Quality and Quantity, 14 (1980) 547-583 547 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam Printed in The Netherlands ROLES AND ROLE-PROGRAMS NICK AXTEN Gabbs Hill, St. Maughans, Monmouth, Wales, U.K. JOHN SKVORETZ University of South Carolina, Columbia, U.S.A. Introduction Our general aim is to contribute to a sociological understanding of roles through an analysis of how persons produce on particular occa- sions the patterned actions characteristic of the roles they occupy. The key concept is that of a role-program - a system of rules by which each role occupant produces appropriately organized sequences of action in relation to current conditions. This concept is not introduced merely as a mode of verbal interpretation, to be justified on the grounds of its intuitive plausibility. Rather, our approach presumes that an essential aspect of the development and justification of such a concept must be the development of representational techniques by means of which the implied analysis of particular empirical cases can be given formal expression. For this purpose we make use of represen- tational methods developed in information science and notably exem- plified in Newell and Simon's (1972) major work on human problem solving. An acceptance of the need for adequate representation is not hith- erto very evident in the sociological discussion and analysis of roles. In its absence the force of various proposals and objections is hard to assess. The use of the term role follows at least three partly conflicting conceptual traditions. In the first it is linked with the notion of prevail- ing expectations relating to the behavior of an individual. As Gross et al. (1958, p. 67) have defined it, "a role is a set of expectations applied to an incumbent of a particular position," while an expectation is "an evaluative standard" applied to an incumbent. The evaluative standard may apply to the attributes or qualities manifested by the incumbent 0033-5177/80/0000-0000/$02.25 9 1980 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company