Roles and role-programs

Our general aim is to contribute to a sociological understanding of roles through an analysis o f how persons produce on particular occasions the patterned actions characteristic of the roles they occupy. The key concept is that of a role-program a system of rules by which each role occupant produces appropriately organized sequences of action in relation to current conditions. This concept is not introduced merely as a mode of verbal interpretation, to be justified on the grounds of its intuitive plausibility. Rather, our approach presumes that an essential aspect of the development and justification of such a concept must be the development of representational techniques by means of which the implied analysis of particular empirical cases can be given formal expression. For this purpose we make use of representational methods developed in information science and notably exemplified in Newell and Simon's (1972) major work on human problem solving. An acceptance of the need for adequate representation is not hitherto very evident in the sociological discussion and analysis of roles. In its absence the force of various proposals and objections is hard to assess. The use of the term role follows at least three partly conflicting conceptual traditions. In the first it is linked with the notion of prevailing expectations relating to the behavior of an individual. As Gross et al. (1958, p. 67) have defined it, "a role is a set of expectations applied to an incumbent of a particular posit ion," while an expectation is "an evaluative standard" applied to an incumbent. The evaluative standard may apply to the attributes or qualities manifested by the incumbent