Social Roles
A cheat-sheet of the roles people hold in society, kept for other entries to point to. In role theory, a role is the set of expectations a society attaches to a position, not a trait of the person. The theory maps the slots, not the people in them. What pulls a person toward a slot, and who ends up filling it, is partly evolved and partly temperament, as Tooby and Domain-Specific Models cover. Everyone holds several at once. The five domains below are my own grouping of the standard list, and the refinements are the field’s own terms.
Five domains
Each domain is defined by the institution that hands out the role and enforces it.
| Domain |
Roles |
How assigned |
Who enforces |
| Kin |
child, sibling, partner, parent, elder |
at birth, later partly by choice |
the family |
| Work |
worker, provider, apprentice, colleague, boss, professional |
by effort and choice |
the employer and the trade |
| Civic |
citizen, neighbor, taxpayer, voter, juror, soldier |
by birthplace or residence |
the state |
| Associational |
friend, member, congregant, volunteer, fan, regular |
by choice, and freely left |
the group, through loyalty only |
| Transactional |
customer, client, patient, student, guest, passenger |
for the length of the exchange |
the counterpart |
- A kin role can last a lifetime, and it is the first one anybody holds.
- A work role is the one that answers “what do you do?” in a market society.
- A civic role carries duties the state defines and can compel.
- An associational role carries the weakest sanctions, so it rests on loyalty.
- A transactional role is always paired with its complement: seller, provider, doctor, teacher, host, driver.
Refinements
- Ascribed versus achieved. Ralph Linton drew the line in 1936. An ascribed role comes from birth or circumstance: sex, age, kin, nationality. An achieved role comes from effort or choice: occupation, membership, parenthood. Most roles mix both over a life.
- Roles come in pairs. There is no parent without a child, no teacher without a student, no seller without a buyer. A role is a relationship, not a trait, though temperament steers who takes which role. That is the main difference from the mythic archetypes: a Warrior stands alone, but a soldier needs a state.
- Role set. Robert K. Merton’s term for the cluster of relationships one position carries. A teacher deals with students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and the school board, each with its own expectations.
- Master status. The one role that overrides the rest in how others see you, a term from Everett Hughes. Doctor, celebrity, convict, and disability all work as a master status. Race and gender often act as one whether the person wants that or not.
- Role conflict versus role strain. Conflict is between two roles, such as parent and worker pulling in opposite directions. Strain is inside one role, such as a manager who must both support and evaluate the same person.
- Life-course roles. Child, student, worker, parent, retiree, elder. Societies mark each transition with a rite of passage. The transition is where the old script stops working and the new one is not yet learned.
- Gender roles. A cross-cutting ascribed layer that changes the expected script inside every other domain. Wikipedia covers the research under gender role.
- Front stage and back stage. Erving Goffman described roles as performances for an audience, dropped in private. Role distance is the visible signal that someone is playing a role without owning it.
- Deviant and marginal roles. Simmel’s stranger is near the group but not of it. Talcott Parsons’s sick role excuses the sick person from normal duties and obliges them to seek help and try to recover. Labeling theory adds that being called deviant is itself a role assignment, and one that tends to stick.
Mythic roles versus social roles
The Sage, the Warrior, and the Peacemaker of myth map onto social roles, but loosely. The Sage is the teacher or expert, a work role. The Warrior is the soldier or police officer, a civic role. Peacemaking is usually a function inside another role rather than a role of its own: elders, parents, judges, and diplomats all do it. The standalone version appears only when a society formalizes it, as mediator or ombudsman. The oldest mythic set, sovereign and priest, warrior, and producer, is the trifunctional division Georges Dumézil found across Indo-European societies.
A role is held, not owned. Reflexivity is the ability to see and change one’s own roles, and Hold Your Identity Lightly makes the same case for labels.
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