This paper aims to understand how social roles are typified by professors of stricto sensu postgraduate courses in Business Administration in Brazil. A qualitative research was conducted, adopting a multiple case study with 29 interviews with teachers from 27 programs. Role typification occurs when the actor, as a collective being, acts in a certain context with knowledge common to a certain collective of actors. As a result, it was evidenced that teachers assume a multiplicity of roles in higher education institutions and graduate programs, when carrying out the daily activities. Thus, they play the role not only of teacher, but also of researcher, advisor, and coordinator, among others. These multiple roles, sometimes complementary, sometimes dissonant, force the teacher to deal with different institutional pressures to perform these roles, which causes the teacher to end up repressing certain activities, or postponing them until what should be their leisure periods. The main contribution of this study is to understand the intricacies of the teaching profession and the challenges of the production of scientific knowledge in the country, since, at this level of education, it is through this knowledge that future teachers and researchers of higher education are trained.