A single role can contain incompatible or excessive demands, so difficulty arises from within one role rather than between roles.
Goode's 1960 argument is that role obligations routinely exceed what anyone can supply, so people are permanently engaged in bargaining over which parts to honour. The interesting move is treating this as the normal condition rather than as pathology: the question becomes how people allocate a chronically insufficient supply of role performance.
In practice
- A teacher expected to instruct, assess, supervise and safeguard is not in conflict between jobs; the job is the conflict.
- A manager told to develop staff and hit quarterly numbers has one role with two demands and time for one.
- Standing
- Distinguished from role conflict, which arises between different roles held by the same person.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change