ABSTRACT
Robert K. Merton's work offers a conceptual framework for understanding the social-structural elements that favor modern individualism. Merton's theory of role-set offers the tools for developing a theory of individual autonomy in modern society. This chapter argues that the multiplicity of expectations faced by the modern individual, incompatible or contradictory as they may be, or rather precisely because they are, makes role articulation possible in a more self-conscious manner than if there were no such multiplicity. The "plurality" of social relations, or, as it is mostly called, the "segmentation of roles," has often been seen as a source of alienation. Social structures differ in the extent to which they encourage or discourage in their various status-occupants the use of intellectual flexibility. Merton speaks of behavioral conformity when, whatever the individuals' dispositions, they act according to normative prescriptions; and of attitudinal conformity when individuals grant legitimacy to institutional values and norms.
