Identity Game

9 GROUPS AND CATEGORIES

Individual identification emphasises uniquely embodied differentiation. During primary and subsequent socialisation, in everyday interaction and in institutionalised labelling practices, individuals identify themselves and are identified by others, in terms that distinguish them from other individuals. Individual identification is, however, necessarily about simi- larity too. Selfhood, for example, is a way of talking about the similarity or consistency over time of particular embodied humans. And, as Simmel understood (1955), public individuality in the interaction order is, at least in part, an expression of each person’s idiosyncratic combination of collective identifications.

Collective identification, on the other hand, evokes powerful imagery of people who are in some respect(s) apparently similar to each other. People must have something intersubjectively significant in common – no matter how vague, apparently unimportant or apparently illusory – before we can talk about their membership of a collectivity. However, this similarity cannot be recognised without simultaneously evoking differentiation. Logically, inclusion entails exclusion, if only by default. To define the criteria for membership of any set of objects is, at the same time, also to create a boundary, everything beyond which does not belong.

It is no different in the human world: one of the things that we have in common is our difference from others. In the face of their difference our similarity often comes into focus. Defining ‘us’ involves defining a range of ‘thems’ also. When we say something about others we are often saying something about ourselves. In the human world, similarity and difference are always functions of a point of view: our similarity is their difference and

vice versa. Similarity and difference reflect each other across a shared boundary. At the boundary, we discover what we are in what we are not, and vice versa.

Even when the matter is expressed as superficially as this, it is possible to see an internal–external dialectic of identification at work collectively, and to begin to understand how the same basic processual model of the construction of identity may be applicable to individuals and to collec- tivities. This is not to say individuals and collectivities are the same. They clearly are not (Jenkins 2002a: 81–84). It is, rather, to suggest that there may be much to learn from exploring the processual similarities and differences between individual and collective identification.

UNDERSTANDING COLLECTIVITY

Collectivity and collective identifications are vital building blocks in the conceptual frameworks of sociology and social anthropology (social psychology, as we shall see later in this chapter, is somewhat different). Without some way of talking about them, we can’t think sociologically about anything. Even the intimacies of selfhood incorporate identifications such as gender, ethnicity and kinship which, whatever else they are, are also definitively collective. However, although the ‘individual’ is an easy enough notion to grasp – in the sense that the human world is peopled by real bodies that are also persons – a ‘collectivity’ is more abstract and elusive. So what might ‘collectivity’ mean?

Similarity among and between a plurality of persons – according to whatever criteria – is the clearest image of the collective that I have offered so far. In sociology and social anthropology it is generally taken for granted that a collectivity is a plurality of individuals who either see themselves as similar or have in common similar behaviour and circumstances. The two facets of collectivity are often conceptualised together: collective self- identification derives from similar behaviour and circumstances, or vice versa. This understanding of collectivities dominated sociology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and still informs much contemporary social theory. It underpins most, if not all, attempts to apply models of causality to the human world, allowing regularities in behaviour to be translated into the principles which are believed to produce that behaviour.

It also exposes a major fault-line within social theory: between an approach which prioritises people’s own understandings of their inter- personal relationships and another which looks for and classifies behavioural patterns from a perspective which is outside the context in question.

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Somewhat crudely, this is the difference between the Verstehen of Weber and Simmel, and the positivism of Durkheim, between ‘the cultural’ and ‘the social’ (Nadel 1951: 75–87), and between ‘subjectivism’ and ‘objectivism’ (Bourdieu 1977, 1990).

This might suggest that there are two different types of collectivity, and hence two different modes of collective identification. In the first, the members of a collectivity can identify themselves as such: they know who (and what) they are. In the second, members may be ignorant of their membership or even of the collectivity’s existence. The first exists inasmuch as it is recognised by its members; the second is constituted in its recog- nition by observers. Nadel is, however, correct to emphasise (1951: 80) that these are not two different kinds of collectivity. They are, rather, different ways of looking at interaction, at ‘individuals in co-activity’. He is equally right to insist that neither is more ‘real’ or concrete than the other: both are abstractions from data about ‘co-activity’. These different kinds of abstraction provide the basis for the fundamental conceptual distinction between groups and categories:

category. A class whose nature and composition is decided by the person who defines the category; for example, persons earning wages in a certain range may be counted as a category for income tax pur- poses. A category is therefore to be contrasted with a group, defined by the nature of the relations between the members.

