Jayv pue u1sr1euor~3unjoa~

Copyright O Jeffrey C. Alexander 1998

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 After Neofunctionalism:
Action, Culture, and Civil Society

In chapter 1 of this book, 1 described the transition frorn an orthodox

functionalism to a reconstructed neofunctionalism, and 1 suggested
that the latter had succeeded in establishing itself in the field of
conternporary social theory. As the preceding chapters attest, there is
now quite a bit of neofunctionalist work, in terrns of both discourse
and research program, and these have had a growing effect on a
fairly wide range of specialities in the sociological field.
Yet, As 1 also suggested in chapter 1, there is a paradox here. For
by virtue of this very success one of the principal rationales for the
neofunctionalist movernent has disappeared. Parsons is now a "clas-
sical" figure. This rneans that while his ideas may continue to form
the basis of traditions, they have also becorne available for use in
more broadly synthetic, eclectic, and opportunistic ways. Inspired by
the scope and ambition of Parsons' originating theory, neofunction-
alism has been intent on incorporating the ideas of competing tradi-
tions and in developing new and more synthetic theoretical rnodes.
While "Parsons" is a crucial resource in this endeavor, his ideas are,
in fact, no more irnportant than some of the critica1 achievernents of
other classical theorists, nor can they override the genial insights of
some contemporaries as well. Perhaps it is only now, after "Parsons*
has been rehabilitated, that it has become possible to link his ideas
constructively with those in other traditions. That in doing so one
moves beyond reconstruction to theory-creation is precisely the point.
In my own work, there are three interrelated areas in which this
movernent beyond neofunctionalisrn is now taking place.
 After Neofunctionalism 211

Action
One of Parsons' majar theoretical achievements was to break down
the concrete sense of the actor. Instead of describing individuals as
taking part in a "society" outside of themselves, Parsons took an
analytical view, suggesting that actors and societies were much more,
and much less, than the concrete image that meets the eye. They are,
in fact, compositions of different levels, of patterned meanings (the
cultural system), of psychological needs (the personality system), and
of interactional and institutional exigencies (the social system). With
this three-system model Parsons early set his focus on what has come
to be known as the micro-macro link. Actors, he believed, were not
individuals per se, but specifications of broad cultural patterns that
entered into role relationships and identities through socialization.
Similarly, organizations were very different from the antisubjective
"iron cages" of Weberian lore; they were sites where socialized motives
and cultural patterns intermingled to form situationally specific norms
that allowed functionally necessary roles to'be performed in a mutu-
ally satisfying way.
This "three-system model" marks, in my view, a permanent con-
tribution to social thought. Parsons was right to break down the
concrete actor in this way. This deconstruction provides access to the
interpenetration of subjectivity and objectivity, self and society, cul-
ture and need. These insights, indeed, remain very much on the agenda
of social science today. Contemporary feminism, for example, too
often seeks to explain sexism either as the result of patriarchical
power, on the one hand, or psychological deformation, on the other,
with scarcely any reference to the role of cultural understandings of
masculinity and femininity that surely stand in between (cf., the cri-
tique by Bloch 1993, and the work by Lara 1998). Macrosociology,
whether historical or contemporary in its reference, too often treats
political, economic, and even cultural structures simplp as networks
of power (e.g., Mann), organizations that are constituted neither by
meaning nor by motivation but by physical proximity and resource
availability (cf., the critique by Eisenstadt 1989). For its part, cultural
studies too often either treat culture as a constraint that is somehow
"outside" the consciousness of concrete actors or, following Foucault,
identify structures of institutional power with structures of cultural
knowledge and eliminate the actor as an independent force.'
Yet, it is now clear that this deconstruction could not create a fully
satisfactory micro-macro link. While Parsons created a credible general
212 After Neofunctionalism

rnodel of cultural, social, and psychological interpenetration, he did

not produce an account of action as such, that is, of concrete, living,
breathing actors rnaking their way through time and space. What
Parsons produced was a compelling macrosociological theory of the
microfoundations of behavior; in doing so, however, he ignored the
order that ernerges from interaction as such (Rawls 1987). Parsons
produced his three-system model in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
before the "micro" revolution in Arnerican sociological theory got
underway. When it did emerge, in the later. 1950s, he did not change
his theory as a result.
Micro theorists emphasized that the socialized self was the point
where theories of action must begin, not end. Blumer wrote, for
exarnple, that actors always take their selves as an object. Goffman
pointed out that conformity with values is not only the result of
socialization but also a presentational strategy: idealization gains actors
trust and space to construct the line of action they need. Garfinkel
sirnilarly bracketed the question of whether and how internalized
values come to exist; values becorne operative and important, he
believed, because actors take them to be there and know how to
exhibit thern in practice. Homans, too, considered value as a con-
stant, treating as variable only the conditions of exchange. It is
the different resources that individuals bring into the bargaining situ-
ation that explain the ernergent organization of social life.
Parsons would have none of this. He neither appreciated the deep-
ness of such insights, nor recognized their potentially far-reaching
implications. This resistance was particularly damaging because, after
the rnicro revolution, general theories of society simply had to change.
The new microtheorizing stimulated the rnajor new developments in
rnacrosociological theory. The later ideas of Collins and Giddens
were deeply affected by ethnornethodology and Goffrnan. Haberrnas's
ideas were transforrned by speech act theory and by the incorpora-
tion of Lebenswelt philosophy. Touraine's understanding of the social
movernent quality of postindustrial society was stirnulated by action
theories, Bourdieu's by phenornenology, Colernan's and Elster's by
rational choice. It is this kind of crossing over, in fact, that defines
the new theoretical movement in sociology.
My own efforts to conceptualize the rnicro-rnacro link (e.g., in
Alexander et al. 1987) are indebted to these recent developrnents in
general theory. At the same time, 1 remain deeply dissatisfied with
them. They have avoided the negative results of Parsons' deconstructive
arnbition, but they have not incorporated its ac~om~lishrnents.~ In
focussing on action they have conceived of the actor only in a concrete
 After Neofunctionalism

