Social Roles and the Split of the ego agens in Multiple Personalities

CARLOS BELVEDERE

Constanza

Conferencia; 4th. Conference of The International Alfred Schutz Circle for Phenomenology and Interpretive Social Science ?Knowledge, Nescience and the (New) Media?; 2018

The International Alfred Schutz Circle for Phenomenology and Interpretive Social Science

The problematic of social roles interested Alfred Schutz in a continuous way throughout his American period. Despite being prolonged and fruitful, the attention that Schutz gives to this problem is non-specific. That is to say that we do not have a text of his dedicated exclusively to the elucidation of the concept of role. His considerations in this regard take place in the context of larger issues and for whose clarification this notion plays a relevant role.The non-specific character of Schutz's considerations about social roles and the various issues with which it relates requires an explicit and systematic treatment. With that aim, I will delimit and systematize this series of scattered (though enriching) reflections on social roles.Schutz?s conception of social roles starts withe the hypothesis of the schizophrenic ego as a partition into multiple social personalities. This ego, which is a pragmatic unification, decides what factors of its personality must operate in a certain area of the social world and, therefore, what role it will assume as well as its location in a more or less central stratum of his personality.Each social personality corresponds to a specific type of area of the social world, which is lived by who assumes a role from a central position. In relation to it, social personalities are peripheral manifestations of the core or heart of the person, that is, of the self. Thus, the split in partial personalities of an actor is counterbalanced by the unifying conscience of the individual, who sees himself in all his sequential and substantially differentiated participations, and feels in everyday life as the center of the social world of its unconnected situational experiences.In terms of this relationship with the self, the roles imply a self-typification on the part of who assumes them; it is him who typifies -up to a certain point- his own situation in the social world and the relations he has with his peers and with cultural objects.The ability to self-typify originates in a particularity of the spiritual subject, consisting in the emergence of the apperception of the self, in which the ego is at the same time subject and ?object?: on the one hand, it is the self that is conscious of be a self; on the other, it is the person constituted by and for this self.By virtue of this capacity, the individual can choose the attitude to adopt towards the role that he fulfills in the group. From this perspective, roles are attitudes that we assume voluntarily in everyday life as resources that we can use. According to the definition that the individual has of his situation, the roles of his multiple memberships will be experienced as a set of self-typifications arranged in a private order of dominions of a changing character.However, the role and role expectations that the ego agens considers elements of his network of typifications, were formed mostly by others and accepted as such by the group to which he belongs, so that the individual defines his role through a system of typifications and relevancias which he shares with the others.It is precisely the acceptance of a common system of relevances that leads the members of a group to a homogenous self-typification; who, in addition, in order to find their position in the group must know the typical behaviors, actions and motives that can be expected from others according to the role they play. At the same time, learning the typical social roles and behavioral expectations typical of those who assume them is something necessary to play a proper role and to show due behavior in order to obtain approval, since the other members of the in-group expect that who assumes a role acts in the typical manner that has been defined for that role. So, a social role entails a set of expectations that the person who assumes it must fulfill.Role expectations consist of typifications of interaction patterns that are socially approved ways of solving typical problems that are often institutionalized and, therefore, are ordered in domains of relevance that have a particular order originating in the relative natural conception of the world held by the group.