(Mann 1983: 34)1

This is a methodological distinction – expressed in social psychology, for example, in the contrast between sociological categories and psychological reference groups (Turner and Bourhis 1996: 28) – which constitutes the human world as a manageable object for empirical inquiry and theoretical analysis. Whether a collectivity is seen as a group or a category is a con- sequence of how it is defined. However, since in each case the definition is that of the observer, the difference is less clear than it appears. By this token a group is simply defined sociologically according to a more specific criterion – mutual recognition on the part of its members – than a category, which may, in principle at least, be defined arbitrarily, according to any criteria.

At this point Bourdieu’s strictures against substituting ‘the reality of the model’ for ‘the model of reality’ (1977: 29) are worth considering. He warns – as indeed does Nadel – against the reification of interaction, against the linked fallacies of misplaced concreteness and misplaced precision. We should beware, for example, of investing collectivities with the kind

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of substance or agency with which embodiment allows us to endow individuals (something that was discussed in the context of Brubaker’s recent critique of the concept of the ‘group’ in Chapter 1). It is not that collectivities lack reality or the capacity to do things – if that were so they would be of little sociological interest – but they differ in these respects from individuals. Similarly, the boundedness of a collectivity is different in kind from the bodily integrity of an individual. Where a collectivity begins and ends is not mappable using the sociometric equivalent of a dressmaker’s tape. Nadel and Bourdieu also remind us that our necessarily systematised and carefully drafted view of the human world is, after all, just that, a view. It is a necessarily abstract and simplified view, which we should not mistake for reality; and, what is more, it is a view that is always from a point of view.

However, groups and categories are not just sociological abstractions. Social scientists have no monopoly over processes of definition and abstraction, of identification. Sociologists engage in the identification of collectivities, but so does everyone else, in a range of everyday discourses and practices of identification. The sociological definition of ‘group’, above, explicitly recognises this. Group identity is the product of collective internal definition. In our relationships with significant others we draw upon iden- tifications of similarity and difference, and, in the process, generate group identities. At the same time, our self-conscious group memberships signify others and create relationships with them.

Thus categorisation, no less than group identification, is a generic interactional process, in this case of collective external definition. I have, for example, already suggested that the identification of others – their definition according to criteria of our adoption (which they may neither accept nor recognise) – is often part of the process of identifying ourselves. More generally, categorisation is a routine and necessary contribution to how we make sense of, and impute predictability to, a complex human world of which our knowledge is always limited, and in which our knowledge of other humans is often particularly limited. Our ability to identify unfamiliar individuals as members of known categories allows us at least the illusion that we may know what to expect of them. This is the specialist concern of a branch of ethnomethodology that is concerned with the study of ‘membership categorisation’ (Eglin and Hester 2003; Housley and Fitzgerald 2002; Leudar et al. 2004; Stokoe 2003).So, although in the strictest of senses groups and categories exist only in the eye of the socio- logical beholder, the conceptual distinction between them mirrors generic interactional processes, external and internal moments of collective iden- tification: group identification on the one hand, categorisation on the other.

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This means that groups and categories are something more than products of the sociological imagination. But what?

THE POWERS OF CATEGORISATION

It is an article of sociological faith for all but the most obdurate positivists that if people think that something is real it is, if nothing else, real in terms of the action that it produces and in its consequences. Therefore it is ‘socially’ and intersubjectively real. Deriving from W. I. Thomas at Chicago in the early decades of this century, this injunction recommends that sociologists not bother themselves too much with ontology and get on instead with the pragmatic business of trying to understand the inter- subjective realities in terms of which people act. How people define the situation(s) in which they find themselves is thus among the most important of sociological data.

From this point of view, a group is intersubjectively ‘real’. Group members, in recognising themselves as such, effectively constitute that to which they believe they belong. In the first instance processes of internal collective definition bring a group into existence, in being identified by its members and in the relationships between them. However, a group that was recognised only by its members – a secret group – would have a very limited presence in the human world. What’s more, its discovery (and categorisation) by others would be perpetually immanent. Furthermore, even if secrecy were maintained, such a group would necessarily be shaped to some extent by the categorising gaze of others: one of its identifying features in the eyes of its members would be precisely its freedom from external recognition. Thus categorisation by others is part of the reality of any and every group.

