Embracing the Role

Some roles we put on and take off like clothing; they have little impact upon our attitudes and personalities. Other roles we fully embrace; the role becomes deeply merged with our sense of who and what we are. We literally become the person of the role.

THINKING THROUGH THE ISSUES

Examine a recurrent source of friction in your relationship with a parent or employer. Does role conflict underlie some of the difficulties?

• Are you confronted with contradictory expectations because you must play two or more conflicting roles simultaneously?

• Do some of the expectations associated with one role in a role set conflict with the expectations of another role in the same role set?

• Do you find that some of the demands of the role are incompatible with one or more of your personality characteristics?

• Are some of the role expectations so ill defined that you do not know what is expected of you?

• Do you disagree with the other person as to what the rights and duties of the role or in what ways the rights and duties should be performed?

Having identified various sources of role conflict in your relationship, what actions might you take to reduce each difficulty?

Why do the statuses we occupy and the roles we play have major consequences for our personality? For one thing, we determine who and what we are primarily in a social context. As we will see, we discover ourselves in our own actions and in the actions of others toward us. So the statuses we occupy and the roles we play tell us about ourselves. Moreover, as we discuss later in the chapter, we embrace many of our roles. Identify a major role that you play that has important consequences for your personality. What are some of these consequences

Statuses

In conversations we use the word “status” to refer to a person's rank in wealth, prestige, and power. However socialists employ the term somewhat differently. They use status to mean a position – an “empty slot” – in a social structure. It is by means of statuses that we locate one another in social life. Student, professor, dean, secretary, academic counselor, coach, and football player are statuses in the social structure of a college. Other everyday examples of statuses include priest, friend, supervisor, male, child, customer, mother, and convict.

The Nature of Statuses

Statuses are marvelous human inventions that enable us to get along with one another and to determine where we “fit” the society. As we go about our everyday lives, we mentally attempt to place people in terms of their statuses. For example, we must judge whether the person in the library is a patron or a librarian, whether the telephone caller is a friend or a salesperson, whether the gregarious person at the party is a bartender or a guest, whether the intruder on our property is a thief or a meter reader, and so on. Much of social interaction consist of identifying and selecting among appropriate statuses and allowing other people to assume their statuses in relation to us. This means that we fit our actions to those of other people based on a constant moral process of appraisal and interpretation.

A status has been compared to ready-made clothes (Newcomb, 1950). Within certain limits, the prospective buyer can choose style and fabric. But the American is not free to choose the costume of a Chinese peasant or that of a Hindu prince. We must choose from among the clothing presented in the society. Furthermore, our choice is limited to a size that will fit, as well as by our pocketbook. Having made the choice within these limits, we can have certain alterations made, but apart from minor modifications, we tend to be limited to that retailers have to their racks. Statuses too come ready made, and the range of choice among them is limited. Societies commonly limit the competition for statuses by sex, age, and social affiliations. For instance, realistically, not every American can be elected president; women, blacks, and members of lower classes suffer severe handicaps from the outset.