way. The challenge for theorizing action in the present time is t o go

beyond this position: it is to understand the contingency of concrete,
ernpirical interactions between actors who are thernselves analytically
conceived.
If one examines the articles and books that have articulated the
new rnovernent in general sociological theory since the early 1980s,
one recognizes a strong tendency to identify actors (persons who act)
with agency (hurnan freedorn, free will) and agents (whose who
exercise free will). 1 propose to think of this as a confusion of "agency"
and " a ~ t o r . "This
~ is a conflation that provided the starting point for
the anti-Parsonian rnicrosociologists whose work 1 have just praised.
Considering the polernical stakes, however, one rnight argue that for
these theorists in the second phase of postwar theory the conflation
of agency with actors was a necessary and productive error; certainly,
it was one that stirnulated sorne of their greatest work. The problern
is that this concrete approach has been taken into the third phase;
it has been continued by rnacrosociological theorists who, far frorn
being engaged in a polernic against rnacro and analytic theorizing,
are seeking to establish the rnicro-rnacro link.
Frorn neo-Marxisrn to rational action theory, frorn reconstructed
conflict rnodels to social movement and practice theories, the danger-
ous legacy of this fertile but fundarnentally rnisguided conflation of
actor and agency can be found. On the one side, agency is equated
with the heroic rnasterful actor, whether in an individual (Hornans)or
a collective (Touraine) forrn. On the other side,.facing this actor, one
finds the irnage of society, the rnacro-order, as a self-reproducing, "user
unfriendly" system, an order that partakes neither of aaors nor agency.
This is exactly what is irnplied, for exarnple, when Giddens (1979,
p. 80) asserts that "actors draw upon structural elernents." Actors,
in other words, are not thernselves social structures but agents. In the
course of their action, such putatively nonstructural agents rnake ref-
erence to objects, to social structures, that are externa1 to thernselves.
To be sure, Giddens overtly identifies the latter as "rules" rather than
sirnply resources, that is, as structures that can be subjective and not
only material in their ontological forrn. But Giddens treats rules
thernselves as objectified and depersonalized, presenting thern, for
exarnple, rnerely as "techniques or generalizeable procedures" (1984,
p. 21), rather than as projections of subjectively experienced rnean-
ing. N o wonder that Giddens (1979, p. 80) equates agency with
"strategic condua," that is, with the exercise of free will unconstrained
by psychological identity or patterns of rneaning.
Most of the other influential general theorists today have a similar
214 A fter Neofunctionalism

problem. Because they assume that both actor and society have
only a "concrete" form, they can identify agency - the dimension of
action that is independent of externa1 or internal constraint - only
with the whole person, with the acting individual as such. Collins,
for example, equates the macro, or extraindividual, referente with
material, impersonal resources like property, power, and physical
space. He understands agency as generated by internal, emotional,
and strategic responses to these environments, which are outside the
actor as such. Habermas equates political and economic activities
with systemsiational organizations that externally impinge upon sub-
jective life-worldly activities, leaving agency to pragmatic speech acts
that, despite his references to the developmental cultural Logic of
Parsons and the psychological logic of Piaget, have no relation to
cultural action or psychological need as ~ u c hLuhmann's
.~ "autopoetic"
systems, whether selves or institutions, are either tropes that obscure
meaningful action and culturally ordered collectivities, or they are
extraordinary reifications that deny such processes altogether. Joas
and Honneth (cf., Alexander and Lara 1996) locate creativity in a
similar kind of "philosophical anthropology," linking them to inherent
qualities of actors rather than to dimensions of culture and social suuc-
ture that can be vital resources in the construction of the capacities
and identities of actors themselves.
1 object to these identifications of actor with agency because they
are guilty of misplaced concreteness. True, the traditional hierarchy
of society and social actors is avoided, along with the microcosm/
macrocosm idea in which actors are fit snugly into the social whole.
But, rather than replacing or reinterpreting the familiar dichotomy
between actors and structures, and allowing the subjective/objective
dichotomy to be mediated in a new way, these identifications of
actors with agency actually reproduce the dichotomy in another form.
Rather than formulating a hierarchy, actors and structures are con-
ceived horizontally, placed side-by-side in a manner that ignores how
they interpenetrate with each other and create new, specifically social
forms. What results is a mixture rather than a solution, a compromise
rather than a reformulation. The notion that structures control actors
who simultaneously constitute structures in turn - the incantation
first produced by Bourdieu and later taken up by Giddens - describes
a serial relationship rather than an interlinkage. Actors and structures
are conceived to be empirically rather than analytically distinct. The
result is a kind of juggling, keeping the balls of action and structure
in the air at the same time. There does not emerge a fundamentally
 After Neofunctionalism 215

different vision of the relationship of actors and societies.

