In Davis's memoirs, after this story, he went on to outline the basic Parsonian career counseling process (Parsons, 1909), although he did not know that at that time: He wrote that Professor Thurber (a) "helped me know myself" (self-knowledge), (b) "opened my eyes to the possible fields" (gather occupational information), and (c) "made certain that I had made my own choice" (i.

Mouzels (1995) argued that Parsonian theory, while providing a conceptual framework for the study of cultural, social, and personality systems, overemphasized "systemness" or determinacy at the expense of agency on both the macro and micro levels of analysis.

Although not an uncontested view,3 its ascendancy meant that pre-1970s social theory was dominated by Parsonian structural functionalism: a perspective, informed by biological discourse, of society as a (social) system, with a bias towards nomothetic and natural scientific methodologies.