The Sociology of Identity

Authenticity, Multidimensionality, and Mobility

Wayne H. Brekhus

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509534821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

How do people think about their identities? How do they express themselves individually and as part of collective groups, social movements, organizations, neighborhoods, or nations? Identity has important consequences for how we organize our lives, wield social power, and produce and reproduce privilege and marginality. In this lively and engaging book, Wayne H. Brekhus explores the sociology of identity and its social consequences through three conceptual themes: authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility. Drawing on vivid examples from ethnography, current events, and everyday life, he offers an approach to identity that goes beyond the individual and demonstrates how social groups privilege, flag, and shape identities. Offering an insightful overview of the sociological approaches to understanding social identity in a multicultural, globalized world, The Sociology of Identity will be a welcome resource for students and scholars of identity, and anyone interested in the social and cultural character of the self.

1
Sociological Approaches to Identity

Identity has become a central concept in modern sociological thought. Introduced to sociology in 1902 by Cooley (1964) and developed in 1934 by Mead (Mead and Morris 1967), who saw identity as important to the self-concept and to the self as shaped by interactions with others, the idea of socially influenced self-identities represents a sociological approach to understanding this entity—the self. In his foundational work on the social nature of self-identity, Mead argues that selves or self-identities emerge from interactions with others and through social experience. We learn to perceive ourselves and to adjust our own self-understandings through dialogue and interaction with others. Mead, building on Cooley, Thomas, and the pragmatist tradition in the social sciences, is widely acknowledged as the founding figure in the theoretical tradition of thinking sociologically about the self. Drawing upon Erikson’s (1994) popularization of the concept of identity in psychology, Goffman (1959, 1986) and Stone (1962) more directly introduced the concept of social identity to sociology in the late 1950s and early 1960s and demonstrated that identity is situated in social relations, social interactions, and encounters. Traditions in the study of identity that derive from Cooley, Mead, and, later, Goffman and Stone focused primarily on the individual and on how interpersonal interactions shape the formation of the self; perspectives emphasizing the individual dominated identity research in sociology through the 1970s (Cerulo 1997).

Since the 1980s, sociological research on identities has increasingly focused not just on the self as a source of identity, but on collective identities. Cerulo (1997: 386) notes that this shift is fueled by three important trends:

1. Social and nationalist movements have increased scholarly interest in issues of group agency and political action, paying particular attention to the political implications of collective definitions around race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.
2. Intellectual concerns with agency and self-direction have enhanced the study of identification processes and how category distinctions are created, maintained, and changed.
3. New communication technologies have diminished the importance of physical co-presence and expanded the array of generalized others one interacts with in constructing their identities.

Spurred on by an interest in understanding collective identities as the product of differentiation and social boundary making, sociologists of identity have returned to their collectivist roots, while still maintaining symbolic interactionist concerns with the interactional performance of boundaries and identities.

The nature of collective thought and the “we-ness” of collectives have generated a longstanding interest among sociologists, ever since Durkheim’s preoccupation with the relationship between the mental and the social was expressed in his idea of a “collective conscience.” In Durkheim’s view, the self and the mind are socially constructed through their dynamic relationship with the social rather than constituted in an individual’s relationship with the natural environment (Brekhus 2015: 5). Similarly, Marx’s idea of class consciousness—the idea that people observe the world from a social standpoint, which is that of their own social class, with its specific life experiences and identifications—reflects an interest, now classical, in the shared understandings of collectives. Modern sociologists of identity have focused more directly on cultural and social expressions of we-ness as collective identities. But perhaps the classical sociologist whose ideas about the relationship between role and social identity have most influenced contemporary thinking is Simmel. In the “web of group affiliations,” Simmel (1969: 140–3) perceives the individual personality as formed by one’s multiple intersecting group affiliations. Individuals internalize their various affiliations of belonging, thus creating a self that is formed by the many intersecting group cultures they belong to. They develop a multiply networked worldview and social standpoint. Thus, for Simmel, the individual is shaped by the intersecting collectives that he or she internalizes. Simmel’s ideas reflect a sociological interest in intersectional identities and in the multidimensionality of identities. As we will see in chapter 4, the concept of intersectionality (the idea that race, class, and gender intersect in shaping the identities and experiences of working-class black women, middle-class Latina women, and other multiply located individuals), currently popular in identity and inequality studies, shares analytic similarities with the concept of overlapping affiliations, which Simmel was interested in.