A more complex position is needed that combines both analytic
and concrete perspectives. Actors are not simply agents (those who
possess free will), nor are structures necessarily contradictory to the
conditions under which actors exercise self-control and autonomy,
an accomplishment which is not at all the same as agency or free
will. If we define action as the movement of a person through time
and space, we can see that, whether antiinstitutional and independent
or conformist and dependent, every action contains a dimension of
free will, or agency. We can even go further and suggest that agency
is what allows actors to move through time and space. But actors per
se are much more, and much less, than "agents."
There are many ways to express this distinction. In my own work,
1 suggest that agency is the moment of freedom which occurs within
three struaured environments, and that two of these - culture and
personality - exist ontologically only within the actor, conceived as
a spatially and temporally located person. According to this model,
actors certainly have knowledge, but it is an error to say - as Bourdieu
and Giddens do, following Garfinkel - that actor; are "knowledgeable
agentsn as such. This is an error because the knowledge that actors
have does not come from their agency as such but from the cultural
environment which surrounds it and transforms it into identity. That
this subjective knowledge is the result of early interactions with others
does not mean, moreover, that it can be viewed only as the result of
an agent's "practicaln experience, of "practicen in the pragrnatic sense.
Some knowledge does, of course, originate in idiosyncratic learning
processes, and al1 of it certainly is applied, in the concrete context of
time and place, in a manner that is specific to the actual individuals
involved. Yet it is misleading to identify most of this knowledge as
the actor's own. Rather, it is society's knowledge, despite the fact
that any particular social reference may or may not be widely shared.
Even when it is not widely shared, however, rather than being gen-
eralized from a series of particular experiences it has been learned
from gestalts that such sequential encounters are seen to present.
Action, then, is the exercise of agency by persons. To both sides
of this phrasing attention must be paid. On the one hand, action can
occur only in relation to two highly structured interna1 environments.
Action is coded by cultural systems and motivated by personalities.
On the other hand, personalities and cultural codes do not exhaust
the contents of a person's subjectivity. There remains the extremely
significant dimension of agency. Philosophers may understand agency,
216 After Neofunctionalism

or free will, as an existential category; for sociologists it can be

conceived as process, one that involves invention, typification, and
strategization. These processes give pragmatic shape to the exercise
of free will. They engage the structured, internal environments of
action and move them through time and space. It is not only agency
as articulated by these three primordial processes, then, but the agentic
articulations of these internal environments that comprise "the actor."
This position can te11 us something important about "socia! struc-
tures" as well. If actors are not only agents in the traditional sense,
then structures are not only - not essentially, not even primarily -
constraining forces which confront actors from without. Culture and
personality are themselves social structures, forces that confront agency
from within and become part of action in a "voluntary" way. Struc-
tures can be described as existing outside of actors only if we focus on
a third environment for agency, the'social system. 1 refer here to the
economic, political, solidaristic, and ecological relations and networks
formed by persons in the course of their interactions in time and space.
Yet, because they are formed from concrete, empirical interactions -
because they are, in fact, only aggregates of earlier actions themselves
- it is impossible to conceive even of these "social system" components
as things which exist independently of the patterned internal environ-
ments of the human beings who activate them.s Al1 of which is to say
that the internal and externa1 environments of action must be con-
ceived in an analytical way, even as the contingency of empirical
interactions can only be understood in its concrete form.

Culture
These reformulations of action theory lead to a much greater emphasis
on action's cultural environment, which must be conceived as an organ-
ized structure internal to the actor in a concrete sense. Among the
general theorists in the new theoretical movement, however, there is
virtually no recognition of culture as a structure analytically separated
from agency. In his structuration theory, Giddens speaks of rules and
procedures but he never investigates the textured patterns of symbolic
life. In his communicative theory of justice, Habermas acknowledges
culture only as it has been "linguistified" into a universalistic morality
whose presuppositions can be discussed in a rational and conscious
way. In his microtranslations of macrosociology, Collins understands
meaning primarily as sedimentation from the emotion of interaction
 After Neofunctionalism

rituals. In Bourdieu's theory of practice, he does see culture as a

structure, but his reductionist equation of culture with institutional
structure means that culture has the effect of denying agency rather
than illuminating it (cf. Alexander 1995).
This failure on the part of general theorists to consider culture as a
structure interna1 to action is not entirely surprising; it reflects, after
all, the sarne kind of concrete and empiricist approach to action that
1 described above. However, even specialists in cultural sociology -
those upon whom general theorists writing about culture might be
expected to rely - tend to treat culture in much the same concrete way.
From the Birmingham school to the efforts of cultural sociologists
like Archer and Swidler, action is understood as a process that often,
or even typically, positions itself over and against "culture," standing
outside patterned syrnbolic ~ o d e sCultural
.~ theorists, in other words,
often make the sarne kind of mistake as does general theory itself.
Equating action with creative, reflexive, or rebellious agency, they
identify culture with patterns that exist only outside of the actors
themselves.
In this context it becomes very clear that there is more involved here
than theoretical issues alone. This shearing of culture from agency also
reflects an ideological sensibility, one that is widely shared by general
theorists and cultural specialists alike. For their approach to agency
is.not only conflationary but celebratory and even heroic. According
to one tradition (exchange theory), actors are rational, autonornous,
self-sufficient, wily, and clever. According to another (ethnomethodo-
logy), they are knowledgeable, reflexive, self-monitoring, and corn-
petent. In the rhetoric of a third approach (symbolic interactionisrn),
actors are endlessly creative, expressive, and meaning-making. These
descriptive terrns have a certain validity if they are taken as charac-
terizations of the analytical properties of agency; the capacity for
freedorn, after all, is at the core of the democratic traditions of Western
life. These qualities must be questioned, however, if fhey are taken
to be descriptions of concrete actions, that is, of the properties of
actors. Yet this is exactly what usually is implied.
If we d o not conflate actors with agents, we are forced to recognize
that actors are not nearly so heroic as these accounts suggest. They
are often befuddled, passive, self-deceptive, thoughtless, and vicious.
How can this be so, if agency itself can be described in a positive
way? The answer is that agency expresses itself only through its
cultural and psychological environments, and these latter forces struc-
ture agency in what are sometimes extraordinarily harmful ways. By
 After Neofunctionalisrn

