Abstract
Try to imagine sociology being without the role concept. The thought experiment will strike us as impossible. And yet, through the early decades of the 20th century, remarkably few sociologists thought of social agents as incumbents of social roles and as performing roles in their day to day lives. This article addresses a set of related questions. How did sociologists manage without the concept social role? How did they describe the social agent and his agency? When and in what circumstances was the term social role initially formulated and when did it enter the vocabulary of social science? Ralph Linton’s The Study of Man (1936) is identified as the key text in this history of the concept social role, foreshadowed in writings of Robert Park, E. A. Burgess, and Kimball Young. Linton introduced his role idea in the midst of disciplinary change with boundaries between sociology and psychology (particularly social, and personal, psychology) being redrawn.
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Notes
To reduce the amount of tiresome circumlocution that would otherwise ensue, ‘sociology’ and ‘social science’ are interchanged in this article as are, unless otherwise indicated, social role qua concept or idea and social role qua term or word.
Discussion in this section has been helped by Collier, Minton and Reynold’s (1991) scholarly history of American social psychology.
The Oxford English Dictionary (2015) indicates that from the 17th to the 20th centuries uses of “role” relating to social life were typically singular in form, the role of a person referring to his part or place or duty in society.
William James (1892, 143–144) had privileged “character” in writing, “Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister … You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ‘shop,’ in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds …It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.” It seems safe to say that James put greater emphasis on habit formation of properties and activities by the individual, and less on the social definition and provision of constraining types of behaviour. James’ (1892, 144) point was that to live effectively in modern society requires we incorporate as many of the “details of our daily life” as possible in “the effortless custody of automatism”. His focus was restricted to the workplace and he appeared to rule out people acquiring a new “character” from around age 30. ‘Character” was also often used by John Dewey (1922/1957, 25–54).
Earle Eubank (1931: 107) in his The Concepts of Society congratulated Park and Burgess (1921, 64–160) on having (in Eubank’s words) advanced discussion beyond “Giddings’ conception of the socius” by clarifying how a person plays a different role in each group of which he is a part. “They give the name person to that group self as indicative of the unique rôle played by the self in its particular group.” Eubank’s notion of a person’s “role” in a social group is of indefinite meaning, one possible reference being the position an agent carves out for himself in a group and another possibility being the contribution he makes to supporting the group.
Role makes one further appearance in Park and Burgess’ textbook in the title of a short subsection “The Self as the Individual’s Conception of his Role” (chapter 2, section C, subsection 3) comprising an excerpt from Alfred Binet’s Alterations of Personality (1896). Binet for his part did not use “role”.
Linton (1936, viii) made mention of Young’s works in his bibliography, and he thanked Young along with two other Wisconsin colleagues for their “constructive criticism” but surprisingly his bibliography omits to mention work by Park or Burgess.
Including “pattern” in his explanation of role and status, Linton the anthropologist was availing himself of a key term of Boasian anthropology, exemplified in the title of Ruth Benedict’s influential book of 1934 Patterns of Culture (Linton 1936, 494). Benedict’s (1934, 270) work made a feature of the “personality’ concept, Margaret Mead (1959, vii) commenting that Benedict viewed “human cultures as ‘personality writ large’”.
Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1861/1906, 82) (noted in Linton’s bibliography) argued “the movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contract” and Linton’s “ascribed status” appears to the present author as not dissimilar in its features to “status” in Maine’s book while his “achieved status” looks to have features in common with Maine’s idea, “contract”. Max Weber was another prominent user of “status” but mainly in the non-technical sense, prestige.
As Larry Nichols has reminded me, Pitirim Sorokin represents an interesting figure in relation to the argument of this article, being a sociologist who “refused to budge” as it were. His Contemporary Sociological Theories of 1928 cited “personality” but not “role”. Twenty years on, his Society, Culture and Personality (1947) had personality among its dominant, explicit concerns whereas the interested reader may find, as the present author has found, only two instances of “role” appearing in this book of over 700 pages, being pages 89 (where “role” is mentioned once as a synonym of “function”) and 716 (where the term “socio-cultural roles” appears once only). At age 58, coming towards the end of his academic career, Sorokin, whether from obduracy, conviction or a bit of both, was not about to include role as part of any conceptual “retooling”.
A very different stance to Sorokin’s was adopted by Parsons and Shils in their essay, “Values, Motives, and Systems of Action”, forming the second part of their edited work, Toward a General Theory of Action (1951). In a text that looks backwards and forwards, they provide extensive analysis of personality together with considerable discussion of role.
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The author has incurred several debts in producing this article: to Professor Larry Nichols for erudite guidance on improving the penultimate draft; to Deakin University’s library staff for obtaining me copies of a number of works that were essential to my researching the topic, and to Dr. Tony Reid and Kerry Cardell for their constructive criticism of earlier drafts.
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Jacobs, S. How Role Replaced Personality as a Major Category of Sociology. Am Soc 49, 280–298 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-017-9354-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-017-9354-0