Showing papers on "Identity (social science) published in 1999"

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race

Abstract: Introduction A Definition of Terms Defining RacismCan we talk? The Complexity of IdentityWho am I? Understanding Blackness In A White Context The Early YearsIs my skin brown because I drink chocolate milk? Identity Development in AdolescenceWhy are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? Racial Identity in AdulthoodStill a work in progress Understanding Whiteness In a White Context The Development of White IdentityIm not ethnic, Im just normal. White Identity and Affirmative ActionIm in favor of affirmative action except when it comes to my jobs. Beyond Black and White Critical Issues in Latino, American Indian, and Asian Pacific American Identity DevelopmentTheres more than just Black and White, you know. Identity Development in Multiracial FamiliesBut dont the children suffer? Breaking The Silence Embracing a Cross-Racial DialogueWe were struggling for the words.

How can you do it?: Dirty work and the challenge of constructing a positive identity

Abstract: The identity literature suggests that the stigma of “dirty work” threatens the ability of occupational members to construct an esteem-enhancing social identity. However, research indicates much the opposite, creating a puzzle we attempt to answer. We argue that the stigma of dirty work fosters development of a strong occupational or workgroup culture, which fosters (1) ideological reframing, recalibrating, and refocusing and (2) selective social comparisons and differential weighting of outsiders' views. These defense mechanisms transform the meaning of “dirt” and moderate the impact of social perceptions of dirtiness.

Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance

Abstract: Recent studies have documented that performance in a domain is hindered when individuals feel that a sociocultural group to which they belong is negatively stereotyped in that domain. We report that implicit activation of a social identity can facilitate as well as impede performance on a quantitative task. When a particular social identity was made salient at an implicit level, performance was altered in the direction predicted by the stereotype associated with the identity. Common cultural stereotypes hold that Asians have superior quantitative skills compared with other ethnic groups and that women have inferior quantitative skills compared with men. We found that Asian-American women performed better on a mathematics test when their ethnic identity was activated, but worse when their gender identity was activated, compared with a control group who had neither identity activated. Cross-cultural investigation indicated that it was the stereotype, and not the identity per se, that influenced performance.

Shaping a Professional Identity: Stories of Educational Practice

Abstract: This volume extends the authors' work on personal practical knowledge as the way through which teachers hone their craft - Teachers' Professional Knowledge Landscapes. They examine the question of how professional identities are formed.

Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste

Abstract: Despite the criticisms of subcultural theory as a framework for the sociological study of the relationship between youth, music, style and identity, the term `subculture' continues to be widely used in such work. It is a central contention of this article that, as with subcultural theory, the concept of `subculture' is unworkable as an objective analytical tool in sociological work on youth, music and style - that the musical tastes and stylistic preferences of youth, rather than being tied to issues of social class, as subculture maintains, are in fact examples of the late modern lifestyles in which notions of identity are `constructed' rather than `given', and `fluid' rather than `fixed'. Such fluidity, I maintain, is also a characteristic of the forms of collective association which are built around musical and stylistic preference. Using Maffesoli's concept of tribus (tribes) and applying this to an empirical study of the contemporary dance music in Britain, I argue that the musical and stylistic sens...

The Discursive Construction of National Identities

Abstract: The concept of the nation as an imagined community has gained importance in the relevant literature during the last decade. How do we construct national identities in discourse? Which topics, which discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one hand, and differences to other national collectives on the other hand? These questions were investigated in our study on the Austrian nation and identity. Taking several current social scientific approaches as our point of departure, we have developed a method of description and analysis of these phenomena which has applications beyond the discursive production of national identity in the specific Austrian example studied. By focusing particularly on the discursive construction of (national) sameness, this study has broken new ground in discourse-historical analysis, which until now has mainly been concerned with the analysis of the discursive construction of difference.

