Blackwell Reference Online

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Role-taking refers to social interaction in which people adopt and act out a particular social role. If, adapting Shakespeare, society is a stage, then people may be thought of as social actors performing roles, each the other's fellow player. Rendered more clinically, and following Ralph H. Turner, role-taking is a process of anticipating and viewing behavior as motivated by an imputed social role. From the child playing at being “a mother” to the adult playing at being “a police officer,” role-taking is a ubiquitous feature of social life. This initial definition belies, however, considerable theoretical and, even more so, empirical complexity. The original impetus to conceive role-taking as an elementary feature of social life is found in the pragmatist social psychology of George Herbert Mead. In Mead's view, society is best understood not as any sort of organic or mechanical object but as an open-ended symbolic universe created and recreated through ongoing, emergent, and ultimately indeterminate symbolic interaction. This constantly (even though usually subtly) changing symbolic universe mediates all major facets of human experience, as in the title of his most famous collection of lectures, Mind, Self, and Society (1934). For Mead, the process of “taking the role of the other” is, however, no simple process. From one perspective, Mead theorizes the growing complexity of ... log in or subscribe to read full text