An onion? Conceptualising and researching identity
Lynn Monrouxe2013, Medical Education
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Abstract
The biggest question I am presently grappling with concerns the concept of identity. What does an identity look like and how can we research it? Of course, across the behavioural and social sciences, the concept of identity and identities has been hotly debated and there is no single idea of what this (or these) are. 1 But from a personal perspective, I'm still oscillating between the seductive notion of an individual's identity being something internal to one's self that can be a measurable and known entity 2 and the thinking that identities are co-constructed through interaction in social settings. 3 I guess my biggest issue is my personal desire to measure identity within individuals (e.g. moral identity) and relate that back to personal actions. But at the same time, my own research clearly demonstrates that identities (in the plural) are enacted interactionally and are highly fluid and contextual. 4 What do you think?
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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.
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The worst thing one can do with words,'' wrote George Orwell a half a century ago, ``is to surrender to them.'' If language is to be ``an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought,'' he continued, one must ``let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.'' 1 The argument of this article is that the social sciences and humanities have surrendered to the word ``identity''; that this has both intellectual and political costs; and that we can do better. ``Identity,'' we argue, tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity). We take stock of the conceptual and theoretical work ``identity'' is supposed to do and suggest that this work might be done better by other terms, less ambiguous, and unencumbered by the reifying connotations of ``identity.'' We argue that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity ^the attempt to ``soften'' the term, to acquit it of the charge of ``essentialism'' by stipulating that identities are constructed, £uid, and multiple leaves us without a rationale for talking about ``identities'' at all and ill-equipped to examine the ``hard'' dynamics and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics. ``Soft'' constructivism allows putative ``identities'' to proliferate. But as they proliferate, the term loses its analytical purchase. If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere. If it is £uid, how can we understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden, congeal, and crystallize? If it is constructed, how can we understand the sometimes coercive force of external identi¢cations? If it is multiple, how do we understand the terrible singularity that is often striven for ^and sometimes realized ^by politicians seeking to transform mere categories into unitary and exclusive groups? How can we understand the power and pathos of identity politics?
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Personal identity is a topic that many of us have pondered at some point in our lives, and we all have likely asked the question 'Who am I?'. I think identity is the unity of character traits, memories and aspirations a person has. It is everything that makes us who we are. We tend to look to factors such as parental upbringing, religion, social class and appearance to decide what makes up our identity, but to what extent are we born into our identity and to what extent do we possess the freedom to change it? This article will address these two questions by examining three main issues relating to personal identity.
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The study of identity forms a critical cornerstone within modern sociological thought. Introduced by the works of Cooley and Mead, identity studies have evolved and grown central to current sociological discourse. Microsociological perspectives dominated work published through the 1970s. Sociologists focused primarily on the formation of the "me," exploring the ways in which interpersonal interactions mold an individual's sense of self. Recent literature constitutes an antithesis to such concerns. Many works refocus attention from the individual to the collective; others prioritize discourse over the systematic scrutiny of behavior; some researchers approach identity as a source of mobilization rather than a product of it; and the analysis of virtual identities now competes with research on identities established in the copresent world. This essay explores all such agenda as raised in key works published since 1980. I close with a look toward the future, suggesting trajectories aimed at synthesizing traditional and current concerns.
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Appeared in: Schwartz, S. J., Luyckx, K., & Vignoles, V. L. (Eds.; 2011). Handbook of identity theory and research: Structure and processes. New York: Springer. (pp. 77-98) 1
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The self is at once both utterly familiar and infinitely elusive. Everyone reading these words has a self or, perhaps more correctly, is a self; yet it is difficult to say what this means or amounts to, because, unlike other objects of scientific scrutiny, the self resists being pinned down or pointed out. In frustration, some philosophers have contended that the “inner I” is an illusion (Nørretranders, 1998), the product of outdated dualistic thinking (Dennett, 1992) or of misinterpreted personal pronouns (Kenny, 1989).
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The conception of this handbook goes way back, taking us more than five years until completion. 1 It all began with an early plan to organize a symposium for the 31 st International Congress of Psychology (ICP) for July 2016 in Yokohama, Japan. The intention was to bring together a group of international identity researchers, from within psychology and from neighboring disciplines, to see whether there were any new developments in identity theory and empirical research, and whether they had a common center or were drifting pieces moving in all kinds of directions (cf., for example, Nochi, 2016, or Watzlawik, 2016). This was the original idea. So, in the summer of 2015 we started contacting researchers we knew (and whom we did not know up to that moment), asking whether they would be interested in joining us for the symposium. Preparing the symposium was as stimulating as the actual gathering that took place on the afternoon of July 28 one year later under the header Identity and Identity Research in Psychology and Neighboring Disciplines. Janka Romero, the Commissioning Editor for Psychology at Cambridge University Press, had contacted us beforehand with the offer to talk about the potential to turn this into a book project, and we, the symposium participants, started following up the same night over dinnernot knowing that this would keep us busy for the next five years. We went through the usual editorial routines: developing a proposal, revising the proposal, and contacting old and new colleagues in the field, up to the point of delivering the full set of manuscripts in January 2021. This is the brief story of the book's conception. Its emergence, the process from conception to print, is telling. First, we started out with thewhat we thought originalidea of seriously bringing together different theoretical frameworks and different conceptualizations of how to do empirical identity work. What had guided us was our own recognition that the use of the term identity, even in our own work, had been not only fuzzy but often confusing, probably mystifying important phenomena rather than elucidating and yielding research in a rather straightforward and fertile way. Thus, it was 1 Victor Krusborg Olesen has played a central role in the finalization of this book (e.g., by formatting the manuscripts and creating the index). We would like to take this opportunity to say thank you, the support was greatly appreciated! 1
Simon, B (2004) Identity in modern society: A social psychological perspective. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-22747-4 pbk. Pages xvii + 222
2009
On the opening page of this inquiry into identity Bernd Simon reminds us that "Identity is fashionable. Everybody wants to have one, many promise to provide one". Identity is not only highly topical in popular culture but is the subject of considerable academic musing and social scientific endeavour.
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