Identity Development: Adolescence through Adulthood

Abstract: Preface PART I. INTRODUCTION Perspectives on Identity Origins of Identity: Erik Erikson Contemporary Approaches to Identity: An Overview Key Similarities and Differences Across Identity Models Back to the Beginning PART II. ADOLESCENCE Identity in Early Adolescence Intersection of Biological, Psychological, and Societal Influences on Identity in Early Adolescence: An Overview Coming to Terms With Pubertal Change: Identity Implications Timing of Pubertal Change: Identity Implications Identity and Sexuality Contexts Affecting Early Adolescent Identity Development Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions Identity in Mid-Adolescence Intersection of Biological, Psychological, and Societal Influences on Identity in Mid-Adolescence: An Overview Identity and Sexuality Identity and Vocation Identity and Meaningful Values Contexts Affecting Mid-Adolescent Identity Development Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions Identity in Late Adolescence Intersection of Biological, Psychological, and Societal Influences on Identity in Late Adolescence: An Overview The Second Separation-Individuation Process and Identity Formation The Beginnings of Intimacy Actualizing Vocational Directions Identity, Meaningful Values, and Personality Contexts Affecting Late Adolescent Identity Development Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions Selected Identity Issues of Adolescence Identity and Adoption Identity and Unemployment Identity and Ethnicity Identity and Residential Relocation Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions PART III. ADULTHOOD Identity in Early Adulthood Intersection of Biological, Psychological, and Societal Influences on Identity in Early Adulthood: An Overview The Course of Identity in Early Adulthood The Contents of Identity in Early Adulthood Identity and Intimacy in Early Adulthood Identity and Generativity in Early Adulthood Contexts Affecting Early Adult Identity Development Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions Identity in Middle Adulthood Intersection of Biological, Psychological, and Societal Influences on Identity in Middle Adulthood: An Overview The Course of Identity in Middle Adulthood The Contents of Identity in Middle Adulthood Identity and Generativity in Middle Adulthood Contexts Affecting Identity Development During Middle Adulthood Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions Identity in Late Adulthood Intersection of Biological, Psychological, and Societal Influences on Identity in Late Adulthood: An Overview The Course of Identity in Late Adulthood The Contents of Identity in Late Adulthood Identity and Integrity in Late Adulthood Contexts Affecting Identity in Late Adulthood Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions Selected Identity Issues of Adulthood Identity and Loss of an Intimate Relationship Identity and Infertility Identity and Threats to Physical Integrity Identity and Coming to Terms With Death Back to the Beginning Answers to Chapter Questions PART IV. EPILOGUE References Author Index Subject Index About the Author

Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory

Abstract: "Language ideologies" refers to the representation, whether explicit or implicit, of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. This collection of essays examines definitions and conceptions of language in a wide range of settings, focusing on how such defining activity organizes individuals, institutions, and the relationships between them. The contributors look at language and its role in such fundamental social institutions as religious ritual, child socialization, gender relations, the nation-state, schooling and the law, and in doing so, link language to larger issues of identity, aesthetics, morality, and epistemology. This will be the first collection of work in this rapidly growing field.

Linguistic minorities and modernity : a sociolinguistic ethnography

Abstract: Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Chapter 1: The Transformation of Linguistic Minorities 1. The voyage: language, identity and hyper-modernity 1.1 The 'voyageurs' 1.2 Linguistic minorities 2. Language and nationalism 3. A sociolinguistic ethnography 4. L'Ecole Champlain 5. The structure of the book Chapter 2: 'L'Unite dans la diversite' 1. Introduction 2. 1968: Schooling and minority language rights 3. The consequences of mobilization 4. Champlain and the politics of equity (1991-1994) 5. Champlain's 25th anniversary celebrations Chapter 3: Norms and Contradictions 1. Introduction 2. The social organization of linguistic monitoring 3. The construction and management of a monolingual ideal 4. 'La qualite de la langue' 5. Normativity and strategic ambiguity Chapter 4: Being Bilingual 1. Playing the game 2. Luc, Luke and Sandra 3. Bilingual rule 4. 'Les Quebecois' 5. 'Je ne comprenais rien' 6. Conclusion Chapter 5: Girls and Boys 1. Gender and public space 2. Studs and Juliettes 3. Ways in and ways out 4. The 'Nerds' 5. Conclusion Chapter 6: Periphery to Centre 1. Voices from the margins 2. The phat boy 3. A View from Africa 4. Music and consciousness 5. The Angels 6. A hip-hop school Chapter 7: The Distribution of Linguistic Capital 7.1 L'Ecole Champlain and the politics of identity 7.2 Bilingualism, language norms and social selection 7.3 Discourse at school and other sites Bibliography Author Index Subject Index

Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State

Abstract: Borders are where wars start, as Primo Levi once wrote. But they are also bridges - that is, sites for ongoing cultural exchange. Anyone studying how nations and states maintain distinct identities while adapting to new ideas and experiences knows that borders provide particularly revealing windows for the analysis of 'self' and 'other'. In representing invisible demarcations between nations and peoples who may have much or very little in common, borders exert a powerful influence and define how people think as well as what they do. Without borders, whether physical or symbolic, nationalism could not exist, nor could borders exist without nationalism. Surprisingly, there have been very few systematic or concerted efforts to review the experiences of nation and state at the local level of borders. Drawing on examples from the US and Mexico, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Spain and Morocco, as well as various parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, this timely book offers a comparative perspective on culture at state boundaries. The authors examine the role of the state, ethnicity, transnationalism, border symbols, rituals and identity in an effort to understand how nationalism informs attitudes and behaviour at local, national and international levels. Soldiers, customs agents, smugglers, tourists, athletes, shoppers, and prostitutes all provide telling insights into the power relations of everyday life and what these relations say about borders. This overview of the importance of borders to the construction of identity and culture will be an essential text for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, nationalism and immigration studies.

