ВЕСТНИК КазНПУ им. Абая, серия «Социологические и политические науки», №3 (75), 2021 г. 9
- Adaptation (A) - behavioral subsystem.
- Goal achievement (G) - personal subsystem.
- Integration (I) - social subsystem.
- Latency (L) - cultural subsystem.
This four-functional paradigm (AGIL) serves as an explanatory a diagram for all levels of social
action, from each person individually to the whole society as a whole. This multifunctional
generalization has both its strengths and weaknesses.
The strength lies not only in the fundamental unity, but also in the orderly nature of its structure;
all four of its elements make up a square as the most stable of the simple forms; and in general the
Latin word quadro means "to put things in order." This regulatory and stable principle fully
corresponded to the general trend of the socio-cultural evolution of American society, which entered
the stage of post-crisis stabilization in the mid-1930s, which later developed into mature modernity,
more precisely, into mature liberalization.
It is not completely clear how the methodological synthesis in the form of a four-functional
paradigm arose in Parsons's mind. There are indications that it stems from the social-behaviourist
scheme of the “four desires” or needs by W. Thomas: the need for security, new experience,
recognition, and emotional response [6].
When comparing the positions of P. Sorokin and T. Parsons, it becomes obvious that they formed
an opinion from the opinion that a person as an active subject of action, firstly, focuses on interaction
as a generic model of sociocultural phenomena, and the second - on the concept of interaction,
structure and functions of each item. The sociocultural approach contains an analysis of functions and
structures, and structural functionalism includes culture as one of the most important structures
(although its functions are more local). Thus, they act as specific forms of the systemic approach,
showing the features of social (sociocultural) objects, but the sociocultural approach is more general,
and in this sense it is closer to the systemic approach, and structural functionalism is closer to the
systematic one. Analysis because it focuses on clearly distinguishing and measuring the functions
and structures of the objects of interest.
Contrasted with structural functionalism, a sociocultural approach that has no fundamental
difficulties in taking into account and interpreting changes in the objects under study. We can say that
at the initial stage it includes the principle of change: sociocultural dynamics is rightfully considered
the central theme in the work of P. Sorokin. In his works, it takes on the form of cyclicality, excluding
the universality of progress. In response to criticism, T. Parsons, at a later stage of his work, made an
unsuccessful attempt to adapt structural functionalism to interpret the evolutionary transformations
of various societies. To substantiate the direction of social evolution, some non-evolutionists classify
sociocultural as biocultural and describe the mechanism of sociocultural evolution by analogy with
the Darwinian model of random change and selection [7].
However, nowadays, the theory of self-organization (synergetics) is of much greater significance
for understanding sociocultural evolution. Close attention seems to be the systematic nature of self-
organization processes in complex systems of different nature, including sociocultural ones. Synergetics
makes it possible to describe and explain the processes of functioning and transformation of a crisis
society. In particular, when analyzing the problem of choosing the vector of motion of the transformed
face, its change from one orbit of evolution to a fundamentally different one. The peculiarity of
sociocultural systems "choose" their spheres, the rules of this choice require careful research.
All these and some other aspects of the sociocultural approach help to assess it as a necessary
level of concretization of the universal principle of evolutionism. “Universal evolutionism is just a
complex of the idea of evolution with the ideas of a systems approach. In this context, universal
evolutionism not only increases development in all spheres of being (establishing a universal
connection between inanimate, living and social matter), but passes the limitations of the
phenomenological description of development, combining such a description with the ideas and
methods of systematic analysis".