ignoring or underplaying the negative elernents of action, then, strong

theories of agency sometimes seem less like dispassionate efforts to
describe action than efforts to mobilize moral evaluations about it.
Touraine's "action theory" is a case in point. Against deterministic and
struaural theorizing, Touraine has rightly emphasized the irnport-
ance of voluntaristic self-starting and free will in structuring macro-
sociological life. Yet, on the basis of this analytic emphasis, he argues
- ernpirically - for the positive, historically progressive role of social
movements in postindustrial society, an elision that ignores some of
the rnost typical and dangerous "action" movements in the twentieth
century (cf. Alexander 1996).
Rather than theoretical generalizations about reflexivity, contem-
porary approaches to action - in general theory and cultural theory
alike - seern more like reformulations of the moral and political
tradition of natural rights. Instead of theorizing the relation between
action and its internal environments, they have produced uplifting
and hopeful elaborations of the normative discourse that underpins
democracy itself. But we should becorne conscious of this discourse,
not reproduce it. The first step is to recognize that it is a discourse;
we rnust deconstruct it as an ideology regulating action rather than
rationalize it as an explanation of action. Then we will see that good-
ness cannot be inherently associated with action; it can be attributed
to action only because of the particular kinds of social, psychological,
and cultural environments withn which agency is expressed.
Insofar as we acknowledge the internal environrnents of concrete
action, then, we will understand that aaion must be seen as a con-
stant process of exercising agency through, not against, culture. That
rneans that typification - the agentic process that reproduces social
narratives and codes - is a continuous dirnension of every action, not
"instead of" but "alongside of" the dimensions of creativity and inven-
t i ~ nAgency
.~ is inherently related to culture, not a process that stands
outside it. Because agency is "free," action is never simply mirnetic;
it never sirnply reproduces internalized syrnbolic environrnents.
Action involves a process of externalization, or re-presentation: agency
is inherently connected to representational and symbolic capacity.
Because actors have agency, they can exercise their representational
capacities, re-presenting their externa1 environments through extern-
alization. This does not contradict the structural status of culture,
any more than Uvi-Strauss's "bricoleur" negated the power of myth
or Durkheirn7s insistance on the "religious imagination" elirninated
ritual.
 Afrer Neofunctionalism 219

Yet, if Parsons' three-system division allows us to understand

culture as a relativel~autonomous structure that informs social
aaion and organization, it does not describe culture as an internal
environment of action when the latter is understood in a concrete
sense. Parsons fails to connect culture with the concrete actor because,
in his approach to meaning, he fails to recognize that cultural ana-
lysts must construct "values" from the actual discourse - the speech
acts - of socially situated actors. Values as such do not inform,
inspire, or regulate concrete action; they are analytic (re)constructions
by analysts themselves, (re)constructions that are generated precisely
by abstracting away from the actual forms of representation in
which evaluations are made. This allows us to understand why
Parsons provides a remarkably thin theory of the internal structuring
of symbolic process, despite his strenuous insistence on culture's
important role.
The problem occurs because Parsons ignored a second intellectual
revolution that has fundamentally altered the social sciences in our
time. Since the early 1970s there has been a sea change in ideas about
culture's role in society, a shift that is sometimes called - certainly
inadequately - the linguistic or the discursive "turn." In the context of
Arnerican debates, this turn is reflected in the series of fundamental
challenges that Clifford Geertz issued to Parsons (and Marx), when
he insisted, for example, that literary tropes should take precedence
over functional demands in explanations of ideology (Geertz 1964)
and that thick descriptions of meaning must take precedence over
inductions about values and methods devoted to causal explanation
(Geertz 1973). In France and England, the linguistic turn was reflected
in the growing impact of semiotics and structuralism, approaches
that worked with ordinary speech and routine, publically ,available
texts, reconstructing from them intricately ordered symbolic codes
and narratives that seemed able to explain the detailed texture
of meaningful social life. These movements stimulated, in turn, the
creation of a new symbolic anthropology in the writings of people
such as Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Geertz himself. Eventually
there emerged the enormously influential poststructuralism of Michel
Foucault, which so powerfully proclaimed the social power of highly
structured fields of cultural discourse. In Germany, hermeneutic philo-
sophy also revived, with its claims that the understanding of social
action must refer to the actor's experience of meaning and that such
meaningful action can and must, as Ricoeur (1971) once put it, be
interpreted as a text.
220 After Neofunctionalism

Because Parsons formed his initial understanding of culture before

these developments emerged, there is certainly a biographical explana-
tion for his failure to recognize their importante. At the same time,
it is possible to see that from the beginning of his intellectual maturity
Parsons was not at al1 sympathetic to strongly culturalist claims. One
sees this, for example, in his early response (Parsons 1937) to the
religious turn that Durkheim made in The Elementary Forms. While
hailing Durkheim for recognizing the symbolic, Parsons criticized his
program of "!eligious sociology" as idealism. Rather than seeing it
as referring to the interna1 structure of symbols or to the continuing
intensity of symbolic experience, Parsons reduced Durkheim's "sacred"
to Weber's "charisma," i.e., to an episodic response to social crisis
and strain, and he described Durkheim's understanding of ritual in
a similar way.*
Rather than following Durkheim's suggestions for a broad focus
on symbolic patterns, Parsons chose to focus on "values," which he
defined as the subset of symbols refracted by functional needs and
institutionalized in specific roles. In fact, however, as 1 have suggested
above, Parsons gained access to values not so much through the inter-
pretive analysis of actors' meanings or discourses but by generalizing
from patterns of actual behavior in the social world. This is precisely
what Durkheim was trying t o get away from in his later writings.
Durkheim was intent on creating a very different kind of sociology,
one that would never confuse the analysis of social functions with the
patterned understandings of actors themselves. Rather than the weak
cultural theory of values that Parsons recommended - which allowed
him so neatly t o differentiate sociology from anthropology - the late
Durkheimian position implies a strong theory that argues against
such a disciplinary separation and, in the process, against any radical
disjunction between "traditional" and "modern" societies as well.
Such a strong program for cultural sociology - one inspired by the
later Durkheim (Alexander 1990, Alexander et al. 1993, cf. Emirbayer
1996) - allows us to explore further one of the most important
implications of the approach to action and its environments 1 have
recommended above. It allows us to link action more closely to mean-
ing as actors themselves experience it and to the cultural forms that,
in structuring meaning, give it more independence from institutional
pressures and system exigencies than Parsons' value theory ever could
allow. Actors are, in fact, deeply and continuously engaged in what
Garfinkel called "indexicality." Yet, in converting the contingent into
the expected - by employing patterns of understanding that already
 A fter Neofunctionalism 221

