Blog 10- Talcott Parsons

Last week in class, we talked about Talcott Parsons. The main thing that we talked about was how he categorized interactions. One of the set of categorizes that he made was pattern variables. Pattern variables mean the expectations and structures that happen throughout a span of different relationships.

Here are a few examples of the 5 pattern variables he mentions.

-Affectivity – affective neutrality is the amount of emotion that happens in an interaction. For instance, I experience more emotion in my roommates’ relationship than I would with the cashier at Walmart. I give my roommates hugs and spend a lot of time with them. The interaction with the cashier would be pretty close to no emotion at all, any more emotion shared than that it would get uncomfortable.

-Achievement-ascription is the process of how we obtain different statuses. Achievement is where we have earned the status and ascribed status is where society gives us our status. For an example, my achieved status is student with a great GPA and my ascribed status is 21 year-old white female.

I think the pattern variables are really interesting, but I think that it almost puts interactions in a box and there is no deviance from those 5 ways to interact.

I took this picture of the internet and I think this is a good example of ascribed status. This is a picture from a German newspaper from 1929, Der Stürmer. People of that time would just label people as a Jew without even trying to include any other attribute of theirs. They would then use that label to add to what their status was. They would use words like “crook” and say they stole money from the rest of Germany. This example shows the power of what an ascribed status can do to a group of people.