Role Theory

Role theory analyzes social behavior in terms of roles, the patterns of expected behavior that attach to a particular social position, or status, within a group or society. The anthropologist Ralph Linton set out an influential early version of the framework in his 1936 book The Study of Man, distinguishing a status, a person's position within a social structure, from a role, the behavior expected of whoever occupies that status, and arguing that individuals typically hold many statuses and enact many roles across the course of a single day. Later sociologists, including Talcott Parsons, incorporated role theory into structural-functionalist accounts of how social order is maintained, treating socialization into roles as the mechanism by which individuals learn to meet the expectations attached to their positions in the family, workplace and wider society. The framework also produced widely used concepts describing strain within it: role conflict, where the expectations of two different roles a person holds pull in incompatible directions, and role strain, where the multiple expectations attached to a single role are themselves difficult to satisfy simultaneously. Robert K. Merton later added the related idea of a role set, the full array of role relationships that come attached to a single status. Role theory remains a standard way of describing how social structure shapes individual behavior through the expectations built into social positions.