A category, however, is less straightforward, since its members need not be aware of their collective identification. Here we must focus on consequences. Can the extreme case – a category that is unrecognised by those who are identified by others as belonging to it, and which has no impact upon their lives – be said to have any reality? Such cases are not common; a category is not generally a secret to its members. But there is no reason why it could not be. Among the obvious possible examples are the classificatory schema of the social sciences.2 These are often distant from the people to whom they refer, and their uses apparently arcane and remote.

It seems unlikely, for example, that anthropological debates concerning the Nilotic peoples of the southern Sudan – about whether ‘the Nuer’ are a definite collectivity in their own right, whether ‘the Nuer’ and ‘the Dinka’

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are separate collectivities, whether one is the other, or which one is which (Burton 1981; Hutchinson 1995; Newcomer 1972; Southall 1976) – have been audible to Dinka or Nuer themselves or have had any consequences for their lives. A similar point could be made about sociological debates concerning the categorisation of populations in terms of social class (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993; Goldthorpe and Hope 1974; Marshall et al. 1988; Savage 2000; Stewart et al. 1980; Wright 1985, 1989). It doesn’t seem likely that technicians, for example, spend much time pondering whether they are members of the ‘service class’, the ‘non-manual working class’ or some other analytical category.

However, these examples oblige us to return to an issue originally raised in Chapter 1 and ask whether categorisation can ever be disinter- ested. In the first place, neither example is wholly divorced from the people who are the objects of the classificatory exercise: ‘Nuer’ and ‘Dinka’ are locally recognised identities in Sudan, are part of the present political landscape (embroiled in the conflict between the Khartoum regime and the south) and earlier had resonance for colonial government (who also tried to ‘pacify’ them). Similarly, people in industrialised societies routinely identify themselves according to class, and those identifications have implications for everything from voting to courtship, housing and schooling choices – or their absence – and policing patterns. The precise ways in which these categories are defined and refined may not be part of the local common knowledge of the people to whom they are applied, but the categories themselves are locally grounded. They are not secrets to their members.

The role of categorisation in the production of disciplinary power is also worth considering. Foucault (1970, 1980), Hacking (1990) and Rose (1989) argue that the categorising, or classificatory, procedures of the social sciences are part of the bureaucratic practices of government of the modern state, and thus not wholly disinterested. Scientific notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ derive their epistemological power in part from their ground- ing in procedures of categorisation. In turn, assumptions of objectivity and truth underpin the bureaucratic rationality that is the framework of the modern state. The categorisation of individuals and populations that is the stock in trade of the social sciences is one way in which humans are constituted as objects of government and subjects of the state, via censuses and the like. The reference to taxation in the definition of ‘category’ quoted earlier was apposite. More pointedly, ‘objective’ knowledge about the human world provides one basis – whether that is its rationale or not – for the policing of families and the private sphere which characterises the modern state (Donzelot 1980; Meyer 1983).

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So, even the most apparently aloof categorisation is only apparently so. Whether directly, via the commissioning, direction and use of social science research by the state or other agencies, or indirectly, via the contribution of theory and research to the fecundity and potency of the categorical point of view of government (Foucault’s ‘governmentality’), categorising people is always potentially an intervention in their lives, and often more.3

Although they may not be aware of their categorisation, that they have been categorised is always at least immanently consequential for a category’s members.

It’s more common that people know that they have been lumped together in the eyes of others, but aren’t aware, or fully aware, of the content and implications of that categorisation. A category may be recognised by its membership without its implications for their lives being clear or obvious to them. We have probably all had the experience of realising that we are being categorised in a particular fashion – in a new workplace, perhaps, or on moving into a new neighbourhood – without knowing what this means in terms of the responses or expectations of others. Imbalances of this kind may be thoroughly institutionalised. Policies such as ‘normalisation’ and ‘empowerment’ may encourage individuals with learning difficulties, for example, despite their awareness of the general categories ‘retarded’, ‘stupid’, or whatever, to deny that these apply to them (Davies and Jenkins 1996). This consequence may be unintended, but the extent to which those categorisations shape their lives and exacerbate the routine cruelties of the world are nonetheless concealed. Both nominal and virtual are obscured.

This highlights another characteristic of categorisation. Group member- ship is a relationship between members: even if they do not know each other personally, they can recognise each other as members. Membership of a category is not a relationship between members: it doesn’t even necessitate a relationship between categoriser and categorised. Any inter- personal relationships between members of a category only involve them as individuals. Once relationships between members of a category involve mutual recognition of their categorisation, the first steps towards group identification have been taken.

