1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias A cultural system is the interaction of different elements in culture.
In an article, late in life, Parsons maintained that the term "functionalism" was an inappropriate characterization of his theory.
Archer reads this same myth through Pitirim Sorokin's influence and then Talcott Parsons' approach to cultural systems (2004:3).
Basic to these mistaken conceptions was the idea of culture as a community of meanings, which function independently in motivating social behavior.
This combined two independent factors, community and meanings which can be investigated quasi-independently (2004:4) Archer, a proponent of critical realism, suggests that cultural factors can be objectively studied for the degree of compatibility (and that various aspects of cultural systems may be found to contradict each other in meaning and use).