exist - they are not merely publically affirming a conformity with the
values that effectively regulate social relationships. They are not, that
is, rnerely engaging in "idealization" as Goffman understood it.
Actors typify not only vis-a-vis structures of meaning that are
institutionalized, i.e., organized, sanctioned, and rewarded by or on
behalf of the social system. At several points (e.g., Parsons and Shils
1951), it is true, Parsons did speak of the "patternn integration of
culture as straining against systernic or functional in'tegration, and of
the possibility of "cultural strainn that results. Most of the time, how-
ever, he understood strains as emerging from within the social system
rather than culture. While his "theorem of perfect institutionaliza-
tion" was conceived as an ideal typical model rather than an actual
description of a frictionless social life, the concept clearly indicates
that Parsons gave priority to social system over culture, to the insti-
tutional mechanisms which select frorn cultural panerns, to culture
primarily as a rnechanism for institutional regulation and control. He
paid precious linle attention to the interna1 codes and narratives of
culture itself. Culture rnust be understood as socially relevant not in
spite of, but because of its broadly coded and narrative form. It
produces a "surplus of meaning" (Ricoeur 1977) in every action and
institution, a surplus that creates tension and distance with every
institutionalized and concrete a ~ t . ~

Civil Society
This new thinking about action and culture has certain implications
for analyzing social systems and their parts. Rather than trying to
trace these implications in a general way throughout the various
institutional domains, 1 will concentrate here on the civil sphere, the
world of "civil society" that has become perhaps the rnost widely
discussed social phenomenon in recent years (e.g., Cohen and Arato
1992, Calhoun 1992).
If one looks at the microtheories of the second wave of postwar the-
orizing from a macrosociological point of view, one can see that these
descriptions of the concrete forms of interaction suggest an informal
social order, one that is not dominated by large-scale, coercive struc-
tures but constructed through various forms of communication and
reciprocity. Rational choice theorists emphasized competition in a
manner that suggested equilibrium could be reached despite inequal-
ities of power. Blumer (cf. Sciulli 1988) suggested that actors succeed
222 Afrer Neofunctionalism

in constructing coherent lines of conduct linking self and other.

Goffman described actors' herculean efforts to present themselves as
behaving decorously, despite his frequent emphasis on their hidden
motives for domination and success, and he described the various
forms of deference and impersonal yet constraining forms of solidar-
ity upon which behavior in public depends and produces in turn.
Garfinkel put interpersonal trust at the center of understanding,
explaining that actors rnust postulate the existence of consensual
rules and shased values even without any hard evidence that they
actually exist. This postulate, and the forrns of interaction it induces,
enhances the likelihood that such informal trusting mechanisms
actually will emerge.
However, when the innovators of the third phase of postwar theor-
izing - the new theoretical rnovernent in sociology - incorporated the
insights of microtheory, they paid alrnost no attention to this vision
of an informally regulated, "civil" society that underlay its work.
They incorporated its descriptive rnodels of how concrete actors rnake
reference to one another and to themselves, and built upon these
"mechanismsn to develop rnacrosociological theories that emphasized
cornrnunication, typification, self-reference, exchange, and the necessity
for continuious action through space and time. But they ignored the
larger sense of society that such processes had implied, which pointed
to the authenticity of the moral order and to its resiliency as a resource
for informal rnodes of social control. In Bourdieu's work, for exarnple,
habitually regulated life is manipulated by class and field dornination
and converted into strategic interactions through which actors seek
to maxirnize capitals of various kinds. Haberrnas uses speech act
theory and lebenswelt rnodels of shared experience and interaction
largely to construct normative alternatives to contemporary societies,
not to describe processes within them; within the contemporary world,
indeed, Habermas insists on the pulverization of informal relation-
ships and trust by the "colonizingn systems of politics and money.I0
Giddens describes a late modern world in which risk and danger
are pararnount, in which the self is continuously threatened with
extinction, in which trust has alrnost completely broken down. Collins'
world is one of competition and conflict, where ernotion and moral-
ity are exchanged through rituals that tend to reinforce hierarchies of
money, prestige, and social power.
What these intellectuals in the new theoretical rnovement have
done is to synthesize microsociological models of interaction with the
conflict-oriented structuralisrn that forrned the other side of theorizing
in the second period of postwar work. Because they draw their map
of the macro order from the materialist threads of Weberian and
neo-Marxist theory, they employ a cartography of large processes
that fails to explore the worlds of self, motivated choice, trust,
normativity, and informal mechanisms of social control. It was this
failure that Alvin Gouldner sharply criticized toward the end of his
life. In The Coming Crisis, his radical denunciation of micro and
macro forms of American sociology, Gouldner (1970) had himself
emphasized coercive institutional power and class manipulation. After
struggling with the deterministic and authoritarian tendencies that
emerged in macrosociology over the next decade, however, Gouldner
evidently began to change his mind. In the afterword to The Two
Marxisms, he (1980) praised the subjective and local emphases of
traditionally American forms of microsociology, arguing that they
pointed to an understanding of a civil society outside the market and
the state that structural theories ignored, not only to their scientific
disadvantage but to their moral peril. Gouldner (1979) even gave a
passing nod to the moral and normative macrosociological emphasis
of Parsons himself, in the eulogy after Parsons' death that barely
preceded his own.
For it was, in fact, exactly this kind of emphasis that had informed
Parsons' theory of the macro order. Precisely because of the analytic
nature of his theorizing, Parsons never lost sight of the manner in
which larger structural processes were embedded in subjective expecta-
tions and informal, cultural forms of social control. With his three-
system model, Parsons could argue that normative references and the
subjective, responsible self were "always there"; with his theory of
institutionalization, he could point to the existence of values that gen-
erated trust and respect within organizations; with his emphasis on
normative and voluntary order, he could highlight the consensual and
reciprocal elements in contemporary social life. In the last 15 years
of Parsons' career, these general orientations ideas took their most
interesting macrosociological form. Building upon Weber's under-
standing of legally regulated, universalistic communites, Durkheim's
vision of organic solidarity, T. H. Marshall's model of citizenship,
and most importantly perhaps his own sense and sympathy for the
voluntaristic bases of American democracy, Parsons began to theorize
about an intermediate realm of subjectivity he called the societal
community. The latter, arguably, represented the most important
contribution to macrosociology that Parsons ever made. It adds a
fourth "spheren to the traditionally two or three part divisions of
224 After Neofunctionalism

