Actors

Actor Typology

INDIVIDUAL Individual actors might be you or I. Individuals with their own personal, personality, intents, motivations, desires, ways of interpreting and taking action that are personal and unique and built on more tacit knowledge and experiences alongside formal training and expertise.

ROLE/ IDENTITY We are very good at creating roles with certain expectations or agreed-upon tasks associated with the role holder. An example might be a professional identity e.g. a lawyer or a doctor with associated ethics and practises. It might also be personal for example the role I take on as a worker versus the role I take on as a friend or relative. We often ritualise entrance into one role from a wider context e.g. fastening a seatbelt or “scrubbing up”.

COLLECTIVE Examples of collective actors might be an organisation, or an institution at a large scale and usually operating with governing constraints. Within larger collective actors might be smaller teams, roles or crews, although these can also exist separately.

Examples of Actors

• Roles - lawyer, doctor, mother, father etc.
• Deep knowledge - Different from roles, in that the expertise is universally acknowledged, it’s more personal based on people’s experience rather than a formal role.
• A profession - Law, Medicine, Accountancy and the Military among others have multi-generational established processes that generate roles, ethics and practices.
• Role combinations - for diversity of perspective e.g. multidisciplinary teams that are more permanent, or we might work with Entangled Trios for a temporary role combination on a specific task e.g. policy maker with young person and teacher.
• Organisations - commercial/non-commercial businesses, might also be our institutions such as the healthcare system or the mass media.
• Teams - authority is given to individuals to carry out certain tasks and job descriptions, often denoting a hierarchical style of governance.
• Crews - different to teams in that authority is given to roles and people can wear many hats and step into another role where necessitated. The focus is on building trust via collective practice over time. Can be used as a way of disrupting hierarchies… heavier use of ritual to step from one into the other. Healthcare and the military are examples.