Active location in teachers' construction of their professional identities

Abstract: Identity as a teacher is partly given and partly achieved by active location in social space. Social space is an array of possible relations that one person can have to others. Some of these relations are conferred by inherited social structures and categorizations and some are chosen or created by the individual. Sets of practices (traditions) convey possibilities within social space. The development of a teacher's professional identity is largely dependent on the quality and availability of these varied factors. This paper identifies the craft, scientific, moral and artistic traditions as significant in educational practice. Although current trends emphasize a narrow aspect of the craft tradition and the technology of teaching, the multi-dimensional nature of teaching is recognized. Teachers need to be aware of many potential positions they might assume. Policies that impose greater degrees of uniformity and conformity threaten to impoverish the notion of active location.

Trust and commitment through self-verification.

Abstract: This research examines how self-processes and trust influence the development of commitment in society, thereby making social order possible. The central thesis is that the process ofself-verification leads directly and indirectly, through positive emotions and trust, to the development of committed relationships, positive emotional attachments, and a group orientation; all of these are characteristics of a stable social structure. At the same time, self-verification results in the accomplishment of the meaning structures and resource flows that define social structures. In the current study, we test the self-verification-commitment process with respect to the spousal identity for newly married couples during the first three years of their marriage. The results support the central thesis and underscore the importance of self-processes and trust in building and maintaining social structure.

Towards a Paradigm for Research on Social Representations

Abstract: Based on Moscovici’s (1961) classical study on the cultivation of psychoanalytic ideas in France in the 1950’s and our own research on modern biotechnology, we propose a paradigm for researching social representations. Following a consideration of the nature of representations and of the ‘iconoclastic suspicion’ that haunts them, we propose a model of the emergence of meaning relating three elements: subjects, objects, and projects. The basic unit of analysis is the elongated triangle of mediation (SOPS): subject 1, object, project, and subject 2, captured in the image of a ‘Toblerone’. Such social units cultivate, that is produce, circulate and receive representation which may be embodied in four modes–habitual behaviour, individual cognition, informal communication and formal communication–and in three mediums–words, visual images or non-linguistic sounds. We propose an operational definition of a ‘social representation’ as the comparison of four characteristics of communication systems: the content structures (anchorings and objectifications; core and peripheral elements), the typified processes (diffusion, propagation, propaganda etc.), and their functions (identity, attitude, opinion, resistance, ideology etc.), within the context of segmented social milieus. Seven implications for research on social representations are outlined: (1) content and process; (2) segmentation by social milieus rather than taxonomies; (3) cultivation studies within social milieus; (4) multi-method (mode and medium) analysis; (5) time structures and longitudinal data; (6) the crossover of cultural projects and trajectories; (7) the disinterested research attitude. This ideal type paradigm leads to an operational clarification to identify new research questions, and to guide the design and evaluation of studies on social representations.

Charting New Directions for Marketing

Abstract: Four fundamental issues serve to establish the identity of the field of marketing, distinguish it from other fields and disciplines, and compel further research inquiry. These issues ask (1) How do...

Identity in Organizations: Building Theory Through Conversations

Abstract: The book ‘Identity in Organizations: Building Theory Through Conversations,’ edited by David A. Whetten and Paul C. Godfrey, is a useful and interesting foray into one community's conversation about identity and identifications and organizations. The book is organized into three different parts, each engaging ideas of identity from a different perspective. In Part I the authors look at what organizational identity means, trying to approach it from a more traditional macro-organizational theory perspective. Part II authors discuss identity in light of the question of what identity implies for strategy. Finally, in Part III of the book, the authors wrestle with the question of how people identify with organizations.

