Strengthening the Theoretical Foundations of Role Performance Theory

Abstract

This article aims to strengthen the theoretical edifice of role performance theory through appeal to recent advances in cultural theory. Role performance studies often assert that journalistic roles are fluid, contingent, situational and hybridic. Yet, In the large-scale surveys and content-analyses that dominate the literature, roles become more fixed than fluid, more over-determined than contingent. This disjuncture is caused, I argue, by under-theorization. Borrowing from contemporary cultural theory, I cast journalistic roles as schematic associations between cultural elements embedded in the field of journalism. Journalists internalize these elements via two distinct cognitive processes, one I label declarative and the other nondeclarative, and they do so from distinct positions within the field. This conception of role performance moves the field away from questions of beliefs and gaps between thinking and doing and toward those of perceptions, interpretations, motivations, and positionality. In so doing it offers a powerful explanation for how and why role-taking may be situational and dynamic and at the same time organized and patterned. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, I end the essay with a consideration of one of the literature’s most compelling empirical findings: that a persistent gap exists between role conception and role performance.

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