Date Published:
Dec 1, 2006
Abstract:
As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding
contemporary life. Despite—or perhaps because of—the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences,
the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature’s early promise had suggested. We propose to
solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more
useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies
along two dimensions—content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social
identities may take the form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with
other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the
shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement
about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity
scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity—including discourse analysis, surveys, and content
analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping—we hope to provide
the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well.
Notes:
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