Unlike Simmel, who placed a broad emphasis on roles, modern intersectionality theorists focus more directly on affiliations tied to inequality and power, for example race, class, gender, and sexuality; yet the formal dimensions of how intersecting affiliations make identities multidimensional are similar. Hughes (1945) brings out the power dimension of intersecting group attributes in individuals, in developing the concept of a master status for those roles or identities that overpower other characteristics in defining social expectations about someone. Hughes identifies race for black people in the United States as one of these master statusdefining traits that a black person carries into any social context. Noting that professional standing is also a powerful characteristic, Hughes highlights the intersectional dilemma faced by black professionals who simultaneously hold a stigmatized racial master status (negro in the United States of the 1940s) and a privileged professional status (doctor). Hughes’s concept of the master status as a salient social standpoint, together with his observations about the intersections of different salient statuses (some stigmatizing, some privileging), is foundational to modern approaches that examine the power dimensions of intersecting collective identities as experienced and internalized by individuals.

As we can see from the varying classical sociological influences, the study of identity is a broad theoretical field, with multiple foci. The concept of identity can be used in very different ways—which stem from different theoretical traditions—to refer to widely varying forms of identity such as personal identity, social identity, or collective identity. Making sense of these multiple traditions and how they interrelate is an important task. To do that, I discuss several theoretical traditions in the sociology of identity. Some of these traditions speak directly to one another, in an integrative scholarly conversation, while others have developed independently and are distinct from one another. The purpose of introducing these multiple approaches is both to show the scope of different, primarily qualitative sociological research traditions that explore the social and cultural dimensions of identities and to demonstrate how these traditions complement one another in painting a picture of the dynamic social character of identities. Each of these traditions is instructive to later discussions of authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility. They include symbolic interactionism, Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, Bourdieusian dispositional habit approaches to identity, modernity and postmodernity theoretical traditions, feminist standpoint theories and standpoint intersectional analysis, cognitive cultural sociology, and symbolic boundaries theories. I begin with symbolic interactionism, a theoretical perspective that develops directly from Mead’s sociology of the self and that is widely viewed as the foundational theoretical perspective on the self and identity within sociology.

Symbolic Interactionism

As a foundational underpinning to sociological work in identity, symbolic interactionism has shaped several strands of recent identity research. Evolving from the social and philosophical pragmatism that took shape at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century (the early Chicago School), symbolic interactionism emerged in the postwar era in response to the then dominant and mainstream structural functionalist paradigm that examined social phenomena primarily from a top-down macro focus (Carter and Fuller 2015). Structural functionalism stressed a rather singular and static view of social norms, institutional structures, and social relationships, while saying very little about the self and identity. As an alternative, symbolic interactionists stress that the meanings we associate with identities (our own and others), situations, and events emerge from our interactions with others in various contexts and communities.

Building on Mead’s view of social activity among other influences, symbolic interactionists bring the dynamics of human association to the fore of our concerns. They focus both on how people cooperate to come to a common understanding of their world (or fight over that understanding), and on how those with whom we interact (our individual and community affiliations) provide the foundations for our notions of self that, for interactionists, are deeply social and relational as well as projected through time. In short, meaning emerges from the real activity of human life and is maintained or changed via this dynamic activity as well. Herbert Blumer built further upon Mead’s ideas, developing symbolic interactionism as both a theoretical and a methodological perspective for understanding the creative involvement of the self, the importance of context, and the complexities of social interaction in constructing identity. The methodological approach of symbolic interactionism emphasizes empirical investigations of social life grounded in observable social interactions, and many of these investigations allow one to explore peer groups, reference groups, subcultures and other levels of group dynamics that deal with identity, in-group belonging and out-group exclusion, boundaries, codes, and symbols.

Symbolic interactionism’s influence on sociology of identity research has been broad and varied. It has extended to social psychological perspectives on how individuals internalize roles and identities, as well to the more ethnographic traditions of research associated with the Chicago School, from which symbolic interactionism arose. These two traditions of research on identity both draw on symbolic interactionism’s roots, but diverge from each other in ways that generate two different strands of research, catered to different scholarly audiences. The first tradition is heavily social psychological, focused on the individual and, methodologically, on experiment and hypothesis testing. It draws largely on Mead’s interest in how the individual internalizes the self and its roles from interactions with others. The second tradition is largely qualitative and ethnographic and builds on Blumer’s methodological interest in observing meaning in social interactions. This latter tradition typically observes social actors in groups, as they interact in social settings.