All our relations : native struggles for land and life

Abstract: W inona LaDuke (Anishanaabeg) is a high-profile environmental activist, director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, and most recently Ralph Nader’s Green Party vice presidential candidate. LaDuke’s 1999 nonfiction book All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life consists of overviews of eight distinct native land and environmental struggles taking place in North America and Hawai’i. This book conveys not only her philosophy about the colonial politics of tribal land struggle, but also her own contribution to the tribal identity, culture, and governance wars that currently rage in Indian Country. In keeping with LaDuke’s numerous articles, documented speeches, and interviews, All Our Relations presents a very narrow definition of authentic tribal or indigenous identity, relies on simplistic traditionalist rhetoric emerging from the identity wars, and then conditions legitimate tribal governance on the restrictive definition of authentic indigenity that she assumes her readers will innately accept to be true. All Our Relations has received praise from critics who evidence little complexity in their understanding of the history and politics of Indian Country. The overarching theme of this book seems to be to present LaDuke’s particular brand of native environmentalist as the true and noble native. These natives reject every last assimilationist trapping of modern life—their cultural practices undaunted by the white man’s laws and practices. However, beyond anecdotal references about rejection of brand-name and other nontraditional clothing choices, there is little substantive detail about how a traditionalist life is undaunted by outside influences. Traditionalism is nebulously defined and fits within a picture of a visually uncomplicated life:

Understanding Party Identification: A Social Identity Approach

Abstract: Social identity theory holds that individuals derive their self-concept from knowledge of their membership in a group (or groups) and that they place value and emotional significance on that group membership, with resulting perceptual and attitudinal biases. Individuals favor the in-group to which they belong which they define against a relevant out-group. In this study, a partisan social identity scale was used to reinterpret perceptual features of partisanship through the lens of social identity theory. The social identity of political independents was also examined in an effort to explain the anomalous behavior and identity of partisan leaners. Social identity theory provided a viable alternative framework for understanding the common bipolarity of perceptions regarding the two major U.S. political parties. In addition, an independent social identification may, in part, explain the identity of partisan leaners.

Faithfulness and Identity in Prosodic Morphology

Abstract: 2. Correspondence Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2.1 The Role and Character of Correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2.2 Some Constraints on Correspondent Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.3 Correspondence Theory and the P ARSE/FILL Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Becoming Black: Rap and Hip Hop, Race, Gender, Identity, and the Politics of ESL Learning.

Abstract: This article is about the impact of becoming Black on ESL learning, that is, the interrelation between identity and learning. It contends that a group of French-speaking immigrant and refugee continental African youths who are attending an urban Franco-Ontarian high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada, enters a social imaginary—a discursive space in which they are already imagined, constructed, and thus treated as Blacks by hegemonic discourses and groups. This imaginary is directly implicated in whom the students identify with (Black America), which in turn influences what and how they linguistically and culturally learn. They learn Black stylized English, which they access in hip-hop culture and rap lyrical and linguistic styles. This critical ethnography, conducted within an interdisciplinary framework, shows that ESL is neither neutral nor without its politics and pedagogy of desire and investment.

`Ours is the Way of God': Religion, Identity, And Intergroup Conflict

Abstract: According to social identity theory, identity competition plays a central role in the inception and escalation of intergroup conflict, even when economic and political factors also are at play. Individual and group identity competition is considered a byproduct of individuals' efforts to satisfy basic human needs, including various psychological needs. Religions often serve these psychological needs more comprehensively and potently than other repositories of cultural meaning that contribute to the construction and maintenance of individual and group identities. Religions frequently supply cosmologies, moral frameworks, institutions, rituals, traditions, and other identity-supporting content that answers to individuals' needs for psychological stability in the form of a predictable world, a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and even self-actualization. The peculiar ability of religion to serve the human identity impulse thus may partially explain why intergroup conflict so frequently occurs along religious...

Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: The limits of performativity

Abstract: This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of Judith Butler's concept of 'performativity'. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and post-structuralist geographers have incorporated performativity into their work on the intersections between gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place. Yet few have explicitly undertaken a close and critical reading of Butler's theory. The author argues that performativity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (i.e. abstracted as a subject position in a given discourse) and thus provides no space for theorizing conscious reflexivity, negotiation or agency in the doing of identity. Butler posits a subject abstracted from personal, lived experience as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness. Uncritically transcribing this abstracted subject into geography limits how we can conceptualize the linkages between emerging identities, social change and spatially-embedded, intentional human practice. ...

Identity development during the transition to motherhood: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

Abstract: This paper illustrates the development of a theoretical model of how aspects of a woman's sense of identity can be transformed during the transition to motherhood. The study is idiographic and primarily qualitative and is grounded in the detailed case-studies of individual women going through the transition, prioritizing their own accounts of the experience. The study employs an interpretative phenomenological analysis of interviews, diaries and repertory grids. The paper presents a processual model of the transition. Key components of the model attend to the women's perception of their social roles. It suggests that during pregnancy a woman's focus may turn from the public world of work towards the more local world of family and friends. This shift may help with the woman's preparation for the new role she is taking on and may furthermore contribute to a transformation of the woman's subsequent life plans. Examples from the women's accounts illustrate each component of the model The theoretical ...

