an impulse toward social integration configured as shared social outlook. Many different individual outlooks may be resolved in what is experienced as an ordered or "structured" system.
Social systems . . . are systems of motivated action organized about the relations of actors to each other; personalities are systems of motivated action organized about the living organism . . . Cultural systems . . . are systems of symbolic patterns . . . created or manifested by individual actors and . . . transmitted among social systems by diffusion and among personalities by learning (Parsons & Shils, 1990, p. 39).
Parsons and Shils observe that analysis of cultural systems is essential to the theory of action:
because systems of value standards. . . and other patterns of culture, when institutionalized in social systems and internalized in personality systems, guide the actor with respect to both the orientation to ends and the normative regulation of means and of expressive activities, whenever the need-dispositions of the actor allow choices in these matters" (Parsons & Shils, 1990, p. 40).
One cultural system may be dominant, even in a pluralist society. In a society that suppresses pluralism or contingency in favor of authoritative certainty and control of all aspects of society, the analysis by Parsons and Shils is even more instructive. Groups and persons, they explain, "are, to an important degree, themselves a product of the cultural system prevailing in the action system" (Parsons & Shils, 1990, p. 43). As the experience of predictable, stable, consistent social order becomes possible, function and action overtake symbol: "there is a tendency of systems of action to build up and maintain levels of consistency as high as the exigencies of action will permit" (Parsons & Shils, 1990, p. 44).
The analyses of both Weber and Parsons and Shils provide a basis for looking at the phenomenon of the alienation of fundamentalist Islam...