Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
LET US BEGIN with a sample of grand theory, taken from Talcott Parsons' The Social System- widely regarded as a most important book by a most eminent representative of the style.
An element of a shared symbolic system which serves as a criterion or standard for selection among the alternatives of orientation which are intrinsically open in a situation may be called a value. But from this motivational orientation aspect of the totality, of action it is, in view of the role of symbolic systems, necessary to distinguish a ‘value-orientation' aspect. This aspect concerns, not the meaning of the expected state of affairs to the actor in terms of his gratification-deprivation balance but the content of the selective standards themselves. The concept of value-orientations in this sense is thus the logical device for formulating one central aspect of the articulation of cultural traditions into the action system.