Categorisers are the other side of the coin. Categorisation may be more significant for categoriser(s) than for categorised. Our categories don’t have to be consequentially ‘real’ to the people to whom they refer in order to have consequences for us. Although categorising others is one aspect of identifying ourselves, this need not involve explicit notions of difference vis-à-vis ourselves and those others. Nor need we have any expectations of them. The examples of the Nuer–Dinka, or social class, can help again to

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make the point. The most important themes of these categorisations are not ‘Nuer–Dinka are different from us anthropologists’, or ‘the working class are different from us sociologists’ (although these sub-themes may be present). As aspects of their disciplinary world-views, categorisations such as these do other kinds of identificatory work for anthropologists and sociologists: recently, for example, Brubaker and Cooper (2000; Brubaker 2004: 28–63) used the Nuer case to establish and highlight their own differences from other social theorists of identity. Disagreements over categories may produce boundaries internally, between different ‘sides’ of the argument: in the case of class, for example, competing classificatory schema are associated with intra-disciplinary groupings and sociological feuds of some longevity and bitterness.

Another example may further illustrate what I mean. Style is an arbiter of youth identities in Western industrialised societies. One of the ways in which styles are delineated is through the categorisation of music and musicians. In my youth, for example, questions such as whether white musicians could play the blues, or whether Tamla-Motown counted as soul, had an urgency which seems disproportionate only in retrospect: the answers were a significant part of style and ‘who’s who and what’s what’. Thus the categorisation of others is a resource upon which to draw in the construction of our own identities.

That categorisation has consequences, even if only trivial or immanent ones, returns the discussion to the distinction between the nominal and the virtual. Collective identification also has nominal and virtual dimen- sions. The nominal is how the group or category is defined in discourse, the virtual how its members behave or are treated. As with individual identification these are conceptually distinct. In practice they are chronically implicated in each other, but there is no necessary agreement between them.

SIMULTANEITY AND PROCESS

I argued in Chapter 4 that although the dialectic of internal–external definition might imply sequence – one, then the other – simultaneity is what I am trying to communicate. Collective internal definition is group identification; collective external definition is categorisation. Each is an inter-related moment in the collective dialectic of identification, suggesting that neither comes first and neither exists without the other. But is this actually the case?

Group identification probably cannot exist in a vacuum. Short of imagining an utterly isolated – and implausible – band, small enough to

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lack significant internal sub-groupings, it seems sensible to suggest that groups necessarily exist in relation to other groups: to categorise and to be categorised in turn. Group identification therefore proceeds hand in glove with categorisation. Although it makes figurative sense to talk about groups being constituted ‘in the first instance’ by internal definition – after all, without their members relating to each other, and defining themselves as members, there would be nothing to belong to – this should not be misconstrued literally and chronologically, to mean first group identification, then categorisation.

There may, however, be situations in which group identification is generated by prior categorisation. But although categorisation necessarily conjures up a possible group identity, it doesn’t inevitably create an actual one. Marx understood this when he talked about the difference between a ‘class in itself’ and a ‘class for itself’.4 He argued that the working class is constituted in itself by virtue of the similar situation of workers, their common alienation from the means of production within capitalism. By virtue of their shared situation, workers have similar interests (i.e. things that are in their interest). Marx argued that these interests cannot be realised until workers unite into a class for itself and realise for themselves what their interests are. This, for Marx, signifies the emergence of the working class as a collective historical agent. The process of group identification encourages and is encouraged by class struggle. Subsequent refinements of this model, particularly by Lenin in What Is to Be Done?, emphasised that class struggle would not ‘just happen’ as a consequence of the conflict of interests between classes; it has to be inspired or produced. Hence Lenin’s notion of the ‘vanguard party’, and hence the need for politics.

Whether or not we agree with this, it illustrates my argument. Given appropriate circumstances, groups may come to identify themselves as such because of their initial categorisation by others. The point is that there was no class ‘in itself’ until its common interests were perceived and identified. The categorical constitution of the working class as a class in itself with a situation and interests in common – by socialists and other activists, on the one hand, and, as a ‘dangerous class’, by capitalists and the state, on the other – was a necessary although not a sufficient condition for the birth of the class for itself and, hence, for working-class politics (if not necessarily revolution). Before the working class could act as a class, working people had to recognise that it was – or they were – a class. In this recognition the working class was constituted as a politically effective group.

