The Nature of Roles

Sociologists took the notion of role from the theater. It is an analogy suggested by William Shakespeare in As You Like It (Act II, Scene 7):

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances:

And one man in his time plays many parts.

Actors perform their roles according to a script (which is analogous to culture), what the other actors say and do, and the reactions of the audience. But the theater analogy also has its limitations. Whereas the theater is a world of make-believe, in life our parts are real. And as we go about our daily activities, we are seldom aware of following a script. Moreover, in life we do a good deal of improvising; we continually test and revamp our action according to what other people say and do.

Roles allow us to formulate our behavior mentally so that we can shape our actions in appropriate ways. We collect the details of an unfolding situation and identify who does what, when, and where. By means of roles, we order our social world into types or categories of people. We assume that we can ignore personal differences and for practical purposes treat the members of a given category as interchangeable. For example, every American “knows” that a physician is “a person who treats sick people” and a carpenter is “a person who uses lumber to build houses.” Roles allow us to collapse or telescope a range of behaviors into manageable bundles. They are the primary link between a society’s institutional arrangements and the private experiences of its members – the link between macrosociology and microsociology.

A role is the expected behavior we associate with a status. Role performance is the actual behavior of the person who occupies a status. In real life a gap often exists between what people should do and what they actually do. And people vary in how they carry out the rights and duties associated with their roles. We are not carbon copies of one another. You take such differences into account when you select one professor over another for a course. One professor may have the reputation for coming late to class, lecturing in an informal manner, and assigning difficult term papers. Another professor may be a distinguished authority in the field, monitor class attendance, and assign take-home examinations. Regardless of which professor you select, you will still occupy the status of student and play its associated role. However, you will have to modify your behavior depending upon your selection. In sum, everyone’s role performance is unique; it is not usually reproduced or re-created by another.

Role Set

A single status may have multiple roles attached to it, constituting a role set. Consider the status of a patient in a hospital. The status involves the sick role; another role as the peer of other patients; still another role as the “appreciative” recipient of the gifts and attentions of friends and family members; one role as a consumer of newspapers, magazines, and other small items purchased from a hospital attendant; and a role as acquaintance of a number of friendly hospital personnel. Or consider your status as a family member. Your status includes a variety of roles, for example, parent and/or child, grandparent and/or grandchild, sibling, nephew/niece, uncle/aunt, spouse, and cousin. Clearly, role does not exist in a social vacuum; it is a bundle of activities that mesh with the activities of other people. For this reason there can be no professors without students, no husbands without wives, no whites without nonwhites, and no lawyers without clients.

Roles affect us as sets of norms that define our duties – the actions others can legitimately insist that we perform, and our rights – the actions we can legitimately insist that others perform. Every role has at least one reciprocal role attached to it; the rights of one role are the duties of the other role. As we have noted, we have a social niche for the sick. Sick people have rights – our society says they do not have to function in usual ways until they get well. But sick people also have the duty to get well and “not enjoy themselves too much.” Anything less is frowned upon as “malingering”. The sick role also entails an appeal to another party – the physician. The physician must perceive the patient as trying to get well – this is the physician’s right and the patient’s duty. And the patient must see the doctor as sincere and not as a quack or a money-gouger – the patient’s right and the physician’s duty. It should come as no surprise that the quality of medical care falters when patient and physician role expectations break down.

One way that people are linked in groups is through networks of reciprocal roles. Role relationships tie us to one another because the rights of one end of the relationship are the duties of the other. Groups consist of intricate complexes of interlocking roles, which their members sustain in the course of interacting. People experience these stable relationships as social structure – a hospital, a college, a family, a gang, an army, and so on.