The Sociology of Identification (June 2016) Ethical Perspectives

2015

When studying the complex issue of identity, it is necessary to decompose it into individual parts or contexts that reveal partial identities. Since they are connected to each other, a particular change in a certain identity may induce further changes in others, or even all of them. Together they create a configuration of complex Identity that is unique, original and variable in time and space. Identity is a system that can be managed. Human being can be converted into an instrument of satisfying needs, a consumer of products. People are open to what is considered and labelled as legitimate in the social world. The social world is primary; it is a cultural text, in which the processes of defining and selfdefining are ongoing. It is therefore essential to view a person or society as a holder of multiple identities.

2021

Systems drawing on databases of personal information increasingly shape life experiences and outcomes across a range of settings, from consumer credit and policing to immigration, health, and employment. How do these systems identify and reidentify individuals as the same unique persons and differentiate them from others? This article advances a general sociological theory of personal identification that extends and improves earlier work by theorists like Goffman, Mauss, Foucault, and Deleuze. Drawing on examples from an original ethnographic study of identity theft and a wide range of social scientific literature, our theory treats personal identification as a historically evolving organizational practice. In doing so, it offers a shared language, a set of concepts for sensitizing researchers' attention to important aspects of personal identification that often get overlooked while also facilitating comparisons across historical periods, cultural contexts, substantive domains, and technological mediums.

2016

Identity is derived from the Latin “idem”, which means “being the same [person]”. Researchers approach this “powerful construct” (Vignoles et al., 2011, p. 2) in different ways: identity is variously understood as a (cognitive) self-image, as something shaped by habit, as a social attribution or role, as a habitus, a performance, or a constructed narrative (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1991, p. 194 ff.). Identity is a constant object of academic discourses, which can be interpreted partly as a reaction to the radical changes that have taken place in modern times, and the crises that have often accompanied them. For example, George Herbert Mead’s theory on identity development emerged at the beginning of the last century in Chicago, against the background of a constantly growing number of migrants, who “threatened” the self-concept of the local residents. This led to a renegotiation of affiliation and difference, and a redrawing of the boundary between people’s own identity and that which ...

This book offers a different look at Identity and identification and introduces the notion of substitute identities (and a subsequent repertoire of personalities) as a rather common phenomenon in many people, as the root of PTSD and other identity conflict and dissociation disorders and the key to effective diagnosis and treatment. Identity is a “hot topic" in academia and popular culture. It might be considered as the ideological signifier of our age, but also carries an ever increasing weight as a political emblem, even as this mostly concerns identification, which we easily trade for consciousness. Identity is an essential attribute of being. At a personal level, identity is not only what we think we are or the labels we are given. It includes our unconscious and is more than our personality, the expression of our identity in relation to others. It goes deeper than our subjective selfhood, the notion of me or self which provides the sense of sameness and continuity, but this stability is an illusion. We are not the same all the time, the continuity of a single ‘self’ is a chimera. This is thus also true for our personality, One of the central themes of this book is that our personal identity is not an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent given, but rather a dynamic matrix, often a repertoire of identities. This is not a pathological condition, but something many of us have, with resulting inner conficts, which eventually may cause depression or disease. To help understand these identity conflicts, in oneself and in others, we present a new way to look at the formation and development of the primary identity and substitute identities and how these manifest and change. Dissociation and identification are processes of transformation, they shape us, in a continuous process. Issues like the group mind, social identity, the Western identity crisis, identity politics, radicalization and identification mechanisms are covered in this book, as are PTSD and auto-immune diseases. We show how there is resonance between cell-, organ- and personal-identity at the epigenetic level. This book is full of new and daring insights and visualizations on how our psyche operates and how we as humans function.

Without social identity there is no human world. Without frameworks of similarity and difference, people would be unable to relate to each other in a consistent and meaningful fashion. In the second edition of this highly successful text Richard Jenkins develops his argument that identity is both individual and collective, and should therefore be considered within a unified analytic framework. Using the work of major social theorists, such as Mead, Goffman and Barth, to explore the experience of identity in everyday life, Jenkins considers a range of different issues, including:

papers.ssrn.com

"The Problems with Identity: Distribution, Agency, and Identification" takes a comparative approach to the discussion of identity and agency by examining the ID systems in the US and the UK. Rooting the discussion in a historical context, this paper concludes that the various technological means of stitching identity back onto the body may marginalize individuals even more as ID systems still fail to identity what it is that they want to identify - identity.

Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 2022

As part of an article symposium on Partha Dasgupta and Sanjeev Goyal’s “Narrow Identities” (2019, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics), Peter Finke offers a critical anthropological perspective on the concept of social identity and its modeling in economics.

