this chapter the theory of action as it was stated in The Structure and in the unpublished document ‘Actor, Situation and Normative Pattern’ is presented. In the next chapter an overview of the development of the theory during the period 1937–51 is given. Chapter 9 looks closely at three formulations which were published during this time. Chapter 10 will provide a detailed statement of principles for the interpretation of The Social System by reference to the first two chapters of that work. This will be a critical summary. A full commentary of those chapters is not included here because of space constraint. Though this work is a critical commentary, a conventional secondary work, it seems that the ‘secondary literature’ on Parsons would be considerably strengthened by a line-by-line exegesis of The Social System on classical lines.

The conceptual scheme presented in The Structure was an outline only – ‘not yet worked out in detail’. That task remained. Towards the end of The Structure Parsons wrote,