Distinguishing the necessary from the sufficient suggests that for a category to be defined it must be definable. There has to be something that

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its members share. In principle this can be completely arbitrary. One could, for example, decide that all married persons with in-growing toenails were a category. But would this ever amount to more than an abstract, logical category? To become a category it would at the very least have to be recognised by appreciable numbers of others. In order for that to happen the condition of being married and suffering with in-growing toenails would have to possess some significance to those others. They would have to have an interest in the matter; there would have to be a point to it. In the case of the working class, capitalist wage-labour produced the common interest and the point, without which there would have been nothing ‘in itself’ to recognise. Although categorisation may in principle be arbitrary, it is actually unlikely ever to be so.

People collectively identify themselves and others, and they conduct their everyday lives in terms of those identities, which therefore have practical consequences. They are intersubjectively real. This is as true for categories as for groups. Or, to come closer to the spirit of this discussion, it is as true for categorisation as for group identification, since neither groups nor categories are anything other than emphases within ongoing processes of identification.

Two further points flow from adopting this position. First, collective identities must always be understood as generated simultaneously by group identification and categorisation. How we understand any particular collective identity is an empirical matter, for discovery. In one case group identification may be the dominant theme, in another categorisation; but, as argued above, both will always be present as moments in the dialectic of collective identification, even if only as potentialities. Second, identificatory processes are practices, done by actually existing individuals. There is thus nothing idealist about this argument. Collectivities and collective identities do not just exist ‘in the mind’ or ‘on paper’.

The distinction between groups and categories is an analogue of the general processes of group identification and categorisation. Collective identities are no less processual than individual identities, and group identification and categorisation have practical consequences. Rather than reify groups and categories – as ‘things’ – we should think instead about identities as constituted in the dialectic of collective identification, in the interplay of group identification and categorisation. In any particular case it is empirically a question of the balance between these processes. Group identification always implies categorisation. The reverse is not always the case. Categorisation, however, at least creates group identification as an immanent possibility.

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THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE . . . AGAIN

Groups and categories are fundamental to the social psychology of identity inspired by the work of Henri Tajfel (1970, 1978, 1981a, 1982; Tajfel and Turner 1979). Sometimes these are distinguished from each other in the way that I have distinguished them here: groups are defined by, and meaningful to, their members, while categories are externally defined without any necessary recognition by their members (e.g. Turner and Bourhis 1996: 27–30). More consistently in this approach, however, the distinction between groups and categories is weak and only implicit: a group is an actually existing concrete point of reference for its members, while a category is a collectively defined classification of identity, part of local common knowledge.

Looking for an alternative to the individualism that he saw as prevalent in social psychology and inspired by his earlier research on social percep- tion, Tajfel was concerned to understand prejudice and conflict as something other than inevitable ‘facts of life’ and to reconcile cohesion and differentiation within one model of human group relationships. The resultant ‘social identity theory’, and its immediate development ‘self- categorisation theory’ (Turner 1984; Turner et al. 1987), can be summarised thus:5

• ‘Personal identity’, which differentiates the unique self from all other selves, is different from ‘social identity’, which is the internalisation of, often stereotypical, collective identifications. Social identity is sometimes the more salient influence on individual behaviour.

• Group membership is meaningful to individuals, conferring social identity and permitting self-evaluation. It is a shared representation of who one is and the appropriate behaviour attached to who one is.

• Group membership in itself, regardless of its context or meaning, is sufficient to encourage members to, for example, discriminate against out-group members. Group members also exaggerate the similarities within the in-group, and the differences between the in-group and out-group.

• Society is structured categorically, and organised by inequalities of power and resources. It is in the translation of social categories into meaningful reference groups that ‘social structure’ influences or produces individual behaviour. Social identity theory focuses on how categories become groups, with the emphasis on inter-group processes.

• Social categorisation generates social identity, which produces social comparisons, which produce positive (or negative) self-evaluation. Universal species-specific processes mediate between social categories and individual behaviour: cognitive simplification, comparison and

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evaluation, and the search for positive self-esteem. These processes bring groups into being.

• The cognitive simplification that is required to manage the information overload produced by a complex world generates stereotypes of collectivities and their members.

• Comparison and evaluation between groups is generically bound up with the establishment and maintenance of in-group distinctiveness, in an interplay of internal similarity and external difference.

