Negotiating Identity

Symbolic Interactionist Approaches to Social Identity

Susie Scott

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781509500772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Identity is never just an individual matter; it is intricately shaped by our experiences of social life. Taking a Symbolic Interactionist approach, and drawing on Goffman's dramaturgical theory, Susie Scott explores the micro-social processes of interaction through which identities are created, maintained, challenged and reinvented. With a focus on empirical studies as illustrations, classic sociological theory is applied to contemporary examples. Each chapter focuses on a key dimension of how identities are negotiated in the drama of everyday life, from politeness and face-saving rituals to secrecy, lies and deception. Goffman's ideas are explored in relation to self-presentation, role-making, group interaction and public behaviour, while language and discourse are shown to help people to give credible identity performances and to frame social situations. The book reveals how social selves change over the life course through stigma, labelling and deviant careers, and how life in a total institution can radically transform its members' identities. Through all of these processes, self and society are shown to be intertwined. This insightful approach will appeal to students taking a range of courses in the sociology of the self, identity, interaction and everyday life

1
Interacting selves
Symbolic interactionism encounters identity

Identity is an evocative and intriguing concept, replete with paradoxes. On the one hand, it refers to something private and personal – our understanding of ourselves – yet, on the other hand, it remains intangible, elusive and resistant to definition (Strauss 1969). We may think we know who we are, but these ideas are constantly changing, shaped by our experiences, relationships and interactions: who I am now is not the same as who I was yesterday or who I will be tomorrow. We also tend to think of identity as something highly individual, which marks us out as unique – yet in forming these self-images we inevitably draw on wider cultural representations, discourses, norms and values, which we share with those who inhabit our social worlds.

Sociologists have always been interested in identity, because it resonates with many of the issues and debates that characterize our discipline. Interpretivist sociology, in particular, is concerned with the relationship between self and society (Hewitt 2007), which is mutually constitutive: the social world is created by people interacting in routinized and orderly ways, while the meanings they attach to these experiences are shaped by those very patterns, in the form of socially constructed structures, institutions and normative frameworks. Max Weber, on whose work this tradition is based, argued that sociology should involve the interpretive study of social action: the process by which individuals organize and make sense of their behaviour by taking into account other people’s meanings and motivations (Weber 1904). We think, feel and behave not as isolated individuals, but as social actors with a relational consciousness. Meanwhile, sociology’s aims to ‘make the familiar strange’ (Garfinkel 1967) and relate ‘private troubles to public issues’ (Mills 1959) are relevant to the study of identity as an aspect of everyday life that we often take for granted, despite its social and political dimensions. The latter have come to prominence since the mid-twentieth century through the rise of identity politics, citizenship debates and civil rights activism, reminding us that, aside from academic theorizing, we have a moral and ethical duty to investigate identities (Wetherell 2009).

What is identity?

Identity can be defined as a set of integrated ideas about the self, the roles we play and the qualities that make us unique. Ostensibly, this implies a relatively stable entity, which we perceive as internally consistent (Allport 1961; Gergen 1968), and use to sustain a boundary between ourselves and others. However, this very image may just be a construction: one that is constantly changing and whose existence is more illusory than real. Lyman and Scott (1970) conceive identity as an aggregate of social roles that one has played across different situations, which together create the impression of something ‘trans-situational’, or greater than the sum of its parts. Turner (1968), similarly, points towards a succession of ‘situated selves’ that we inhabit as we move between social settings, which are ‘averaged out’ to create an overall sense of identity. Here we encounter what Lawler (2008) suggests is a central paradox of identity: that it combines notions of sameness and continuity with notions of difference and distinctiveness.

A similar duality is recognized by Williams (2000), who makes a distinction between identity, a sense of oneself as a coherent and stable entity, and identification, a social process of categorizing ourselves as similar to certain social groups and different from others. Social identity is therefore relational: defined relative to other people or groups. I find out who I am by knowing what I am not: understanding where and with whom I do (or don’t) belong. For example, the Twenty Statements Test, devised by Iowa sociologists Kuhn and McPartland (1954), asked students to write a list of twenty words to describe themselves. The overwhelming majority of these referred to social categories, roles, statuses and group memberships, such as gender, age, ethnicity, occupation and family relationships. Other common descriptors that were found, such as ideological beliefs, interests, ambitions and self-evaluations, can also be seen as socially shaped.

