Bomer & Laman (2004) “Ways people continually put on different selves and assign roles to other people.”
Following is from Bomer & Laman’s mini-lit review:

1. Althusser's notion of interpellation, or hailing, wherein ideologies call out to the subjectivities of individuals, recognizing them or recruiting them into pre-defmed social roles (Althusser, 1971). In Althusser's view, language can position a subject because a position is always present in the ideology of which language is a manifestation. The ideology and the subject positions language affords are determined by the relationship of varied social groups to the means of production. For Althusser, individuals therefore do not choose positions, since they are "always-already subjects" (p. 119). They may believe they possess free choice, but they are actually always subjected to the workings of state apparatuses (families, schools, workplaces, racial definitions) that make them desire and intend to inhabit the roles that ideology has already prepared for them.

2) Some theorists and researchers have seen the relations among language, power, and positions as less unified and fixed in advance, and more complex, contradictory, and fluid (Mills, 1997). These scholars have been influenced by Foucault (1977), Butler (1990), and Hollway (1984), among others. Credited with introducing the concept of positioning into the social sciences (van Langenhove & Harre, 1999), Hollway (1984) employs Foucaultian theory to describe the ways traditional discourses concerning sexuality make available positions for subjects to take up. The practices and meanings of particular individuals always occur within discourses, and discourses contain positions, as a sentence contains subjects and objects. To speak within a discourse (and everyone always does), one must take up a position, and in so doing, place oneself in relation to others, as one would in taking the position of yielding, submissive female (Hollway, 1984, p. 236). Positions are relational, then, not only because they pertain to personal relations, but also because they structurally arrange those relations, like the grammatical forms in a sentence (if a position is to be "female" in a particular way, for instance, a corresponding position of "male" must be established).

Subject positions are almost constantly in flux and are often contested, as compared with the relatively fixed conceptual nature of interpellations, identities, roles, or actors (Harre & van Lagenhove, 1999). Furthermore, acts of positioning are agentive, ascribed by an individual to both self and other. Multiple selves are continuously formed, re-formed, and changed entirely in a "changing sea" of "joint action" (Shotter, 1993, p. 38). One conversational partner hails another as a particular identity, and the partner rejects that role, calling on an entirely different storyline, or else accepts the role for a few minutes until the conversational horizon shifts and a different social proposition, a new particular I/You is enacted.

In order to speak, a person casts herself and the person to whom she is speaking as those two characters from that story we both know. Van Langenhove and Harre (1999) use the term storylines to name the typified situations in which positions and acts of positioning fit. Storylines are not full narratives, but rather are like kinds of dramatic scenes in which one finds predictable dramatis personne. One storyline, for example, might involve positions of nurse and patient (Harre & van Langenhove, 1999, p. 21). As soon as one calls to mind those positions, one also imagines complex sets of predictable, Stereotypie attitudes and interactions. In another example from van Langenhove and Harre, if one person tells another to "iron my shirts," the utterance invokes a storyline of master and servant, with the utterer claiming the right to make such a demand and the interlocutor positioned as someone obliged to respond. The interlocutor, of course, can resist or reject this positioning, but the position and the storyline are socially real and must be dealt with. Positioning, then, is more than simply treating people as if they are x, since it involves defining this social moment as being of y type. The claim is not simply that I/you are these types of characters, but that we are in this storyline that carries a particular type of relationship.

For a theoretical account of how positions become durable, we turn to Holland and her colleagues, who use the word "dispositions" to describe positions that are stabilized enough in experience that an individual may appropriate them as a relatively permanent part of an identity (Holland et al., 1998). Some social positions become dispositions. That is not to say that they are immutable, but that they are at least habitual or accustomed within joint activity. Children and neophytes develop "a set of dispositions toward themselves in relation to where they can enter, what they can say, what emotions they can have, and what they can do in a given situation" (Holland et al., 1998, p. 143). Shorter (1993) suggests that individuals develop such dispositions through a Vygotskian process of internalization:

In learning how to be a responsible member of certain social groups, one must learn how to do certain things in the right kind of way: how to perceive, think, talk, act, and to experience one's surroundings in ways that make sense to the others around one. . . . Thus internalization is not a special geographical movement inwards, from a realm of bodily activity into a nonmaterial realm of "the mind," but a socio-practical-ethical movement, in which "children grow into the intellectual life of those around them" (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986). And the child . . . learns . . . the'ethical logistics' . . . of personal transactions within that group, the means to coordinate the different responsibilities involved in negotiating the social construction of meanings, (p. 4

3) Bourdieu (1998) “Position-taking practices” At every moment of each society, one has to deal with a set of social positions which is bound by a relation of homology to a set of activities (practice of golf or piano) or of goods (second house or old master painting) that are themselves characterized relationally. The formula states that the first conditions for an adequate reading of the analysis of relation between social positions (a relational concept), dispositions (or habitus), and position-takings, that is the “choices” made by the social agents in the most diverse domains of practice…The space of social positions is restranslated into a space of position-takings through the mediation of space of dispositions (or habitus—produced by social conditioning