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92 P. F. Lazarsfeld
vasion of social influence, etc. One of these mechanisms, providing children
with higher education, has at least two consequences: it leads to better jobs as
well as to a higher chance of survival in situations of stress. Now the original
observation is not only a specific case of behaviour under stress but a specific
case of a social mechanism which accounts for the perpetuation of elite positions
over more than one generation.
The proponent of a theory of the middle range will warn us to stop here in
order to prevent the discussion from evaporating in ever higher levels of specu-
lative construction. One might, for example, begin to speculate on whether
social systems of necessity require stable and long-lasting systems of stratifica-
tion; if so, the original result would be due to a ‘law’ which applies to any so-
ciety anywhere. This, says the middle range theorist, is going to far; nothing is
really explained, and we end up where we began.
Instead of stopping with an imaginary example, we shall analyse two concrete
cases. The first is taken from Merton himself. His notion of ‘role set’ begins
with the observation that each social status involves not one single associated
role but an array of them.The teacher,for instance, has to deal with his students,
the school principal and parents. Each has a different, often contradictory, set
of expectations. ‘The concept of role set raises the general but definite problem
of identifying the social mechanisms which articulate the expectations of those
in the role set suffciently to reduce conflict for the occupant of a status.’z6
Some of these mechanisms could be as follows:
I. The members of the role set might have different degrees of power; the
teacher has to be more wary of the principal than of the other two role
partners.
2. The intensity with which the members of the role set are involved is likely to
affect the status occupant; while the children are the least powerful, the
teacher must face them every day and their reactions might guide him even
in the face of some difficulties with the other two groups in the drama.
3. Conflicting expectations may be used to play off members of the role set
against each other; thus the teacher might mobilize progressively-oriented
parents against a principal who has conservative educational ideas.
4. Insulating role activities from observation by members of the role set; a
teacher who wants to teach modem biological ideas may avoid using a
textbook in order not to arouse the moral prejudices of conservative parents.
Merton discusses quite a number of such devices which help manage concrete
situations so ‘that an appreciable degree of social regularity obtains sufficiently
to enable most people most of the time to go about their business without
becoming paralyzed by extreme conflicts in their role sets’.”’
In Merton’s discussion we find several elements of our basic list. By its very
announcement, the notion of role set persuasively draws attention to a complex
and important social phenomenon. The list of coping mechanisms is a classi-
fication of considerable analytical force. Clearly the two together point to
interesting research problems: under what conditions will which mechanism
succeed or fail? The whole is not a theory in the classical sense but forms a
bridge between rational reflection and empirical observation.