other macro models, pointing to a world that possesses the subjectiv-

ity of the lifeworld but, at the same time, the abstraaion of more highly
rationalized systemic spheres. At once a sphere of individual recog-
nition and a world of integration, the societal community provides
the sense of "peoplehold" that Parsons insisted was an important
component of citizenship. On this basis, he identified "inclusion" as
the fundamental, secular tendency of the contemporary world.
Yet this concept of societal community emerged only in Parsons'
later period, when his sensitivity to strain and contradiction, and the
critica1 character of his liberalism, had al1 but disappeared; when the
endemic tendencies of his theorizing to exagerate stability and integra-
tion were at their most pronounced; and when his substantive sociolo-
gical ideas were coming more and more to be expressed in formalistic
terms. These tendencies, particularly in the face of the radical con-
flicts over normativity and power that emerged during the period,
had the effect of virtually burying the significance of this Parsonsian
notion of societal community. For microtheorists, the voluntaristic
character of the larger society was an implication they never thought
to connect with an emphasis in Parsons' work, and Parsons himself
never suggested any links benveen his own concept of societal com-
munity and their more actor-centered views. For the macrotheorists
of that second phase, Parsons' emphasis on this sphere was rejected
out of hand. In light of these earlier dynamics, it is not surprising
that recognition of the vitality of an intermediate sphere of subjectiv-
ity and morality plays so little role in the synthetic theorizing that
followed in the third phase.
In the last decade, however, the need for just this kind of thinking
about an intermediate sphere has seemed particularly urgent. New
kinds of self-regulating social movements emerged in the struggle
against authoritarian regimes, fighting successful revolutions not for
socialism but for democracy, solidarity, and the independence of the
private world of individual rights. These political practices revived
the eighteenth century concept of civil society, first among the activists
themselves, later among political philosophers and social scientists.
Concerns with a sociological approach to publicness, trust, solidarity,
and responsibility began to assume center stage.
1 am not the first theorist (see Cohen and h a t o 1992 and Mayhew
1990) to observe that Parsons' earlier approach to societal commun-
ity helps clarify this newly emerging concept of civil society, which
remains confused and even mysterious despite the enormous debate
that has mushroomed in the 1990s. With this concept, Parsons tried to
 After Neofunctionalism 225

explain how a sphere of solidarity can, in fact, be differentiated frorn

both rnarket and state as well as from more specifically ideational
and emotional spheres like religion, science, and the family. 1 have
been fundamentally influenced by Parsons' general orientation to these
problems in the work on civil society in which 1 am currently engaged
(e.g., Alexander 1991, 1992c, 1996, 1997a, 1997b, Alexander and
Srnith 1993). At the same time, there are serious problerns in Parsons'
understanding of the societal community, problems that neofunctional-
ism has long pointed to but which it is now possible, and necessary,
to explore in a more critica1 and systernatic way. These problems
begin with the weaknesses 1 have identified in Parsons' cultural theory.
These are related, in turn, to Parsons' underemphasis on the strains
between societal comrnunity and the other social spheres, and to his
failure to understand the importance of the interactional leve1 of civil
society, rnuch less its psychology, in their concrete forms.
The very possibility of institutionalizing a societal community de-
pends upon the valuing of universalism. For Parsons, this means
choosing the universalistic rather than particularist side of the
pattern-variable dichotomy that regulates role relationships; this is
the specifically "cultural" dimension at stake. Institutionalizing univer-
salism in this way also implies that normative control of power and
interest is established through patterns of legal control. These cultural
choices and new modes of control are possible, Parsons believes,
because there has ernerged in most modern societies a very high degree
of value generalization: the growing abstraction of Durkheim's col-
lective conscience, the rnovement away from the detailed symbolic
structuring of individual and group activities toward tules that create
generalized guidelines for highly different kinds of concrete acts. In
the legal order of the societal community this suggests an increasing
role for procedural norms. Particular identities and the contents of
various claims are not considered as such; rather, organizations and
authorities are mandated to consider al1 actors and ciaims in exactly
the same way, no matter what their particular point of view.
Parsons' confidence in the possibility of this kind of institutionaliza-
tion of universal forms of life was reinforced by his insight into how
the spread of mass education affected socialization." Parsons described
the "educational revolutionn as a kind of practica1 Enlightenment.
This understanding, however, had the unintended effect of legitirnat-
ing Parsons' anti-"linguisticn view of meaning in the modern era, for
it suggested that the mythical and arbitrary elements in the syrnbolic
motivations of adults were in the process of disappearing. As Parsons'
226 After Neofunctionalism

