Overhead
Identities and Roles
General definition: Roles are a set of cultural expectations towards a particular position.
More detailed:
1. Roles refer to expected, rather than actual behavior.
2. Roles are normative rather than descriptive.
Sociology: role playing is preconscious automatic enactment; passive, in a stable, consensual social system.
SI: role making is a self-conscious creative process that occurs within a loose organizing framework of a role.
3. A. Role expectations are part of society’s cultural structure.
3. B. Role performance is part of society’s social structure.
4.A. Sociological: if social positions are considered with their roles we speak of role-identities (McCall & Simmons).
4.B. Social psychological: when social positions become internalized we speak of identities (Stryker).
Overhead ACT integrates three Schisms
Role Making
versus
Role Playing || Process versus Structure
|| Affect
versus
Cognition
"The
same one sided exaggerations of structure and process... characterize the
long-standing schism in symbolic interactionism itself" (p.85).
II. Process vs. Structure
III.
Cognition vs. Affect
1.
Consolidation: McCall and
Simmons, just as Stryker, include affective as well as cognitive components in
their hierarchy of role-identities.
2.
Consolidation of the Primacy Debate:
Osgood:
Cognition and affect are two aides of the same coin (sentiment).
Overhead
Burke’s Form of Identity Theory
I. Identities Are Self-meanings
II. Identities are Relational
Measurement of identities
Identities cannot be adequately measured in isolation, they must be assessed in terms of their commonalities and differences with counter identities.
III. Identities are symbolic and reflexive
IV. Identities affect Behavior indirectly
V. Identities motivate
Overhead
Alexander
& Wiley’s concept of the situated identity
Alexander, Norman C. and Mary Glenn Wiley. 1981. Situated activity and identity formation. In Rosenberg and Turner (eds.) Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives. 1992 Second Edition. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Behavior: private behavior, when we do not think someone else sees us.
Conduct is:
· “what Heider calls general readiness to perceive psychologically” (Heider 1959)”(p.273).
· “what Goffman calls an “interactional tonus.” A... disciplined management of personal front"(p.273).
· “what interactionist generally regard as “role taking”(p.273)”
Situated Identity:
“Conduct becomes situated activity when it is anchored outside the self and constrained by presumed monitoring”(p.273).
“A situational identity is a set of dispositional imputations,... dispositional refers to invariant structures and processes of the interaction of actors or objects with their environments”(p.288)
Role Analysis
How do we
define adequate Role Behavior?
1. Role theory catalogs a finite number of behavioral expectations that people expect to be fulfilled in a particular position.
=>
Inventorial Model
2. Identity
theory and ACT are generative models that choose from an infinite number of
interpersonal acts or attributions to confirm an identity.
=>
Generative Model
Appropriateness
is defined by Context
In
inventory models role expectations are restricted by limited cognitive
prescriptions that account for the context of an identity.
Because
of the infinite number and the affective nature of behaviors and attributions
ACT, like any other generative model, need contextual filters.
Here
we have to employ cognitive filters for a particular event.
1.
verbal
2.
physical
3.
primary (interpersonal like love)
4.
exchange
5.
managing (arrest, deter…)
6.
fixing (cure…)
7.
training
Disclaimer: The documents linked to other sources on the WWW, others than http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/Schneider2/ and its subdirectories, do not necessarily express the views of Texas Tech University or Dr. Andreas Schneider. @Copyright 2008 Andreas Schneider