New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research

Abstract: Gendered linguistic practices emerge as people engage in social practices that construct them not only as girls or boys, women or men ‐ but also as, e.g., Asian American or heterosexually active. Adequate generalizations about gendered language use and explanations of such generalizations require understanding the place of particular linguistic practices in the life of what Lave & Wenger 1991 and Wenger 1998 call a Community of Practice: a group whose joint engagement in some activity or enterprise is sufficiently intensive to give rise over time to a repertoire of shared practices. Eckert’s ethnographic /sociolinguistic work (1989, 1999) in preadolescent and adolescent communities of practice illustrates ways in which gender and other aspects of identity are co-constructed. We use these and other sociolinguistic data to suggest some of the many different kinds of generalizations, emerging from studies of language and gender, that look to communities of practice. (Community of Practice, gender, variation, social practice, local meaning, ethnographic sociolinguistics, identity construction) At lunchtime in the spring of 1997, in an ethnically very heterogeneous junior high school in northern California, a crowd of Asian-American kids hangs out in a spot that is generally known in the school as “Asian Wall.” Girls stand around in their high platform shoes, skinny bell-bottoms, and very small T-shirts, with hips cocked. As they toss their heads, their long sleek black hair (in some cases tinted brown) swishes across their waists, the slimness of which is emphasized by shiny belts. Some of them talk to, some lean on, quiet-demeanored boys with Language in Society28, 185‐201. Printed in the United States of America

The Interdependence of Israeli and Palestinian National Identities: The Role of the Other in Existential Conflicts

Abstract: The interactions between identity groups engaged in a protracted conflict lack the conditions postulated by Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) as necessary if contact is to reduce intergroup prejudice. The article examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from this perspective. After summarizing the history of the conflict, it proposes that a long-term resolution of the conflict requires development of a transcendent identity for the two peoples that does not threaten the particularistic identity of each. The nature of the conflict, however, impedes the development of a transcendent identity by creating a state of negative interdependence between the two identities such that asserting one group's identity requires negating the identity of the other. The resulting threat to each group's identity is further exacerbated by the fact that each side perceives the other as a source of some of its own negative identity elements, especially a view of the self as victim and as victimizer. The article concludes with a discussion of ways of over-coming the negative interdependence of the two identities by drawing on some of the positive elements in the relationship, most notably the positive interdependence between the two groups that exists in reality. Problem-solving workshops represent one setting for equal-status interactions that provide the parties the opportunity to “negotiate” their identities and to find ways of accommodating the identity of the other in their own identity.

Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology

Abstract: This paper explores relations between “identity” and “self”—concepts that tend to be approached separately in anthropological discourse. In the conceptualization of the self, the “Western” self, characterized as autonomous and egocentric, is generally taken as a point of departure. Non‐Western (concepts of) selves—the selves of the people anthropology traditionally studies—are defined by the negation of these qualities. Similar to anthropological conceptualizations of identity, this understanding of non‐Western selves points exclusively to elements shared with others and not to individual features. Consequently, anthropological discourse diverts attention from actual individuals and selves. A different approach is exemplified by a case from northern Pakistan in a social setting characterized by a plurality of contradictory identities. It is argued that an analysis of how a particular individual acts in situations involving contradictory identities requires a concept of a self as it emerges from the action...

Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Abstract: Not simply an "event" or merely an "incident, " the 1962 standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba was a crisis, which subsequently has achieved almost mythic significance in the annals of U.S. foreign policy. Jutta Weldes asks why this occurrence in particular should be cast as a crisis, and how this so significantly affected "the national interest." Here, Weldes analyzes the so-called Cuban missile crisis as a means to rethink the idea of national interest, a notion central to both the study and practice of international relations.Why did the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba constitute a crisis for U.S. state officials and thus a dire threat to U.S. national interests? It was, Weldes suggests, more a matter of discursive construction than of objective facts or circumstances. Drawing on social theory and on concepts from cultural studies, she exposes the "realities" of the crisis as social creations in the service of a particular and precarious U.S. state identity defined within the Cold War U.S. "security imaginary." Constructing National Interests shows how this process allowed for a redefining of the identities, interests, and likely actions of various states, so that it seemed to logically serve the U.S. national interest in removing the missiles from Cuba.