• Groups distinguish themselves from, and discriminate against, other groups in order to promote their own positive social evaluation and collective self-esteem.

• Individuals and groups with unsatisfactory social identity seek to restore or acquire positive identification via mobility, assimilation, creativity or competition.

• Moving from inter-group to intra-group matters, self-categorisation theory focuses on the universal psychological processes that produce group cohesion. Accentuating the in–out distinction, self-categorisation as a group member – the internalisation of stereotypes – generates a sense of similarity with other group members, and attractiveness or esteem.

• Individuals, in using stereotypical categories to define themselves thus, bring into being human collective life.

• Individuals will self-categorise themselves differently according to the contexts in which they find themselves and the contingencies with which they are faced.

This is merely a thumbnail sketch of a complex and still growing body of research and literature that has become an established social psychological paradigm in its own right (Brewer and Hewstone 2004; Brown and Capozza 2006; Capozza and Brown 2000; Hogg and Abrams 2003; Robinson 1996; Worchtel et al. 1998). Nor does it do justice to the twists and turns along the way. Tajfel, for example, in his last word on stereotyping (1981b), went beyond cognitive simplification as an explanation, adding the defence or preservation of values, the creation or maintenance of group ideologies, and positive in-group differentiation (see Chapter 12 for a further discussion of stereotyping).

As might be expected, three decades of development have generated considerable debate about ‘social identity theory’, within the approach itself and with external critics. One of the most pertinent issues concerns the empirical underpinnings of Tajfel’s – and Turner’s – foundational propositions. These data derived from explicit, controlled laboratory

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experiments, most characteristically the ‘minimal group’ approach. This method involves typically small, artificial coalitions of subjects, doing tasks in the outcome of which they have no material or other interest. Among the most significant findings here is that, placed in otherwise meaningless groups by an experimenter, research subjects tend to discriminate against members of the experimental out-group, even though they stand to gain or lose nothing by doing so (Tajfel 1970; Tajfel et al. 1971).

Questions have been asked by both supporters and critics about whether ‘social identity theory’ can be generalised beyond its experimental context (e.g. Maass et al. 2000; Skevington and Baker 1989). To stick with the example above it may, for example, be at least partly because a minimal group is a simplified, no lose–no gain situation that experimental subjects discriminate against the out-group in this way. Within the checks and balances of the everyday human world, in which actions have real con- sequences, choices are likely to be more complex (or may not be available at all). More specifically, there are questions about whether the evidence supports generalisations about themes such as inter-group evaluation and bias (Crisp and Hewstone 1999; Hewstone et al. 2002), inter-group nega- tive discrimination (Migdal et al. 1998; Turner and Reynolds 2004), the cognitive simplification effects of stereotyping (Oakes 1996: 98–100) and the maximisation of self-esteem (Abrams and Hogg 2004; Rubin and Hewstone 1998; Wetherell 1996: 277–280).

It is obviously important to be clear, and cautious, about what we can learn from laboratory experiments (which is not the same thing as rejecting them). To a sociologist or social anthropologist, reservations about the minimal-group approach seem to be uncontroversial: ambitious generalisations about large-scale collective processes deriving from the investigation of micro-micro-level situations – whether experimental or not – require considerable modesty in their formulation, even when they are not completely unsafe. This issue has, however, been hard fought and has yet to be accepted by most social psychologists, working as they do in a field in which the experiment is still the gold-standard research design.

From my point of view, there are other criticisms of psychology’s ‘social identity theory’, not least its problematic basic differentiation between personal and social identity (as discussed in previous chapters). The equally fundamental problem of how to differentiate in this approach between its own concepts of social categorisation in general and social identification in particular shouldn’t be underestimated either (McGarty 1999: 190–196). What’s more, despite Tajfel’s original ambitions, ‘social identity theory’ remains an individualist perspective: groups are, at best, taken for

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granted as simplified and reified features of the human landscape, actual interaction is largely ignored, and identification appears to take place solely ‘inside people’s heads’. With respect to interaction, the particular lack of attention to the emergence of identification during talk and other discourse is noteworthy (Antaki and Widdecombe 1998; Billig 1996: 346–351), as is the frequent dependence on assumptions about weakly conceptualised motivational factors such as ‘esteem’, ‘attraction’ and ‘liking’.6

These criticisms aside, some recent writing within this paradigm resonates loudly with the arguments advanced in this book. Deschamps and Devos (1998) have, for example, explored the relationship between similarity and difference and ‘personal’ and ‘social’ identity, while Deaux (2000) has looked at the range of motivations for social identification and the varying intensity of group identification. Abrams’ account (1996) of how, depending on situational factors and goal-orientations, self- identification and self-attention may vary in their salience and interact to produce self-regulation of varying intensity, suggests fruitful lines of inquiry into the hows and whys of identification’s variability. Finally, Ashton et al.’s review (2004) of the range of ways in which individuals do collective identification points to fruitful possibilities for work across disciplinary boundaries.

