Encounters

reading “Two studies in sociology of interaction" by Erving Goffman

Role Distance is displayed in connection with roles one does not take seriously, or one finds it unwise to embrace.

A role that some persons take seriously most of their lives may be one that others will never take seriously at any age; The participation with a group of one's similars can lend strength to the show of role distance and to one's willingness to express it.

Using example of surgeon, the explicit instrumental role sometimes shifts to implicit new role assignment. Situated roles that place an individual in an occupational setting he feels is beneath him are bound to give rise to much role distance.

Role distance provides a sociological means of dealing with one type of divergence between obligation and actual performance.

1). Distance is not introduced on an individual basis but can be predicted on the ground of performer's gross age sex characteristics; Role distance is a part of typical role.

2). The means for expressing this disaffection must be carved out of the standard materials available in the situation.

The social setting provides the individual with trappings of a social role. A set of visible qualifications and known certification, well designed social setting as a showplace provide the individual with something more than an opportunity to play his role self. For this scene he needs to create a clear impression of what he chooses not to lay claim to. The more extensive the trapping of a role, the more opportunity to display role distance.

Disaffiliation between oneself and his role


The function of role distance for surgery

In a surgery, to a team of different socioeconomic status, role distance is routinely expressed.


Role distance helps to protect the individual's ego, self-esteem, personality or integrity from the implications of situation. Noted that when the individual withdraws from a situated self he does not draw into some psychological world that he created himself but rather acts in the name of other socially created identity.

The situated self faces social constraints with others.

For a team of surgery to function usefully, each member must sustain his capacity as a communicator, an individual capable of giving and receiving verbal communications and their substitutes. The chief surgeon must help any one who is incompetent handling himself. The chief surgeon is likely to find himself with the situated role function of anxiety management and may find that he must draw on his own dignity in order to fulfill this function.

Given the conflict between correcting a subordinate and helping him maintain his poise, it is understandable that surgeons will employ joking means of negative sanction, grounds the sources of tension.

In addition to maintaining the capacities and poise of other members of the team, the chief surgeon has of course an obligation to maintain his own. His self control is crucial in the operation. We may find that he engages "externalization" of his feeling in order to give security and confidence to other members of team, to distract concerns and to provide constant stimulus to team member's attentiveness and task engagement

The discuss of the special responsibilities of the chief surgeon and his frequent need to draw on informality in order to meet these responsibilities implies that superordinate present may have some special reasons for exhibiting role distance.

There are connected relations between role distance and social ranking.

Formalities of a role "status quo" provide one authority and social distance. It is often to the advantage of the subordinate to decrease distance from the superordinate and to the advantage of the latter to sustain or increase it.

Finally, the individual must be seen as someone who organizes his expressive situational behaviour in relation to situated activity role, but that in doing this he uses whatever means are at hand to introduce a margin of freedom and maneuverability, of pointed disidentification

SO when we talk about the individual exerts role distance, that means the injected identification will be more or less in opposition to the one available in the situated role. Role distance is an extreme instance of expressions, as long as the dominion of the situated role is not challenged, other role identities, can be sustained too.