Concern with the formation of the self in interpersonal interactions dates back as far as the works of Cooley (1964) at the beginning of the twentieth century and of Mead (Mead and Morris 1967) some thirty years later; their theories of internalized identities provided the insight that “we incorporate the social positions that we occupy into our cognitive image of ourselves as people” (see Owens, Robinson, and Smith-Lovin, 2010: 485). Mead and Cooley focused on how we internalize the way others see us. The self, in this view, is a social accomplishment produced through interactions with others. We learn to perceive ourselves through how others see us. A number of identity theories have originated from these insights.

One branch stemming from symbolic interactionist foundations consists of theories that are heavily focused on how identities and roles are attached to and internalized by individuals. Social psychological identity and social identity theorists in this tradition conduct social psychological experiments on how people behave in relation to their role identities. Burke and Stets (2009), for example, have developed a social psychological symbolic interactionist identity theory that looks at individuals’ attempts to maintain and enhance self-esteem, to match their behaviors to standards relevant to their roles and identities, and to act in ways that keep perceptions of themselves in situated contexts, consistent with their identity and role commitments. Burke and Stets regard one’s role (as reflected in what one does) as a basis for identity and examine the ways in which self-meaning attached to identity guides behavior in interaction.

As an example of their identity research, Stets and Burke (1996) analyzed how self-meanings of gender as a type of identity affected the negative and positive behavior of married couples whose task was to resolve marital disagreements. The two researchers hypothesized that those with a more masculine and more dominant control identity would be more likely to use negative behavior (e.g. complaints, put-downs, criticisms, defensive behavior, negative facial expressions, escalating negative affect) in their interactions, while those with more feminine and less dominant control identities would be more likely to use positive behavior. They tested these hypotheses using videotaped conversations from a representative sample of newly married couples and ran a factor analysis on coded responses. Stets and Burke found that wives rather than husbands employed more negative behavior in conversations but that, paradoxically, the results for being a woman were different from the results for being feminine, and the results for being a man were different from the results for being masculine. Men and women with more masculine gender identity standards were on average more likely to engage in negative behavior in order to bring their self-perceptions in tune with their identity standards, but women were on average more likely to engage in negative behaviors than men. In explaining these findings, Stets and Burke argue that women, as a social category, are culturally discredited in terms of competence and power and that this categorial discounting pushes them to counter discrediting disturbances to their self-concept through negatively coded behavior. This varies depending on the relationship; thus wives with more traditional husbands display more negative behaviors in interaction than do wives with less traditional husbands (Stets and Burke 1996: 213).

Stets and Burke regard identity as something performed at the individual level, in relation to identity standards and role expectations. They draw on symbolic interactionism’s classical insights on role internalization, to analyze the social psychology of the individual. This kind of social psychological work is more psychological and laboratory-based than most of the work that falls under the umbrella of a symbolic interactionist sociology of identity, but this quantitative social psychological strand of research illustrates how widespread the use of symbolic interactionist elements is when applied to contemporary identity research.

Sheldon Stryker’s structural symbolic interactionist identity theory is a similar social psychological and hypothesis-testing approach to the study of identity (Stryker 1980, 2008; Stryker and Burke 2000). Using Mead’s conceptual frame to develop testable hypotheses, Stryker employs a role-theoretic sense of social structure to analyze identities as self-cognitions connected to roles and, through those roles, to positions in organized social relationships (see Stryker 2008: 20). Since in Mead’s framework mind and self arise from accomplished, ongoing interactions where role taking plays a vital part in behavior, communication, and interaction, a role-theoretic sense of social structure illuminates the understanding of how symbolic interactionism plays out in everyday life. For Stryker (2008: 20), “social behavior is specified by taking ‘role choice’—the opting by persons to meet expectations of one role rather than another—as that which [identity theory] seeks to explain.”

Stryker develops structural symbolic interactionism as a revised Meadean approach that views social differentiation as a continuous process composed of organized systems of interactions and role relationships where these role relationships happen among complex constellations of “differentiated groups, communities, and institutions, cross-cut by a variety of demarcations based on class, age, gender, ethnicity, religion” and other variables (Stryker 2008: 19). In this view identities are self-cognitions connected to roles and, through roles, to positions in organized social relationships (Stryker 2008: 20). Identity attributes in this approach are organized into a salience hierarchy where different identities are more or less likely to be invoked in differing situations or relational and interactional contexts. And commitment, for Stryker, determines the source of immediate salience attached to identities. Stryker’s structural symbolic interactionist identity theory recognizes identity attri...