saw it, the pre-adult tirning of primary socialization ensured that

modern citizenship values would have an a priori status; at the same
time, the increasing length of the educational period of socialization
has put into place a developmental process that increasingly decenters
cognition, emotion, and morality, allowing them to become more
"rational." Such highly educated and reflexive actors, according to
Parsons, form the universalistic basis for the contemporary expan-
sion of tolerance and inclusion. Controlling aggressive psychological
impulses and regulating conflictual interaction, the increasingly uans-
parent norms of educated persons ensure that contemporary institu-
tions will respond not in closed but in open ways. Exclusion will
become a relic of early stages in social development. Ascription and
particularism, with their antimodern implications, are becoming things
of the past.
If, however, socially relevant patterns of culture cannot be con-
sidered merely, or even primarily, as "values" that are specified and
selected according to specialized exigencies and systemic needs, then
the culture of civil society simply cannot be abstracted and generalized
in the way Parsons believed. Certainly one can say that more univer-
salizing cultural referentes gradually have emerged, but this universal-
ism is expressed as much, if not more, by new code and narrative
configurations - what 1 have called the "discourse of civil society" -
than by the omnipresence of abstract rules. The interna1 syrnbolic
structure of these patterns, moreover, makes it impossible to conceive
of universalism as if it meant simply the putting into place of norms
of fairness or procedural legal rules. In fact, the discourse of civil
society can never be institutionalized as such, and it is for this very
reason that it provides such a reflexive, often liberating mirror for the
restrictions and abuses of civil and noncivil society.12
It is not only the transcendental and free-floating nature of univer-
salism that creates new tensions, however, but the binary nature of
symbolic classification itself. Universalism is not a choice that can
exclude particularism from social life; it is a coded definition of
categories of motives, relations, and institutions which take their
meaning only in relation to what are conceived to be their opposites,
that is, in relation to categories of "excluded" and "particularistic."
The sacralized symbolic categories that construct universalism, in
other words, can be defined only by publically contrasting them with
the profane motives, relations, and institutions that characterize other
kinds of individuals, institutions, and groups. It is for this reason that
the excluded "other" always stands side-by-side with those who are
 Afier Neofunctionalism 227

included in the civil sphere. Educationally generated reflexivity can

never stand entirely outside these arbitrary elements in understanding;
they are inherent in the very process of meaning-making itself.
If such a "strong" cultural theory can highlight the tensions in
civil society that escaped Parsons' more abstracted and denatured
approach to reason, a more concrete approach to subsystems, to inter-
action, and to psychological motivation allows our understanding to
be deepened in similar ways. The most debilitating problem in Parsons'
approach
- - to the relation between institutional subsystems was his
identification of empirical, concrete differentiation with the analytical
separations of his conceptual ("AGILn) scheme. Parsons believed not
only that interchange between subsystems was necessary because they
had become gradually differentiated and separated from one another,
but that in modern societies these interchanges would tend to be
symmetrical, reciprocal, and mutually fulfilling. Just as the societal
community would be facilitated by the emergence of more univer-
salistic culture, it would be supp&ed by industrialization and the
market economy, by cross-cutting ethnic obligations, by political
federalism, by religious denominationalism, and by gendered role
divisions in family life.
This confidence in institutional reciprocity derives, at least in part,
from Parsons' insistence on institutionalization in his approach to cul-
ture, for it suggests that universalism typically will play a regulating
role. Yet, just as the discourse of civil society is at once utopian and
destabilizing, promoting demands for inclusion even while identify-
ing those who "should ben excluded, so do the boundary relations
of civil society operate in a paradoxical way. Certainly civil society
receives facilitating inputs from institutions outside of it, but it is
subject to destructive intrusions at the same time. The divisive classes
generated by economic life, the oligarchies generated by political and
organizational power, the gender and age hierarchies of families, the
demonology frequently legitimated by religious institutions, and the
ethnic, regional, and racial dominations so often generated by the very
construction of national civil states - such intrusions fragment and
split civil society even while its very existence promises participation
and restoration of the social whole (see Alexander 1997b).
A more concrete, empirical approach to action contributes further
to this process of creating a new theory of civil society. It points, for
example, to the irnportance of face-to-face interaction. Not only do
such Goffmanian ideas as "civil inattentionn and "face work" become
crucial elements of the democratic social fabric, but phenomena such
228 After Neofunctionalisrn

as "turn-taking," highlighted in ethnomethodological studies of con-

versation, come t o be seen in a more historical and macrosociological
light. Simmel's understanding of exchange and conflict as forms of
integration, Mead's understanding of how the generalized other allows
spontaneous cooperation, and Boudon's insistance that actors seem
always compelled to offer "good reasons" can now be understood as
important descriptions of the distinctively interactional leve1 of a civil
order. Such a concrete approach t o agency also points t o the role that
social movements play in allowing the contours of civil society to be
constructed and reconstructed in response to the tensions generated
by the discursive strains, institutional conflicts, and the psychological
and interactional dynamics of everyday life.
1 have argued here both for the fundamental importance of Parsons'
analytic approach to synthetic social theory and, at the same time,
for the urgent necessity of going beyond it. Two revolutions have trans-
formed contemporary social theory since the 1960s, neither of which
penetrated Parsons' most basic understandings. Microsociological the-
ories explored the concrete nature of action and interaction; culturalist
theories opened up the model of culture-as-language and allowed a
more concrete focus on the actual patterning of discourse in texts
and speech. The analytic emphasis of Parsons' three-system model
calls for critica] revisions in these approaches, but they, in turn,
demand a fundamental rethinking of his. 1 have explored some of the
institutional ramifications of these new ways of thinking in my discus-
sion of civil society, which also suggests that institutional subsystems
most be understood in a much less equilibrating way.
These brief discussions can perhaps be seen as a prolegomena for
a new form of synthetic social theory. Hegel believed that in order
to truly surpass something one must include it in some new form.
1 am pointing to a new wave of theory creation that goes beyond
the important achievements of neofunctionalism. If it eventually
succeeds in doing so, a principal reason will be that it has come after
neofunctionalism, not before.

