Roles and networks

One of the most important aspects of networks is that of roles.





Roles have been widely discussed from a number of points of view over time. One that some people go to right aways is roles as attributes of an individual with a psychoanalytic basis. For instance, roles as archetypes, like "the warrior" and so on. In this theory, to understand ourselves we need to know the roles that are fundamental to our character. The notion of role that we take (network folks) is almost the opposite. We take the position that there are countless roles in society and that they exist whether we occupy them or not.





When you first meet someone, or anytime you are interacting with you, what are they interacting with? Are they interacting with you lips? Your immortal soul? Your mind? Specific neural patterns in your brain?





Depending on your beliefs and the level of analysis, possibly all of the above, but if you meet someone new and you ask yourself what type of a person you are meeting, a story about them will come to mine. As Gladwell points out in "Blink" the decisions we make about others are instant and unconscious. A more practical way of thinking about it is that somehow you create a story about that person and they about you.





So, what are the elements of that story? Where do the stories come from? Could you tell your story to someone else, in other words say it in language? Probably you could. That presupposes that they have a shared understanding of what is possible. The stories don't come from nowhere, they are given to us by the communities in which we are involved. Our mothers, your friends, the social world around us. We are born into stories and explanations.



One thing that "exists" in the world outside of us is "roles." It is easy to see that the authority of, say a police officer, is not because of the individual that has the role, but the social weight of the role. Anyone who is a police officer can arrest people, carry a gun and so on. There are more or less sensible ways of talking to a police officer and a police officer is trained in having the bearing of a police officer.



Suppose someone wants to be an accountant. He or she goes to school and learns to do what accountants do. Though there can be some creativity, the domain is small. And an account needs to have the kind of office an accountant has appointed with the appropriate equipment and furniture. The accountant needs to wear the appropriate clothes, drive the appropriate car and have the appropriate friends. Society has many ways of letting us know when we are not following the rules. If you ask the accountant "what are you?" He or she might answer "an accountant." But, what part of that did he or she have any choice in?



Of course, few of us have a single role. We surely are sons or daughters, we may be parents, golfers, leaders, social icebreakers, and countless other roles. These roles to some extent have to be agreed on by others. We fill the roles, we cannot make them on our own. We can move from role to role, but the roles will exist even if we do not fill them.



Later on I will talk about more subtle aspects of roles. The subtely has to do with multiple networks. The role of a father might be seen differently in different networks. But that will come in a later entry. What I want to emphasize here is that when we interact with each other, we are, to some degree interaction with a socially influenced expectations by both parties. You can think of highly formal diplomatic situation where both parties are the roles and every word spoken is scripted to be the words of a prime minister or president. We hope that a judge will act in his or her role, not from his or her feelings about a situation. It is not difficult to see that roles strongly influence the way we are seen and the way we act.



So the idea is: what if we could know people's roles we could know a lot about how they will act.