Parody

provide the understanding needed to undergird policy recommendations. The signal accomplishment of his career was initiating and overseeing the single largest labor market research project ever funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Longitudinal Surveys of Work Experience (NLS). It began in 1966 and has continued in modified forms into the twenty-first century. Literally thousands of scholarly articles, monographs, theses, and dissertations have been completed using what in the earliest years were known as the Parnes data. Parnes authored or coauthored more than fifty of those during his prolific career. Before that, he had published several significant works. In Research on Labor Mobility: An Appraisal of Research Findings in the United States, he synthesized everything known empirically to that point (1954) about worker mobility in American labor markets. He updated that synthesis a decade and half later in A Review of Industrial Relations Research (1970). His collaboration with other social scientists began early in exploring the economic, psychological, and sociological elements of a critical aspect of human decision-making in Occupational Choice: A Conceptual Framework (1956). This belief in the importance of multidisciplinary approaches carried over into the research team that he assembled at Ohio States Center for Human Resource Research to design and analyze the NLS data, which dismayed critics who believed it resulted in an underemphasis on economic theory. Attesting to the policy importance of the NLS-based research are many studies of race and sex discrimination in labor markets, the salient factors related to the changing labor force participation of adult women, the impacts of schooling and training on the labor market success of various age-sex groups, and the correlates of changing retirement behavior among adult American men. Critical to the ability to offer policy recommendations on these and related issues is the longitudinal and detailed microeconomic character of the data that comprise the NLS. Furthermore, the collection of data on attitudes and a variety of schooling and training experiences enable testing of hypotheses about which only speculations were possible before the NLS existed. Among the attitude measures in which Parnes had profound scholarly interest were questions designed to tap into mobility as a propensity to move (by changing employers or occupations or geographic locations) as a predictor of later actual movement. This was, in part, born of his skepticism of the standard theoretical assumption that all workers are always seeking to improve their position in the marketplace and are always searching for information to enable such improvement. Though he coauthored several published studies using the data from these questions, many opportunities to exploit them exist for newer generations of

social scientists, thus adding to Parness contribution to our understanding how people really behave in labor markets and what social policies might be invoked to improve their well-being and the effectiveness of the economy in allocating and utilizing scarce human resources.
SEE ALSO

Economics; Economics, Labor; National Longitudinal Survey of Youth; Occupational Status; Social Science; Work

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blau, Peter, John Gustad, Richard Jessor, Herbert Parnes, and Richard Wilcock. 1956. Occupational Choice: A Conceptual Framework. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 9 (4): 531543. Parnes, Herbert S. 1954. Research on Labor Mobility: An Appraisal of Research Findings in the United States. New York: Social Science Research Council. Parnes, Herbert S. 1970. Labor Force Participation and Labor Mobility. In A Review of Industrial Relations Research, vol. 1, 170. Madison, WI: Industrial Relations Research Association. Parnes, Herbert S. 1975. The National Longitudinal Surveys: New Vistas for Labor Market Research. American Economic Review 65 (2): 244249. Parnes, Herbert S., ed. 1981. Work and Retirement: A Longitudinal Study of Men. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Parnes, Herbert S. 1984. PEOPLEPower: Elements of Human Resource Policy. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Parnes, Herbert S. 2001. A Prof s Life: Its More than Teaching. San Jose, CA: Writers Showcase.

Andrew I. Kohen

PARODY
Parodic practices carry implications for the study of social institutions and cultural frameworks because, especially when allied with satiric critique, they can lead to the clearing away of older modes of thought, and the opening up of alternate paradigms of cultural understanding. Not all forms of parody accomplish this skeptical questioning, emptying out, or overturning of an official perspective; normative parodies attack dissidents and divergences from the dominant cultural ideology and enforce established values. But parodies that reverse accepted hierarchies of value can serve as indicators of or even contributors to cultural change. Parodyfrom the Greek para, beside, and odos, song or derived from another poeminvolves both the repetition and inversion of some elements of an established work or genre, usually so as to lower what has been elevated or respected. Aristophanes, the first great parodist

