Breaking down the question
The question has two limbs. The first — give conceptual meaning of social system — is a definitional demand: state precisely what Talcott Parsons meant by the social system, its constituent units and its place in his general theory of action.
The second limb is more testing and easily misread. It asks for the cognitive consonance between two of Parsons's own devices — the pattern variables and the paradigm (the AGIL functional scheme). Cognitive consonance here means intellectual coherence or fit: how these two conceptual tools hang together within a single, consistent theory. The examiner is checking whether the candidate can show that Parsons's apparatus is not a loose collection of typologies but an integrated system in which each part presupposes the others.
For the full conceptual background, draw on the note on Parsons' social system and pattern variables.
How to approach it
Answer the two limbs in sequence and keep them visibly connected. Begin with the social system: define it as one of the sub-systems of action, built from the interaction of actors occupying statuses and playing roles, integrated by shared values. Establish the vocabulary — actor, status-role, institutionalisation, value consensus — that the rest of the answer will use.
Then turn to the harder second limb. Explain the pattern variables as the choices that structure role expectations, and the AGIL paradigm as the four functional problems every system must solve. Demonstrate the consonance: pattern variables specify the content of the value orientations that AGIL requires each sub-system to satisfy. Close by conceding the standard criticisms so the answer does not read as uncritical exposition.
Model answer
Talcott Parsons, the leading figure of structural functionalism, made the social system the centrepiece of his general theory of action. Within that theory, human action unfolds across three interpenetrating sub-systems — the personality, the cultural and the social — and the social system is the level at which the interaction of two or more actors becomes patterned and stable.
Conceptually, a social system is a plurality of individual actors interacting with one another in a situation, whose relations are governed by a shared system of culturally structured and shared symbols — that is, by common values and norms. Its irreducible unit is not the individual as such but the status-role: the actor is located in the system by the status (position) she occupies and acts through the role (expected behaviour) attached to it. When roles and their expectations become stabilised and morally binding, they are institutionalised, and it is institutionalisation that gives the system its durability. The social system therefore rests on a fundamental postulate — value consensus — the assumption that members broadly share the standards by which conduct is judged, so that the system tends towards equilibrium and orderly self-maintenance rather than perpetual conflict.
Parsons's problem, famously posed as "how is social order possible?", is answered by showing how the actor's motivation is brought into line with the system's requirements through the internalisation of values in socialisation and their institutionalisation in roles. Two conceptual devices do the analytical work of specifying this order: the pattern variables and the functional paradigm (AGIL). The question's phrase cognitive consonance asks precisely how these two fit together.
The pattern variables. These are a set of paired, dichotomous choices that every actor must resolve — explicitly or by cultural default — before action is possible. Parsons identified four principal pairs: affectivity versus affective neutrality (immediate gratification or its deferral); specificity versus diffuseness (a narrow, defined relationship or a broad, open-ended one); universalism versus particularism (judging others by general standards or by their particular relation to us); and ascription versus achievement, sometimes rendered as quality versus performance (responding to what a person is or to what a person does). A fifth pair, self-orientation versus collectivity-orientation, was later subordinated. Together the pattern variables describe the value-orientation embedded in any role: they translate a culture's values into the concrete expectations that govern a given relationship. The doctor–patient tie, for instance, is characteristically affectively neutral, functionally specific, universalistic and achievement-based, whereas the mother–child tie is affective, diffuse, particularistic and ascriptive.
The functional paradigm. The AGIL scheme identifies four functional prerequisites that any system of action must meet to survive: Adaptation (securing resources from the environment), Goal-attainment (defining and pursuing collective goals), Integration (coordinating the parts and managing internal relations) and Latency or pattern-maintenance (sustaining and transmitting the system's values and managing tensions). In the social system these four functions are discharged by specialised sub-systems — the economy (A), the polity (G), the societal community and legal/normative institutions (I), and the institutions of socialisation and culture such as family, religion and education (L).
The consonance between them. The intellectual coherence Parsons builds is this: the AGIL paradigm tells us which functional problems a system must solve, while the pattern variables tell us what kind of value-orientation is appropriate to each solution. The two are not independent lists but two faces of one theory. Each functional sub-system tends to be characterised by a distinctive cluster of pattern-variable choices. The adaptive sub-system (the economy) is governed by universalism, achievement, specificity and affective neutrality — the orientations of impersonal, efficient exchange. The pattern-maintenance sub-system (the family) is governed by their opposites — particularism, ascription, diffuseness and affectivity — the orientations of intimate, moral solidarity. Thus the pattern variables supply the normative content of the roles through which AGIL's abstract functions are actually performed. The paradigm gives the skeleton of functional necessity; the pattern variables give the flesh of value-orientation. Their cognitive consonance lies in this mutual fit: neither is intelligible in isolation, and together they let Parsons move from the abstract question of order to a concrete map of how differentiated modern societies allocate functions and orientations to distinct institutional spheres. This same coherence underwrites his account of modernisation as a shift from the ascriptive-particularistic pole towards the universalistic-achievement pole across the system.
Parsons's synthesis has been influentially criticised. Conflict theorists such as Dahrendorf and C. Wright Mills object that the emphasis on value consensus and equilibrium obscures power, coercion and change; the scheme is charged with a conservative bias and with being an elaborate typology that describes rather than explains. Critics also note its abstraction and its difficulty in accommodating deviance and structural conflict. Yet as an architecture of concepts the fit between pattern variables and paradigm remains one of the most systematic attempts in sociology to derive social order from the interlocking of function and value.
Examiner's perspective
Because the question uses Parsons's own terms, examiners expect exact vocabulary: status-role, institutionalisation and value consensus for the social system; the four named pairs for the pattern variables; and A-G-I-L spelt out for the paradigm. Vague talk of "functions of society" without the scheme will not do.
The discriminating requirement is the second limb. Weak scripts define the two devices side by side and stop; strong scripts show the consonance — that pattern variables specify the value-orientation appropriate to each AGIL function, with a worked illustration such as economy versus family. Establishing this linkage is what the phrase cognitive consonance rewards.
A brief, accurate critique — conflict theory, the charge of conservative equilibrium — signals balance. Given thirty marks, the best answers are architecturally clear: a crisp conceptual definition, precise exposition of both devices, an explicit demonstration of their fit, and a measured critical close.