Specific research findings aside, important general themes running through this approach support the model of identification that I am exploring and advocating here:

• In the general spirit of earlier theorists such as Mead ‘social identity theory’ offers a vision of identification as rooted in basic and generic human processes, part of our species-specific nature.

• The minimal group experiments suggest that group identification is one of those generic processes and is in itself a powerful influence on human behaviour.

• These experiments further suggest that categorisation, in my definition – i.e. external identification, the process of placing people, in this case arbitrarily, into collectivities – is also an important generic process, which can contribute to group identification.

• The approach understands collective identification as not just an internal group matter, but as coming into being in the context of inter-group relations: thus groups identify themselves against, and in their relationships with, other groups.

• ‘Social identity theory’ also recognises that collective identifications are real for individuals – that they mean something in real experience – and seeks to understand how that reality works.

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• ‘Self-categorisation theory’ acknowledges the situational variability of identification.

• There is a general appreciation of the necessary interplay within identification of similarity and difference.

• Although not well thought through, the significance for identification of the distinction between groups and categories is acknowledged.

• Finally, the emphasis – certainly in Tajfel’s own writings – on power and inequality, while it may be underdeveloped, is an important reminder of the realities of the human world.

With benefit of considerable hindsight, one of the striking things about this school of thought is its apparent isolation from scholarship outside social psychology that, some time before Tajfel’s seminal state- ments, outlined a vision of how identification works which, in some of its fundamentals at least, resembles ‘social identity theory’. As I shall discuss in Chapter 10, during the 1960s Fredrik Barth, standing on the shoulders of earlier anthropologists and sociologists (not least Goffman), began to put together some very similar propositions. The resultant shift in the understanding of ethnicity and other collective identifications – the establishment of what I have elsewhere called ‘the basic anthro- pological model’ (Jenkins 2008) – seems to have been unnoticed by Tajfel and his associates, despite its conceptual harmony with much of what they were saying.

I doubt that this was mainly due to ‘academic trade barriers’ on the part of social psychologists eager to establish a distinctive niche for them- selves within their discipline (Condor 1996: 309–310). Probably more to the point are personal factors, the nature of the discipline in question, and the power of normal science. Reading his own words and what his ex-students say about him – even when, like Billig (1996), they now seem to be at odds with much of his intellectual legacy – Tajfel’s influence as a teacher and that of the force and direction of his intellectual leadership shine through. He seems to have been trying to establish a dis- tinctive school of thought. The context for that project was an academic disciplinary field, psychology, in which natural science, rooted in the laboratory, held sway (even today, ‘humanist’ approaches remain a peripheral minority interest, often located outside mainstream psychology departments). Tajfel himself was committed to the natural science model: it isn’t obvious that anthropology, for example, or the work of Goffman would have interested him. Finally, once established, the social identity and social categorisation theorists pursued their work within a taken for granted normal science paradigm. Most of them don’t seem to have seen

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any need to look elsewhere for ideas: the work they had in hand was enough, and the networks self-sustaining.

Nor, to be fair, should this mini intellectual history single out for comment only the social psychologists. After all, what goes on within groups, and how their members identify themselves, is also a function of what goes on between groups. And there is no evidence that the anthro- pologists showed any interest in, or were aware of, what Tajfel and his followers were doing (almost certainly for reasons similar to those that I have just sketched in). With little communication between the two camps, their relationship, if it can be called that, seems to have been characterised by distance and mutual ignorance rather than stoutly defended boundaries. ‘Trade barriers’ weren’t necessary. Which was a shame: each might have benefited from talking to the other. That they didn’t, however, is no more than might have been expected: they simply got on with doing their own stuff. It’s a tribute to the force of disciplinary identifications and boundaries that, by and large, it’s what they’re still doing today.

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