“Can I Sell You Avocadoes and Talk to You About Contraception?” “Well, It Depends Which Comes First”: Anchor Roles and Asymmetric Boundaries
通过对73名坦桑尼亚自雇者（同时担任家庭计划咨询师）的定性研究，发现高度对比的角色可被同时视为不相容与相容，边界强度非对称：社区角色锚定时强，工作角色锚定时弱。
Role theory generally predicts that when the demands and norms of two roles are highly contrasted, individuals will construct a strong boundary to separate the roles. However, such predictions are grounded primarily in the Global North, emphasizing role pairings including “work–family” and hybrid “work–work.” Comparatively, the Global South is characterized by a lack of public services that creates a highly contrasted, highly salient, and yet understudied role pairing—“work–community.” Additionally, the socioeconomic features of the Global South (e.g., dense and overlapping community networks, financial poverty) call into question whether existing predictions surrounding boundary strength are likely to hold. We conducted a qualitative study of 73 Tanzanian participants who had both a self-employed work role and a family planning counselor community role. We found that highly contrasted roles can be simultaneously perceived as both incompatible and compatible. Specifically, the boundaries we observed were neither uniformly strong nor weak, but rather of asymmetric strength: strong when a social interaction was anchored in the community role, but weak when anchored in the work role. The specific role contrasts we identify, and the importance of role anchoring we observe, have important implications for role theory and boundary-setting more broadly.