Social Types: Process and Structure

Abstract

COMPARATIVELY f ew of the hundreds of social types in American culture have received much attention and their general part in modern social systems has not been made clear. These collective concepts have a function in role-definition and the organization of the self, for example, and hence are an important link between the person and the system. Their significance, if anything, is growing as our society becomes more mobile and anonymous, for it is more important to place people we do not know very well. The number of roles in modern systems is greater, and the individual has more choices and discriminations to make. Versatility in role playing is also probably greater, if we can judge by such things as the development of human relations techniques and training. So we must know many roles in order to be adjusteded and must be critics, if not connoisseurs, of social types in order to distinguish real from phony roleplaying. Social types, as I shall try to suggest, are consensual concepts of roles that have not been fully codified and rationalized, which help us to find our way about in the social system. To put it another way, they are a chart to role-structures otherwise largely invisible and submerged. The purpose of this paper is to try to show how the typing process serves the system and what aspects of structure are especially well reflected in social types. The following discussion considers four key structuralfunctional aspects of social types. First, they make for finer discrimination of roles than the formal I structure recognizes. Between knowing a person's formal status only and knowing him intimately there is a kind of knowledge that fills in. For example, bankers may be hard-headed but Mr. X is a good Joe. This information can be quickly transmitted and serves to orient a person, say a loan-seeker, more effectively in the social structure. The social type 2 iS his substitute for really knowing the person he deals with-and often not a poor substitute at that. Since any formal structure labels and recognizes only a limited number of roles, it is left to social typing to specify much of the informal structure and special