What is a role? Types of roles

The concept of role, that is, what is the role, is very broad. It can be used in various spheres, hence, in different meanings.

Terminology

The role can be determined in various ways.

• As a measure of significance. First of all, the term is defined as the degree and extent of influence. In this sense, they perceive this term, asking what role any phenomenon / event / specific person plays, etc.
• As a behavioral model . This is what determines how you need to behave. It establishes and regulates special social norms. The role must be correlated with rights and responsibilities. It is also assigned to the status and is its dynamic characteristic.
• Like the behavior itself. Another definition is the expected behavior of a person, depending on his social position.
• How to function. The offshoot of the term is role functioning, which is yet another definition.

• As a social position . The social position, established by relative standards and including the rights and duties of the person who occupies this position, is also an answer to the question of what a role is.

Social role

The term social role is most widely used in two sciences: directly in sociology and, moreover, in social psychology. But what is a social role? It is closely related to the status of the individual in society. Most often it is defined as a pattern of behavior. Among the tasks is to establish the interaction of different statuses in the society.

The term is borrowed from the theater, in which the distinction between the concepts "actor-role" is especially sharply emphasized. What is the role in the theater - the simplest explanation and one of the most visible. That is why it is used as an example.

The question of what a social role is, always stands apart from other types of roles, for several reasons. First of all, it is not difficult to see that the first definition is the sharpest differs from the other four. It is a classic, what is a role, a definition. This means that categories such as syntactic or role in databases are repulsed from it. But the category under consideration in the presented context is the quintessence of the remaining four definitions, closely related to patterns, behavior, models in society, as a dynamic structure.

Professional role as a subspecies of social

Classification of social roles implies a division into conventional and informal. And in the first and second cases, the synonym for the term in question is the "template". The difference is just how strict the framework is. For example, conventional roles are always clearer, more stable, common in all requirements, but informal ones still allow one to take into account what kind of person they are performing.

Professional role refers to conventional. That is, to the question of what a professional role is, one can safely answer that it is primarily a social one. However, in this term is laid not only the template of the employee's actions, but also his rights and responsibilities, competences, on the basis of which, his influence is determined in the company in which he works, and in the professional sphere.

Political role as a follower of the "status-template" system

Political science, like sociology, is a social science. That is why, despite the fact that they concentrate their attention on different subjects and objects of research, the interrelation between them is great. The political role is not a subspecies of the social, it does not fall under the above classification, since, in essence, it directly relates to a separate science. And yet, when talking about what a political role is, one can not help recalling the system of "status-pattern" that operates in society. The society as a static structure reflects the status, as dynamic - the role. The same rule applies to the political structure of society.

Political roles are typical for different actors with different statuses, depending on which they perform different functions and have different public significance from one another.

A political role is expected behavior not only from the individual, but also from the group or institution. A vivid example for an obvious explanation is political parties. On the one hand, as the formation and organization they have established patterns of behavior. On the other hand, one political party may be more significant than the other or at some other time. In other words, it will have a different political role, providing for a higher measure of significance.

Role as a concept of computer science

The word "role" is also used in computer science, for example, in the field of databases and system administration. A role is called a group of privileges that have a relationship with each other and are provided to the user. Essentially, this is a method that provides convenience in regulating privileges.

Role as the term of syntax

What the word in the sentence is, what role it plays in it - that's what a syntactic role is. Different parts of speech have different meanings. Therefore, the most frequently asked question is what is the syntactic role for the noun / adjective / verb, etc. In this case, we mean the measure of the significance and influence of the word of a given part of speech in the sentence.

The term in question is determined depending on the relationship with the other members of the proposal. For example, a noun in relation to them can be subject, complement, appeal, etc.

The decisive factor of stratification

It should be noted that a role that, among other things and to a greater extent, determines the measure of significance, is one of the decisive factors of stratification. In turn, stratification is inequality. In sociology this is a stratification of society. Stratification involves a certain hierarchy. The wider the structure under consideration, the more complex it will be, having many branches.

It is from the role that the stage that the subject will occupy in this established system of relations depends. For society (the subject of sociology and political science) the highest "caste" is called the elite. In computer science and syntax, other terminology, however, it shows similar features. For example, in system administration there are users who are given all possible rights, and there are those who have limitations on some of them.

Stratification usually involves the smallest group of elites. Ideally, the mean value should be the largest, but this is not always the case. Stratification, studied by social sciences, is more dynamic than the same phenomenon in the subjects of the study of the humanities or the exact sciences.