We can distinguish identity from two closely related concepts: selfhood and personhood. Selfhood is a reflexive state of consciousness about one’s internal thoughts and feelings, while personhood is a set of publicly presented or externally attributed characteristics that others use to determine our status (Jenkins 2004), with moral, philosophical or political connotations. Cohen (1994) similarly points to the primacy of the self, as those aspects of experience which are private, internal and subjective, over personhood, as a set of publicly externally attributed characteristics, rights or statuses. Jenkins (2004) suggests that self and personhood are interconnected dimensions of experience which are mutually constitutive. Identity is the dialectical process of their articulation, an umbrella that encompasses them both. Lindesmith et al. (1999: 218) also distinguish between the self, a reflexive, communicative subject who witnesses him- or herself through a succession of transitory moments of interaction, and identity, or the meanings individuals give to these experiences as being unified.

Jenkins (2004) suggests four features of identity: similarity (a sense of one’s uniformity and consistency), difference (a sense of one’s uniqueness and distinctiveness from others), reflexivity (the ability to think about ourselves) and process (agency, independence and change over time). Lindesmith et al. (1999) agree that identity is multi-layered, incorporating different types of self: the phenomenological self (an internal stream of consciousness about one’s current situation), the interactional self (as presented and displayed to others), the linguistic self (representations of the self to oneself or others through language and biographical stories), the material self (the body and externally visible parts of the self, which are potentially commodifiable) and the ideological self (broader cultural and historical definitions of what it means to be a good citizen in a particular society).

Then, there are different types of identity, which have been theorized across the social sciences. The social philosopher Harré (1998) saw social identity (externally applied categorizations or attributions) as being different from personal identity (the belief individuals have in their own self-consistency). In social psychology, Tajfel (1982) defined social identity in terms of affiliations with reference groups and the processes to which this gives rise, such as social comparison, in- and out-group relations and prejudice. Meanwhile Hewitt (2007) distinguished between personal identity (a sense of uniqueness and difference, together with integrity and consistency), biographical identity (the self as recounted through narratives and stories), social identity (group memberships and affiliations that forge connections and shared values) and situational identity (produced through the presentation or ‘announcement’ [Stone 1962] of particular versions of the self in specific interaction settings, and the extent to which these are accepted by those we encounter therein). In sociology, Goffman (1963a) made a distinction between personal identity (the ‘single, continuous record of facts’ that documents an individual’s life, for example in photographs), social identity (the ‘complement of attributes’ seen as ordinary, natural and normal for members of a recognized category) and ego identity (a person’s subjective sense of their own character, developed over time).

This book is concerned with social identity, but even this has different theoretical interpretations. Macro-level sociologists emphasize the collective identities through which we understand ourselves as members of social groups, and which are mobilized in political arenas. Demographic factors like social class, family and kinship, religion, and so on, formed the focus of ‘traditional’ sociological studies of identity in the context of workplace relations (Goldthorpe et al. 1969; Beynon 1973), local communities (Willmott & Young 1960) and gender divisions (Walby 1997), and continue to be hotly debated today. Meanwhile, ‘new’, more nuanced forms of collectivity have been recognized as shaping contemporary identities, for example through subcultural affiliation (Hebdige 1979), idiocultures (Fine 1987), fan cultures (Hills 2002), neotribes (Maffesoli 1996) and contested ethnic classifications (Lentin & Titley 2011). Bourdieusian theory shifts our attention towards the social processes of distinction (Bourdieu 1979) and positioning (Lury 2011), whereby people define themselves through their relative social class status, in terms of tastes, possessions and lifestyle practices: identifying with one social category often goes hand-in-hand with demonstrating one’s disidentification with another. Last but not least, micro-level perspectives like symbolic interactionism theorize social identity as something that is formed through face-to-face encounters in everyday life. This is the approach I will be taking throughout this book, as we explore the negotiation of identities through processes of social interaction.

