sophical issue under debate here is, of course, that of free will versus determinism. Parsons, for the sake of making a start on a scientific sociology, was willing to create his model of ôsociological manö as having no significant free will at all, and it was on this issue that Garfinkel entered his demurrer. The issue was not whether Parsons actually thought human beings have no free will--obviously Parsons would have not thought any such thing--but whether his model was useful on the small social scales at which most human beings interact with one another.
Heritage (1984), in a section titled ôThe Problem of Reflexivity,ö discusses the problem with small-scale application of ParsonsÆ model:
[I]nsofar as the actors can and do adopt a reflexive attitude to their normative environments, they can act manipulatively in relation to them. The reflexive actor, therefore, is one for whom the normative framework is not an analytically independent element capable of autonomous causal influence and the sources of normative conformity must, of necessity, be located el
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