The Concept of Role and Human Behaviour

Abstract

Publisher Summary The concept of role is to provide a key to understand the ways in which a person's behavior and identity are related to the culture to which he belongs. And accordingly, roles provide the most important of the links between sociology and social psychology. Role theory does constitute an important advance over associationist or behaviorist accounts of the socializing process. The use of the concept of role by social scientists—and connected concepts, such as role-internalization, role-expectation, etc.—seems to be drawn in two different directions. On the one hand, roles will be regarded as assignments—that is, as something that a person can be given by others, and that he may or may not accept. On the other hand, roles will be regarded as affectations—that is, as ways in which persons present themselves, and which others may or may not credit. The issue concerning the relation between roles and behavior are altogether different, depending on which of these notions one has in mind.