2004

Review of Social Economy, 2012

Identity has been recently introduced as a ''legitimate'' subject matter in economics. Whereas the social nature of identity is consensually acknowledged, its relational and moral dimensions are overlooked. We begin by clarifying the role of interpersonal relations in identity formation. Following Honneth (1995) we argue that the development of a positive identity, defined as a person's relation-to-self, depends on the processes of mutual recognition in which a person takes part throughout her/his life. We then frame Honneth's recognition processes in terms of the access to relational and moral goods. An empirical study is presented that illustrates the association between relational and moral goods and ''relation-to-self.'' Based on European Social Survey (ESS) data, we show that high levels of relational goods (e.g. experiencing intense and positive social relations) and moral goods (e.g. perceiving to be treated with justice and respect) are associated with a positive relation-to-self.

Journal of Economic …, 2010

Forum University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture the Arts, 2010

Introduction: special issue of FORUM on Identity Denise deCaires Narain "Identity" is a word that we have learned-with good reason-to be wary of. Its suggestion of solidity and fixity makes it a dangerous and divisive concept that elides the flux and instability that characterizes selfhood. In academic discourses, identity has been theorized exhaustively and the idea of the subject as de-centred and constantly shifting is taken-for-granted. But still "identity" won"t go away. Indeed, in some arenas of public culture, "identity" remains a necessary concept around which to consolidate ideas of selfhood that may not be so readily accommodated in prevailing definitions of the self.

2012

In response to the suggestion of treating identity as a historically bound notion (Matusov & Smith, 2012), its genealogy is further explored. First establishing that identity has been understood in a particular personal way, and that genealogy might carry beyond this conception, as it also carries beyond the notions of class and adolescence that are used to contextualize identity. Then opting for treating historically bound notions as dynamic, studying them in the continuous interaction between conceptualization and practice, as processes and verbs rather than essences and substantives. Finally suggesting to dissociate identity from selfhood by looking at why, when and to whom we need to identify ourselves and also inverting the question: why and when do we ask others to identify themselves? After all, sameness and difference are two sides of a coin called identity, and what is looked at is a matter of how it is looked at.

Datenschutz und Datensicherheit - DuD, 2006

With the introduction of digital media, publicly available networks and the development of the Information Society, identity has become a pressing contemporary issue with wide ranging implications. This article outlines diverse areas of identity-related research and reviews the relevant literature on offer. Analysis of the research to date leads to the conclusion that cross-disciplinary approach is called for if we are to achieve a comprehensive understanding of Identity in the Information Society.

British Journal of Sociology, 2002

The concept of 'identity' is central to much contemporary sociology, re ecting a crisis that manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, there is a view that identity is both vital and problematic in this period of high modernity. Secondly, while this awareness is re ected in sociology, its accounts of identity are inconsistent, under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical load required. As a result, there is an inherent contradiction between a valuing of identity as so fundamental as to be crucial to personal well-being, and a theorization of 'identity' that sees it as something constructed, uid, multiple, impermanent and fragmentary. The contemporary crisis of identity thus expresses itself as both a crisis of society, and a crisis of theory. This paper explores the diverse ways in which 'identity' is deployed before turning to case-studies of its use by Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells. This strategy demonstrates the widespread and diverse concern with identity before exploring how problematic it has become, even in the work of two of the world's leading sociologists.

Sociology, 2016

Why Identity and Why Identity in the 1990s? To celebrate the 50 th anniversary of the journal Sociology, the Editorial Board have decided to publish four e-special issues to showcase the depth of material in its archive. After some discussion the Board agreed that these should be grouped by both time period and theme: the other e-special issues are '1967-1979 Sociology and Social Class' edited by Ryan and Maxwell, 'Sociology in the 1980s-The Rise of Gender' edited by Roth and Dashper, and 'Sociology in the 21 st Century-Reminiscence and Redefinition' edited by Jawad, Dolan and Silkington.Identity was chosen as the focus for the present e-special issue as the 1990s was an important period in the development of public and sociological discussions around this slippery concept. This was an era when the politics of group identities came to the fore (around sexuality and ethnicity to name but two). It was also, as we discuss below, the decade when the notion of the 'individualization' of self-identities was widely discussed in sociology and beyond. Sociologists' interest in the topic of identity has waxed and waned over the years. Much of the work of classic social theory, including Durkheim, Marx, and Simmel, was concerned with the impact of the shift from traditional to modern society on people's sense of self and on the relationship between individual and society. Decades after, the fathers of symbolic interactionism, Mead and Cooley, explored the inherently social processes by which personal identities are formed. Later Goffman's extensive work considered how unwritten rules of interaction inform social identities and their presentation. In spite of this rich tradition, identity did not figure as a topic when David Morgan and Liz Stanley, the editors of Sociology, organized a collection around key debates within British sociology to celebrate the journal's 25 th anniversary in 1992. The chapters, written by current or recent members of the Sociology editorial board, discussed social mobility; women and class; organisational structures; 'industrialism'; inequalities within the household; power; ethnomethodology; and gender (Morgan and Stanley, 1993). The term 'identity' was missing from the contents and index of this collection. Yet within a few years it was ubiquitous across the sociology curriculum and has remained so. This embrace of the term 'identity' did not come without