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in the tradition, implies conservative cultural allegiances in his comedies (written between 427 and 385 BCE), which parody the style and thought of Euripides, the last of the great Athenian tragedians, the philosopher Socrates, and the Sophists, the new, professional teachers of rhetoric. The Satyricon of Petronius (early 60s CE) probably constitutes the best example from the ancient world of the use of satiric parody to empty out established canons of value. The longest surviving episode of this novel, Trimalchios Feast, satirizes the vulgar pretensions and mangled learning of the immensely rich former slave Trimalchio. But the dinner conversation of Trimalchios guests, who are obsessed with money, mortality, and the passing of the good old days, also parodies the dinner conversation of the aristocratic Athenians in Platos dialogue, the Symposium. Contrasting the honest vulgarity and materialism of Trimalchio and his guests with the corruption and hypocrisy of the educated narrator and his friends, Petronius achieves a portrayal of the lowborn, newly rich class that is neither caricatural nor condescending, and implicitly places them on a level with Platos high-minded Greeks. In Gargantua and Pantagruel (first two books, 1532 and 1534), Franois Rabelais satirically parodies as illogical, ungainly, and repetitive the scholastic learning of the medieval universities that was authorized by the Catholic Church, and proposes by contrast the graceful, thoughtful, and persuasive eloquence of students trained in the new humanistic model of education. Where Rabelais criticizes a system buttressed by religious authority, Miguel de Cervantes, like Petronius, achieves in Don Quixote (Part 1, 1605; Part 2, 1615) a satiric critique of a previously dominant aristocratic culture, through parody of the romance epics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Cervantes adopts the episodic structure of such works and their concerns with love and adventure; however, by making Don Quixote, the reader who believes in the literal truthfulness of these romances, repeatedly collide with contemporary social reality, he suggests the inadequacy of this narrative form in the more commercial world of his own time. He thus opens up a cultural space for the development of the new genre of the modern novel. In Gullivers Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift parodies travelers tales in general and Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719) in particular to satirize the arrogance of Englishmen and of Europeans in relation to the inhabitants of other parts of the world they were encountering through their voyages of discovery, commerce, and empire. In a similar way, Ubu Roi (1896), Alfred Jarrys parody of the high genre of tragedy, and particularly of Shakespeares Macbeth, produces an acidic critique of middle-class intellectual and artistic culture that opened the way to such twentieth-century movements as dadaism and absurdism. Finally, to take a contemporary example, Thomas Pynchons novels from V.

(1963) to Mason & Dixon (1997) consist almost entirely of parodic reworkings of established genres and discoursesfrom travel guides and spy novels to captivity narrativesto suggest a radical skepticism toward received understandings of history, technology, and power in the modern world. Satiric parody has also affected cultures through popular media such as comics and television in the last halfcentury. MAD magazine made a mark in American culture during the 1950s and 1960s, puncturing pretensions by means of its irreverent parody of hit films and television shows. It was joined in doing so by a new form, the weekly satiric television news program, first with That Was The Week That Was (U.K., 1963; U.S., 19641965), then with Weekend Update (beginning in 1975 as a regular feature of Saturday Night Live). The latter lasted longer, but was more limited formally, consisting largely of comic anchors reading items based on stories in the news. The next most significant instances of parodic satire of politics and journalism in America consist of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, followed by The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert, which appear back-to-back four nights a week on Comedy Central. Stewart usually maintains a smile as he reports, often verbatim, the statements of newsmakers, spokesmen, journalists, and commentators; only occasionally does he let outrage show. By contrast, Colberts adoption of the persona of a hard-right cable talk-show host enables him to say what others find impossible to express: by zealously criticizing even the most well-grounded skepticism of government officials, their policies, and their bullying manipulation of mainstream media, he makes clear what the authorities believe but do not say, and allows the commonsense criticism to be expressed along the way. In a famously controversial argument first published in 1984, Fredric Jameson maintained that in the postmodern period parody had become divorced from satiric critique. For Jameson, all that remained of parody was pastiche, a toothless, complacently unhistorical mixing of incongruous fragments from earlier styles. A year after Jamesons essay, Linda Hutcheon by contrast argued that twentieth-century parodic forms do not possess a fixed and unfluctuating ideological persuasion: parody can be conservative or transgressive, or can even combine the two in an authorized transgression. Although, as Hutcheon and others have pointed out, the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin could be utopian in its emphasis on the possibilities for inversion and renewal through parody, most critics would agree that Bakhtins works (written from the 1930s through the 1960s) constitute the essential and seminal reflections on the renovating cultural work performed by satiric parody from the ancient world to the present.