The social self

Symbolic interactionism is concerned with the social dimensions of the mind: imagination, motivation, perception of others, self-consciousness and emotions. Empirically, we can study the mind through its effects on behaviour, which is understood as not merely habitual or instinctive but rather ‘minded, symbolic, self-reflective conduct’ (Lindesmith et al. 1999: 21) – in other words, Weberian social action. This can be contrasted to psychological approaches, which include the ‘theory of minds’ (the cognitive and developmental processes through which we can imagine the world from someone else’s perspective), and philosophical approaches that focus on metaphysical questions of ontology and consciousness. Rationalists, such as Descartes, emphasized the introspective primacy of the thinking subject, located in the ideal rather than the material realm, while empiricists claimed that only knowledge acquired through the senses could be verified as true (Williams 2000). The empiricist Hume (1739) questioned the notion of an underlying self, the transcendental subject, who interprets these experiences. Ryle (1949) similarly disputed the rationalist ‘ghost in the machine’ as a ‘category mistake’ of Cartesian dualism, arguing for the interconnectedness of mind and body. Locke (1689) conceded that we may have a sense of our own sameness and continuity from recurrent empirical experiences, but that this was just an illusion. Harré (1998) made the similar point that our sense of self may just be based upon linguistic conventions, such as the use of the pronoun ‘I’, which locates the speaker/thinker in relation to others. However, this is an elusive and slippery agent. If we can only reflect on our conduct retrospectively, we can never witness our own subjectivity acting in the present moment: as Mead (1934: 174) put it, ‘I cannot turn around fast enough to catch myself.’

The symbolic interactionist concept of the ‘social self’ centres on the idea that selfhood is relational, arising through social interaction at the micro level. This is a symbolic and communicative process by which actors understand themselves through their relations with others. It involves reflection and perspective-taking, definitions and judgements; the self is an active agent, capable of manipulating objects in the social world. Hewitt (2007) adds that the social self is processual: it is not a fixed object or entity but, rather, fluid, emergent and mutable. Selfhood is never finished but in a constant state of becoming. Identity, similarly, is ‘never gained nor maintained once and for all … it is constantly lost and regained’ (Erikson 1959: 118) through social negotiation.

These theories stem from the philosophical tradition of pragmatism: the study of human praxis, or meaningful activity. Ontologically, pragmatism teaches that social reality is constructed through human action: we define the social world and the objects within it in terms of their use for us, or practical effects upon situations (Dewey 1922). The term ‘object’ here incorporates people, and, most crucially, one’s own self: we can reflect upon ourselves as social objects in other people’s worlds, and imagine their perceptions and judgements of us. James (1890: 295) argued that this is a key means of understanding ourselves, which also suggests multiplicity: an actor has ‘as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinions he [sic] cares’.

Pragmatism suggests that the self has two sides: it is both subject and object simultaneously. The mind has a reflective capacity: we think, feel and act, but also reflect upon the social consequences of this, and modify our self-image accordingly. Cooley’s (1902) concept of the Looking Glass Self had three elements: imagining how we appear to others, imagining how they might judge us, and the resultant self-feelings, such as pride or shame. This in turn shows that the self is a dynamic process,which is never complete: we do not simply ‘have’ selves but rather ‘do’ or ‘make’ (and re-make) them, through constant reflection.

Animation and personification help us to imagine this process more clearly. James (1890) made a distinction between two phases of the self: the ‘I’, the agent of thought and action, and the ‘Me’, the version(s) of oneself that were presented to others. Mead (1934) developed this idea further, arguing that the self unfolded through an inner conversation between ‘I’ and ‘Me’, as alternating phases of the self. He defined these as subject and object, respectively. The ‘I’ is the creative, impulsive agent of social action, while the ‘Me’ is an image (or collection of images) of oneself, viewed from the perspective of others. This is internalized into the self-concept as the ‘organized set of attitudes of others which one himself [sic] assumes’ (Mead 1934: 175). For Mead, mind, self and society were all intertwined parts of the same process: we import ‘society’ into the mind through an internalized set of attitudes and responses from others, which we then use to guide o...