Editing Talcott Parsons (section)

===Criticism of Riesman===
Parsons and Winston White cowrote an article, "The Link Between Character and Society", which was published in 1961.<ref>Talcott Parsons and Winston White, "The Link Between Character and Society." In Seymour Martin Lipset and [[Leo Lowenthal]] (ed.) ''Culture and Social Character.'' New York: The Free Press, 1961. Also reprinted in Talcott Parsons, ''Social Structure and Personality.'' New York: [[Free Press (publisher)|The Free Press]], 1964.</ref> It was a critical discussion of [[David Riesman]]'s ''[[The Lonely Crowd]],''<ref>David Riesman, [[Nathan Glazer]] and [[Reuel Denney]], ''The Lonely Crowd.'' New Haven: [[Yale University Press]], 1950.</ref> which had been published a decade earlier and had turned into an unexpected bestseller, reaching 1 million sold copies in 1977. Riesman was a prominent member of the American academic left, influenced by [[Erich Fromm]] and the [[Frankfurt School]]. In reality, Riesman's book was an academic attempt to give credit to the concept of "[[mass society]]" and especially to the idea of an America suffocated in [[social conformity]]. Riesman had essentially argued that at the emerging of highly advanced [[capitalism]], the America basic value system and its socializing roles had changed from an "inner-directed" toward an "other-directed" pattern of value-orientation.

Parsons and White challenged Riesman's idea and argued that there had been no change away from an inner-directed personality structure. The said that Riesman's "other-directness" looked like a caricature of [[Charles Cooley]]'s [[looking-glass self]],<ref>Charles H. Cooley, ''Human Nature and the Social Order.'' New York: Scribner's, 1902. pp. 183–184.</ref> and they argued that the framework of "[[New institutional economics|institutional individualism]]" as the basic code-structure of America's normative system had essentially not changed. What had happened, however, was that the industrialized process and its increased pattern of societal differentiation had changed the family's generalized symbolic function in society and had allowed for a greater permissiveness in the way the child related to its parents. Parsons and White argued that was not the prelude to greater "otherdirectness" but a more complicated way by which inner-directed pattern situated itself in the social environment.