Role

A role (from the French rôle, and sometimes so spelt in English) or social role is a set of connected behaviours, rights and obligations as conceptualised by actors in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behaviour and may have a given individual social status or social position. It is vital to both functionalist and interactionist understandings of society. Social role posits the following about social behaviour:

  1. The division of labour in society takes the form of the interaction among heterogeneous specialised positions, we call roles.
  2. Social roles included appropriate and permitted forms of behaviour, guided by social norms, which are commonly known and hence determine the expectations for appropriate behaviour in these roles.
  3. Roles are occupied by individuals, who are called actors.
  4. When individuals approve of a social role (i.e., they consider the role legitimate and constructive), they will incur costs to conform to role norms, and will also incur costs to punish those who violate role norms.
  5. Changed conditions can render a social role outdated or illegitimate, in which case social pressures are likely to lead to role change.
  6. The anticipation of rewards and punishments, as well as the satisfaction of behaving prosocially, account for why agents conform to role requirements.

Read more about Role:  Determinants and Characteristics of Social Role, Role Theory, Role Conflict and Role Confusion, Role Enhancement, Documenting Roles

Famous quotes containing the word role:

    “Man, truly the animal that talks, is the only one that needs conversations to propagate its species.... In love conversations play an almost greater role than anything else. Love is the most talkative of all feelings and consists to a great extent completely of talkativeness.”
    —Robert Musil (1880–1942)

    “The role of the intelligence—that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions—is merely to submit.”
    —Simone Weil (1909–1943)

    “Where we come from in America no longer signifies—it’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
    The irony of the role of women in my business, and in so many other places, too, was that while we began by demanding that we be allowed to mimic the ways of men, we wound up knowing we would have to change those ways. Not only because those ways were not like ours, but because they simply did not work.”
    —Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)