Neofuctionalism and After

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Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published December 1997, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 1557866309

Neofunctionalism has been described as one of only a small handful of new theoretical movements that have emerged over the last decade in sociology. Developing simultaneously in Germany and the United States, it has involved at once a sharply revived interest in the mode of theorizing associated with Talcott Parsons and a self-conscious distancing from the particular manner in which Parsons himself practiced it. For this reason, the emergence of neofunctionalism in the l980s can be seen as part of the new wave of synthetic theorizing that displaced earlier mappings of sociology as revolving around issues of conflict versus order, structure versus agency, exchange versus normativity.

In l983, Jeffrey C. Alexander published what was immediately recognized as a major revisionist work of Parsons's scholarship, and in l985 he coined the term "neofunctionalism." This groundbreaking work became the focal point for a small but influential group of American sociologists working self-consciously in a "neo-functionalist" tradition. Along with the writings of Luhmann and Munch, Alexander's work also played an influential role in emerging new strands of German sociological theory.

Bringing together for the first time all of Alexander's writings on neofunctionalism, the present volume also contains two chapters written especially for this publication. The first, "From Functionalism to Neofunctionalism: Creating a Position in the Field of Social Theory," is an autobiographical reconstruction of the origins of this movement. The other, "Action, Culture, and Civil Society," is an ambitious theoretical argument in which Alexander asserts that the internal contradictions of neofunctionalism inevitably lead to a new movement of theoretical reconstruction that goes beyond it.

Contents

Part I: Origins of a Theoretical Project:
1. From Functionalism to Neofunctionalism: Creating a Position in the Field of Social Theory.
2. Traditions and Competition: Preface to a Postpositivist Approach to Knowledge Cumulation.
Part II: Reinventing Parsons/Reconstructing His Tradition:
3. Neofunctionalism Today: Reconstructing a Theoretical Tradition.
4. Parsons's Structure in American Sociology.
5. Formal Sociology Is not Multidimensional: Breaking the Code in Parsons's Fragment on Simmel.
6. On Choosing Ones Intellectual Predecessors: Why Charles Camic is Wrong About Parsons's Early Work.
7. Structure, Value, Action: What Did the Early Parsons Mean and What Should He Have Said, Instead?
Part III: After Neofunctionalism: Its Contribution to Theory Creation Today:
8. The New Theoretical Movement.
9. Action, Culture and Civil Society.