ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the interaction of the social and psychodynamic problems, and their simultaneous solution by the formula that “role” provides self-consciousness. One of the more popular lines of contemporary social criticism holds that the impersonality of male career culture deadens the inner world of working men. The culture of careers suggests something of a solution, at least for the social problem. Men who face these contradictory social demands — that they be both collegial and dispassionate — often describe their sense of “acting in role.” That is, they reveal something of their personal lives, but only to the degree that the job requires. The chapter shows the conceptual limits of a particular interpretive perspective — classic role theory — which for the moment may appear to us not an interpretive perspective at all.
