(a) Critically analyse Parsons views on society as a social system. (20 marks) (b) Discuss how 'environmentalism' can be…

(a) Parsons: society as a social system Parsons' views:

• In The Social System (1951) he treats society as a system of interrelated parts in which actors' roles, institutionalised norms and shared values hold the whole together. The social system is one of four interdependent action systems (cultural, social, personality, behavioural organism), and society is the social system with the highest self-sufficiency (Societies, 1966).
• Functional prerequisites (AGIL): adaptation (economy), goal attainment (polity), integration (law, community and norms) and latency or pattern maintenance (family, education, religion). Generalised media (money, power, influence and value-commitments) regulate exchanges between these subsystems.
• Order rests on value consensus, institutionalisation and the internalisation of norms through socialisation, backed by social control; pattern variables (universalism-particularism, achievement-ascription and others) describe role orientations.
• Change is gradual and evolutionary, through differentiation and adaptive upgrading.

Critical analysis:

• Strengths: it shows the interdependence of institutions, links personality, culture and social structure, and AGIL is a useful heuristic; his later evolutionary work addresses change (neofunctionalism, Alexander).
• Overemphasis on consensus and equilibrium makes it weak on conflict, power and change (Mills, Dahrendorf). Lockwood distinguishes social integration from system integration to show that systems can contain contradictions.
• It is seen as conservative, giving legitimacy to the existing order (Gouldner, 1970).
• Actors are "oversocialised" (Wrong, 1961); agency, interpretation and negotiation are neglected (interactionists, Garfinkel).
• It is abstract, teleological and hard to test, a "grand theory" (Mills, 1959); Merton preferred theories of the middle range.
• Its evolutionary scheme is Western-centric, and in plural societies such as India, with caste and communal cleavages, the assumption of shared value consensus is hard to sustain.

(b) Environmentalism and the new social movements approach The NSM approach (Touraine, Melucci, Habermas, Offe, Inglehart) holds that in post-industrial societies conflict shifts from distribution to quality of life, identity and control over culture and knowledge. Movements draw on the new middle class and marginal groups, are loosely networked, act in civil society rather than seek state power, and stress post-material values.

How environmentalism fits:

• Values: Inglehart (The Silent Revolution, 1977) links environmental concern to post-material values once material security is attained.
• Habermas: environmental and other new movements resist the colonisation of the lifeworld by money and power (market and bureaucracy) and defend the grammar of forms of life.
• Touraine: conflict over who controls the direction of a programmed society; anti-nuclear and ecological protests challenge technocratic decisions.
• Melucci: movements are networks that challenge dominant cultural codes; Offe: they "bypass" the state.
• Beck (Risk Society, 1986) and Giddens (life politics): hazards of industrial modernity cut across class, and mobilisation is around risk and lifestyle.
• Form: decentralised, issue-based networks, direct action and symbols, from Greenpeace and the German Greens to Fridays for Future (2018).

Limits in India:

• Chipko (1973, Garhwal) and the Narmada Bachao Andolan (from the mid-1980s) combine identity and ecology with livelihood claims on forests and rivers, which Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997) call "environmentalism of the poor"; class and caste material interests therefore remain.
• Critics say NSMs are not wholly new and that the theory is Western-centric. Environmentalism today is also institutionalised through NGOs and bodies such as the National Green Tribunal (2010).

(c) Pressure groups in social policy formulation Pressure groups are organised groups that seek to influence policy without contesting power, through agenda-setting, drafting, lobbying, mobilisation and litigation. Examples:

• Right to information: MKSS's jan sunwais from the 1990s and the NCPRI campaign (1996) led to the Right to Information Act, 2005.
• Food and work: in the right-to-food case brought by PUCL (2001), the Supreme Court ordered cooked midday meals in government and aided primary schools. The Right to Food Campaign that grew around it pressed for the National Food Security Act, 2013 and, with other groups, for MGNREGA (now succeeded by the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025).
• Forest rights: the Campaign for Survival and Dignity pressed for the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
• Women's rights: after the Vishaka petition by women's groups (1997), Supreme Court guidelines led to the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013.

Their influence is limited by unequal resources and elite capture.