Role is sociologically significant because it demonstrates how individual activity is socially influenced and thus follows regular patterns. Sociologists have used roles as the units from which social institutions are constructed. For instance, the school as a social institution may be analyzed as a collection of teacher and pupil roles which are common across all schools.

Emile Durkheim defines sociology as the scientific study of institutions. In everyday language, we refer to institutions in terms of a heterogeneous array of concrete social forms such as the family, the market, or the state.

Talcott Parsons, a major contributor to functionalist sociology, defines an institution as “a complex of institutionalized role integrates (or status-relationships) which is of strategic cultural significance for the social system in question”. Parsons argued that institutions are fundamental to the overall integration of social systems.

The contemporary analysis of institutions has, however, been decisively influenced by the sociological writings of Peter L. Berger, whose general sociology was in turn influenced by the philosophical anthropology of the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen.

According to Bryan S. Turner, institutions are the social bridges between human beings and their natural environment and it is in terms of these institutions that human life becomes coherent and meaningful. Institutions, in filling the gap created by instinctual deprivation, provide humans with relief from the tensions generated by their undirected instinctual drives. Over time, these institutions come to be taken for granted and become part of the implicit background of social action. The social foreground is occupied by reflexive, practical and conscious practices.

Turner argues that with modernization, however, there is a process of deinstitutionalization with the result that the taken-for-granted background becomes less reliable, more open to negotiation, culturally fluid, and increasingly an object of critical debate and reflection. Accordingly the social foreground expands, and the everyday world becomes risky and precarious. The so-called objective, sacred institutions of tradition recede, and modern life becomes subjective, contingent and problematic.

According to Gehlen, we live in a world of secondary or quasi-institutions. There are profound psychological changes that are associated with these social developments. In premodern societies, human beings had character that was a firm, coherent and definite psychological structure that corresponded with reliable social roles and institutions. In modern societies, people have personalities that are fluid and flexible, like the precarious institutions in which they live. The existential pressures on human beings are significant and to some extent modern people are confronted with the uncertainties of what Peter L. Berger, B. Berger and H. Kellner call The Homeless Mind (1973).

While a number of sociologists, such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, have argued that “de-traditionalization” and reflexive modernization are the predominant trends of late modernity, there are counterarguments, both sociological and psychological, to suggest that people in their everyday lives need stable social structures. Putting it succinctly, where there is de-traditionalization, there will also be countervailing movements of re-institutionalization.