ROLE DISTANCING

Role Theory, Role Playing, Reflexive Role-Taking, Role Strain

Role distancing is a concept from dramaturgical sociology.

The act of presenting your 'self' as being removed or at a distance from the role you are being required to play.

For example, by keeping your eyes open when asked to pray or say grace, you communicate to the group that you are making no commitment to the role. 

Role Distancing and Role Conflict
Unlike a stage play, we do not define roles. We negotiate social roles.

Role Distancing: When an individual disagrees with the expectations associated with a particular role, the individual may try to de-emphasize the importance of that role. Irving Goffman calls this "role distancing." Role distancing is the act of separating oneself from the role. For example, the actor may only play the role in a tongue and cheek fashion.

Role Conflict: Some roles that have to be played contradict other important roles. Here the individual does not know what is expected. We call this "role conflict."

Role distancing: Differentiating the role of the elderly from the person 
Elderly participants in an extended care class at a senior citizen''s center were observed to determine if some of them could continually distance themselves from the client role. Although earlier research suggests that people can use role distancing techniques to disassociate themselves successfully fromoccasionally played roles or certain aspects of a role, it is unclear whether or how people successfully disassociate themselvescontinually from enacted roles. Using a symbolic interactionist''s definition of role, this paper attempts to 1) classify the circumstances which give rise to both occasional and continual role distancing; 2) specify the conditions under which disassociation from continually enacted roles may be successful; and 3) suggest the relevance of the data to studies on low-status occupations, deviance, and role theory. - springerlink.com/content/l3348635j2075718/ - Journal Qualitative Sociology, Issue Volume 7, Number 3 / September, 1984 - Marnie L. Sayles, Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii-Hilo, 96720 Hilo, Hawaii 

Selection, socialization, and mutual adaption: Resolving discrepancies between people and work
Norbert Semmer, University of Bern, Switzerland
Urs Schallberger, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Extract: In Applied Psychology: An International Review, 45, 263-288. Special Issue: "Work and Personality", edited by Nigel Nicholson (1996)
The most extreme way of role-distancing is to deny the role, for instance, when it is stigmatized. Thus, in a recent Swiss study with people who were unemployed after graduating from teacherīs college, Truniger (1991) found a pronounced tendency to distance oneself from "the unemployed", to paint oneself as atypical, as "not really unemployed" etc. and to emphasize, instead, the differences between oneself and "the unemployed".
From this perspective it also seems plausible that one of the factors that might mitigate the effects of unemployment (and other low status or stigmatized roles) would be the availability of an "alternative role" that one could identify with, such as the role of the "retired" or of the "housewive", both of which have been found to be beneficial (Frese & Mohr, 1987; Mohr, 1993; Warr, 1987). In a similar vein, one might "redefine" or "re-label" oneīs role, as when an unskilled handy-man identifies with his prestigious company ("I am a Daimler-Benz man"), with a proud profession ("I am an automobile worker"), a trade union, and the like (see Brown, 1988; Dubin, Hedley, & Taveggia, 1976). One migh even "take advantage of the disadvantage" by changing the stigma "from a drawback to an asset" (Crocker & Major, 1989, 622), for instance, by taking pride in dealing with work that others see as dirty (Meara, 1974), or by defining oneself as a member of "the disadvantaged", "the exploited", as "one of those who lost their jobs after more than 30 years of hard and dedicated work", and the like.
This, of course, leads to the question of how far one can go in distancing him- or herself from a role one is holding on a quite permanent basis. One the one hand, role-distancing often is a defensive strategy that may be associated with poor well-being (Kahn, 1990; Semmer, in press). On the other hand, there are work roles which make it difficult to distance oneself from it because high commitment and involvement are part of their definition. Work roles with a high degree of responsibility as well as status are a good example. You cannot be company president and keep declaring that the things going on in this company have really nothing to do with you!

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