The Origin and Maintenance of Social Roles: The Case of Sex Roles

Abstract

The concept of social role has always been troublesome and a source of controversy among sociologists and social psychologists. The standard Parsonian view is that roles are structures within a social system. They are sets of normative expectations specifying the attitudes and actions that are appropriate for actors in each role category or position (Parsons, 1951; Parsons & Shils, 1951). But, along with many psychologists, those sociologists who emphasize the constructive activities of actors find this view unsatisfactory (e.g., Goffman, 1969; Turner, 1962, 1968). The difficulty centers around the problem of providing a conceptualization that simultaneously and adequately handles social structures and processes and the individual production of action. All too often what happens is that the formulation of an answer to one side of the question necessarily makes inadequate the formulation of an answer to the other side. For example, the Parsonian emphasis on the systematic, orderly, and consensual nature of societal processes tends to make the individual a mere pawn of societal forces. Speaking of Parson’s system, Giddens (1979) puts the criticism aptly: “recogniseably human agents seem to elude the grasp of his scheme: the stage is set, the scripts written, the roles established, but the performers are curiously absent from the scene” (p. 253).