Thanks for the suggestion, Eugene, but Herb Gintis hasn't really thought through it, and he basically AGREES with the structural -functionalist concept of role (just like most Marxists do). Roughly speaking, the Bowles/Gintis theory is that life does operate in a structural-functionalist way, but it just doesn't have the values in it that the structural-functionalists say it does.
So anyway Gintis doesn't actually offer any critique of Parsons' role theory, only a leftist moral flavor. The leftist moral flavor is, that if life is organized so that people behave in conformity with a social function, that could be a bad thing, rather than a good thing. But that is not really what I am trying to get at. I am not trying to contrive a quick mathematical model based on a few crudified descriptions either. My concern is more classical: it is with the sociological concept of role itself, and how it is used. J.
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