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SEE ALSO

Satire

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, Mikhail. [19341935] 1981. Discourse in the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259422. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Frank Palmeri

PARSIMONY
SEE

Occams Razor.

PARSONS, TALCOTT
19021979
American sociologist Talcott Parsons, the youngest of five children, was born in Colorado Springs in 1902. His father was a Congregational minister, professor, and university president, and his mother was a progressive and a suffragist. Parsons completed his undergraduate studies in biology at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He also attended the London School of Economics, where he studied with Bronislaw Malinowski (18841942), inheriting his view of society as a system of interrelated parts. In 1926 Parsons attended the University of Heidelberg, where he studied the theories of Max Weber (1864 1920). He translated Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (19041905) into English in 1930. Parsons was initially an instructor of economics at Harvard University, where he was mentored by Pitirim Sorokin (18891968), then became an inaugural member of the sociology department. In 1945 Parsons established Harvards Department of Psychology and Social Relations, an interdisciplinary collaboration in the behavioral sciences and economics. He served as chair of the department until its dissolution in 1972. He continued teaching as a visiting professor upon his retirement in 1973 from Harvard. Parsons died in May 1979. Parsons was the major American social theorist until about 1969, and some claim that social theory since then has been in conversation with Parsons. Parsons attempted to develop a grand theory of society that explains all social behavior, everywhere, throughout history, and in all contexts, with a single model called structural functionalism. This approach considers values to be the core of cul-

ture, because values give meaning to what people do, direct peoples lives, and bind people together. These cultural traits thus function for the operation of society (Parsons 1966). Parsons believed that all lasting social systems strive for stability or equilibrium with a strong sense of social order and institutional interdependence. Influenced by Sigmund Freud (18561939), he was interested in how actors choose goals and means in relation to internalized norms and values, and argued for an objective external world that is understood empirically with concepts created by the ideas, beliefs, and actions of those under study. This is a modernist approach because it assumes an absolute developmental process. Parsons early theorizing on social action, influenced by Weber, focused on active, creative mental processes that have an important subjective component. In The Structure of Social Action (1937), Parsons developed his empirical approach of analysis based on observation, reasoning, and verification, and explored the difference between the concepts of behavior (a mechanical response to stimuli) and action (an inventive process and analysis of the subjective aspect of human activity) (Ritzer 2000). For Parsons, the basic unit of study is the unit act, which involves the following criteria: an actor/agent motivated to action; an end toward which action is oriented and means to reach this end; a situation where the action takes place; and norms and values that shape the choice of means to ends. Actions consist of the structures and processes from which humans are motivated to form meaningful intentions (through available goal-attaining means) that are put into practice within the social system (Parsons 1966). Parsonian action is considered from all of the following perspectives: culture (values), society (norms), personality (source of motivation), and organism (source of energy). For Parsons, people cannot choose goals and means without society in the background, and they cannot make sense of agency or action without enforced or expected social norms. This means people must have an intention and awareness of societys norms, and they cannot escape these norms. Parsons is sometimes criticized for this position because he cannot account for social change. Parsons was concerned with the integration of structure and process, and defined a social system as comprised of the interactions of many individuals within a situation, where the system itself includes commonly understood cultural norms. These cultural norms are within a system of generalized symbols and their associated meanings (Parsons 1951). These social systems have parts, or subsystems of varying complexity, that represent organizational structures. Additionally, social structures have social functions, which are the consequences of any social pattern for the operation of society as a whole. For Parsons, society is a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability (they strive for equilibrium), and

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