Notes
1 Pierre Bourdieu manages to accomplish al1 chree of these reductionist
moves at the same (cf. Alexander 1995).
2 In his own recent effort to rethink the micro-macro link - which
he describes as "the articulation between institutional and figurational
structuresn - Mouzelis (1995, p. 7) makes a roughly similar complaint.
Arguing that "we must relate what is happening in theoretical sociology
 After Neofunctionalism 229

today to the Parsonian 'constitutive' contribution," he suggests that

"one can maintain that most current tendencies fail to appropriate cre-
atively what is positive and useful in Parsons' oeuvre."
3 1 draw here upon Alexander 1992a and Alexander 1993, which them-
selves develop ideas from Alexander 1987.
4 It is in response not only to increasingly powerful criticisms from fem-
inist, communitarian, and Hegelian philosophers, and to developments
in the work of his own followers, like Benhabib and Honneth, but in
response to his long encounter with the cultural writings of Parsons and
Weber that Habermas has come to acknowledge, in his most recent
writings, that actors entering into Kant's "moral" sphere - Habermas's
rationalized lifeworld of the public - can do so only on the basis of
needs and identities formed in the "ethical," particularist world Hegel
called the Sittlichkeit. As he remarks in his response to a critica1 collec-
tion responding to the English publication of his early work on the pub-
lic sphere, "1 think that 1 have in the meantime also changed my own
framework so that the permanent autonomy of cultural developments is
taken more accurrently into accountn (Habermas 1992b, p. 464). In
articulating this new approach, Habermas makes precisely the cultural
argument for an analytic understanding of action 1 am calling for here.
The social integrative power of communicative action is first of al1
located in those particularized forms of life and lifeworlds that are
intertwined with concrete traditions and interest constellations in
the "ethical" sphere (Sittlichkeit), to use Hegel's terms. . ..A public
sphere that functions politically requires more than the institu-
tional guarantees of the constitutional state; it also needs the
supportive spirit of cultural traditions and patterns of socialization,
of the political culture, of a populace accustomed to freedom.
(Ibid., pp. 444, 453)
This acknowledgment of the interna1 environments of publically ori-
ented action would entail a far-reaching reconstruction of Habermas's
discourse-ethics approach to the nature of collective order in democratic
societies. It points to the necessity of going beyond abstracted univer-
salism and procedural minimalism to some substantive understanding
of how the universalism can be grounded in thick cultural traditions.
1 discuss this in my discussion of civil society below.
5 For an insightful statement of this position, specifically in regard to the
relationship between network theory and cultural sociology, see Emirbayer
and Goodwin (1994). See also the forceful earlier argument of Kane
(1990).
6 For criticism of the Birmingham School from this point of view, see
Sherwood et al. (1993); for a discussion of the work of Archer and
Swidler, as well as Robert Wuthnow, from this point of view, see also
Rambo and Chan (1990).
230 After Neofunctionalism

7 In his laudable effort to insert creativity into the core of action theory,
Joas (1996) fails to conceptualize typification as a simultaneous dimen-
sion of action, one that unfolds alongside of invention and strategization.
8 Parsons' (1968) later critica1 response to Geertz's essay, "Religion as a
Cultural System," is similarly revealing in this regard.
9 This is precisely Eisenstadt's point, of course, in his insistance on the
centrality of strain and tension in axial age civilizations (cf. Alexander
1992b). It is because of this recognition of surplus meaning that Eisenstadt
turns institutionalization theory on its head, suggesting that institutional-
ization actually produces tensions rather than resolving them. For a sim-
ilar insistence on the manner in which cultural norms allow an experience
of transcendence that facilitates antiinstitutional action, see Dubet (1994).
10 This problem is only partially mitigated in Habermas's (1996) most
recent work on law. While notably conceptualizing law as, indeed, an
institutionalized moral sphere partially independent of economy and
state, this work still fails to grapple sufficiently with the non-formal,
symbolic discourses of the civil sphere, the existence of which Habermas
has gestured to in the writings 1 discussed in note 5.
11 See Turner's (1993) probing essay, which places Parsons' theory of the
educational revolution into contemporary debates about social change.
12 In this regard, 1 would take issue with the anticultural thrust of David
Sciulli's (1992) theory of societal constitution, which in other respects
represents a high water mark of neofunctionalist work. Sciulli believes
that the independent power of a civil sphere - which he links particu-
larly to the institutional autonomy of the legal domain - is compromised
if actors are described as linking social justice and equality to particular
kinds of cultural ideals. Justice can only have a formal, procedural base.
In my view, by contrast, institutional processes will always remain linked
with, though not of course reducible to, particular kinds of symbolic
codes and narratives. Thus, whereas Sciulli criticizes Parsons for dwelling
in the 1950s on socialization, values, and family psychological dynamics,
1 would criticise him for not pursuing these interests thoroughly enough.
This anticultural notion that fairness and inclusion can only proceed
on procedural grounds results in part from Sciulli's encounter with
Habermas, whose work on discourse ethics and legal proceduralism has
provided the most sustained exemplar for such a position. It is a posi-
tion that also negatively affects the theory of civil society offered by
Cohen and h a t o (cf. Alexander 1994).

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