THE PROBLEM OF ROLE ANALYSIS

S.F. Nadel was an Austrian-born British anthropologist whose investigations of African

Before turning to anthropology Nadel pursued musical interests. He wrote a biography of

Nadel was a reader in anthropology at the University of Durham in England and professor of
anthropology at the University of Canberra. Apart from Nupe Religion (1954), his other
works are theoretical and reveal the influence of, among others, Malinowski, the sociologist
Max Weber, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and the psychologist Kurt Koffka.

S F Nadel role perspective

1. S. f. nadel :- The role concept is basically a type of class concept like the class

concept of logic it labels and brings together member of individual, human being in

our case in virtue of certain properties they have in common.

2. S. F. Nadel :- We arrive at the structure of society through abstracting from the

concrete population and its behaviour that pattern or network or system of relationship

obtaining between actors in their capacity of playing roles to one another.

There are 3 elements of society

a) Group of people

b) Institutionalized rules according

c) In institutionalized pattern or experience of these interaction

The institutionalized rules or patterns do not change easily and this creates
orderliness in society. These rules determine the statuses and roles of the individuals.
There is an order among these roles and statuses also which provides an ordered
arrangement of human beings.

Definitions of role

1. Hobbs and Blank :- Social roles are part and parcel of an individual behaviour when

interacting with other people in various situations. Every situation has a role
expectancy for us to fulfill.

2. S. Talcott Parsons:- The role is status translated into action, the role being the

processal aspect of status, as status is the positional aspect of the role.

Meaning of Role

The word role meant the role on which an actor’s part was written. Just as the
successful enactment of a drama depends upon how successfully the different actors
play their roles. Similarly, the smooth running of social life depends upon how
efficiency and consistently each member of different groups performs his or her role in the
social system. Thus, the role consists of behaviour excepted of an individual in
community. The task performed by an individual makes up the role he is excepted to play
in their life of his social group. A role is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations,
beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation. It is an expected or
free or continuously changing behaviour and may have a given individual social status or
social position. It is vital to both functionalist and interactionist understandings of
society. Social role posits the following about social behaviour

Characteristics of role

1. The division of labour in society takes the form of the interaction among

heterogeneous specialised positions, we call roles.

2. Social roles included appropriate and permitted forms of behaviour and actions that

recur in a group, guided by social norms, which are commonly known and hence

determine the expectations for appropriate behaviour in these roles, which further

explains the place of a person in the society

3. Roles are occupied by individuals, who are called actors

4. When individuals approve of a social role (i.e., they consider the

role legitimate and constructive), they will incur costs to conform to role norms, and

will also incur costs to punish those who violate role norms.

5. Changed conditions can render a social role outdated or illegitimate, in which case

social pressures are likely to lead to role change.

6. The anticipation of rewards and punishments, as well as the satisfaction of behaving

socially, account for why agents conform to role requirements

• S P Nadel has pointed out, its usefulness in simplest terms, lies in the fact that it

provides a concept intermediary between society and individual. It operates in that

strategic area where individual behaviour becomes social conduct and where the

qualities are inclinations distributed over population are translated into differential

attributes required by or exemplified the obtaining social norms.

• Role provides a strategic area an intermediary concept, societies rest on rules or

norms. Thus, depend Nadel calls Constancies of behaviour.

• Nadel feels that when describing structure, we abstract relational features from the

totality perceived data, ignoring all that is not in order or arrangement in brief, we

define the positions relative to one another of the component parts. Structures can be

transported irrespective of the concrete data manifesting it differently expressed, the parts

composing any structure can vary widely in their concrete character without changing

the identity of the structure.

• Nadel translated all this into the language appropriate to the analysis of society. To begin

with the societies are made up of people, societies have boundaries people either

belonging to them or not and people belong to a society in virtue of rules under which they

stand and which impose on them regular determinate ways of acting towards or in

regard to one another we usually say relationship and we indicate that they fellow from
rules

by calling them institutionalized or social relationship.

• Nadel analyzed the mutual ways of acting of individuals as relationships only when the

former exhibit some consistency and uniformity since without these attributes they would

merely be single or disjoined acts. Most relationships lack this simple relationships.

• Nadel analysis in terms of structure is incapable of presenting whole societies nor

which the same can any society be said to exhibit an embracing coherent structure as we

understand the term.

present a single structure will in fact present only a fragmentary or one sided picture.

• Nadel analysis impossible to speak social structure in the singular.

• Social structure really means have shown it to be a conceptual tool both more and less

powerful than is often assumed.

• Social structure viewed as something within the grasp of ethnographer’s account is a myth.

• It is impossible even to articulate the different sectors of social structures with one

another, at least, it cannot be done within the same logical framework using only one set of

terms.

• Final analysis, its weakness seem greatly to outweigh its strength, the greatest

weakness being its narrow compass and consequently, the fragmentation it imposes on

our universe of discourse.

According to nadel are three dichotomous to resolve:-

1. Structure as opposed to function

2. Structure as opposed to qualitative character.

3. Structure as opposed to process.

Unless we resolve these dichotomies, we are unable to give satisfactory account of

social structure. Social behaviour which is institutionalized involves relatively determinate

ways of action within and between groups over periods of time. The institutionalized

behaviour characterized by consistency of the relationships may not always be concrete

behaviour. It various in detail according to occasion and circumstances but it general

characters which allows it to be subsumed in an identical category of relationship are

clearly bound by the convention of a particular society. Therefore, the problem is find

a way of expressing the relationship between individuals acting as individuals and as

their acting as part of social network.