{
  "id": "role.social",
  "term": "role",
  "sense": "social",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 13,
  "arena": "lexicon",
  "domain": "emergence",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a position within a collective that performs a recurring pattern of behavior",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "part.relation",
      "pattern.regularity",
      "groups.collection",
      "regular.frequency",
      "state.condition"
    ],
    "interaction": "the part and the regular pattern together instantiate a stable condition within the collective",
    "novel_properties": [
      "collective function",
      "persistent behavioral niche",
      "recurrent relational position"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The night watch at Masada sounded alarms every two hours until the Roman siege in 73 CE.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "In a beehive, the forager bees return to the same hive daily, transferring nectar to receiver bees.",
      "domain": "biology"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Linux kernel's merge window assigns maintainers to review specific subsystem code every release cycle.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "part.relation",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    },
    {
      "id": "goal.purpose",
      "note": "abstracts",
      "type": "abstracts"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "department.organizational",
    "director.leadership",
    "executive.role",
    "jobs.employment",
    "president.political",
    "students.group",
    "title.label"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "role",
    "roles"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "factual",
      "note": "definition corrected to align with emergent components; original definition inaccurately omitted essential aspects of group context and temporal persistence"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-role.social"
}