Cultural scenarios are the instructional guides that exist at the level of collective life. All institutions and institutionalized arrangements can be read as semiotic systems through which the requirements and practices of specific roles are given. Cultural scenarios essentially instruct in the narrative requirements of specific roles. They provide the understandings that make role entry, performance, and/or exit plausible for both self and others; they provide the who and what of past and future without which the present remains anxiously uncertain and fragile. The enactment of virtually all roles reflects either directly or indirectly the contents of appropriate cultural scenarios.
However, to serve entire collectivities over reasonable lengths of time, such scenarios must be too abstractly generic to be mechanically applied in all circumstances. Improvisation or tinkering to some degree conditions almost all social interaction. Even in the most tradition-bound of collectivities, not all requirements of a role can be applied uniformly. Distinctions, for example, must often be made between the sick and the well, the powerful and the powerless, the closely related and the stranger, and those who are age peers and those who are not (Bourdieu 1977). With increased individuation, the uniform applicability of cultural scenarios becomes even more problematic. In such contexts it becomes even more likely that others may not share the same cultural scenarios or share a common understanding of those they acknowledge sharing. The possibility of a
failure of a congruence between the necessarily abstract scenario and the concrete interactional situation is resolved at the level of interpersonal scripting.