The crisis of 'identity' in high modernity

The concept of 'identity' is central to much contemporary sociology, reflecting 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 reflected 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, fluid, 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.     

Rethinking cynicism: Parrhesiastic practices in contemporary workplaces

Within the social sciences, most studies of transnationalism take the approach that migrants experience a duality between place of origin and place of residence. In that kind of approach, transnationalism refers to a sense of in‐betweenness caused by this duality. The aim of this paper is to show how the activities of an Iranian diaspora organization in Southern California (NIPOC) may seem essentialist at first but can be considered transnational because they transcend the duality of the past/place of origin and the present/place of residence. Through an example of an Iranian festival that is the creation of diaspora, I intend to show how national identity is detached from its assumed link to the nation state or ‘the country of origin’ and placed within a newly created imaginary space of a nation within a nation.     

The comfort of strangers: social work,modernity and late Victorian England—Part I

In these two related articles the history of social work in late Victorian England is understood by aligning it not with self-consciously held ideologies of, say, bourgeois capitalism, patriarchy, evangelical Protestantism, or liberal humanism, but with the complex cultural system of modernity. It is hoped to problematize both the genealogy and the substance of early social work that now so decisively shapes our interpretations of the influences of late Victorian philanthropy. The history of social work has to be treated seriously if we are to properly understand the present day situation in terms of modernity and investigate its orientation more thoroughly. This first paper offers a history of social work which draws attention to the imbrications of a secular modernity and how its governing ideas, texts and discourses of the time influence philanthropy. It examines dominant modernist themes that had a significant impact on the emergence of social work and the important role of the Charity Organization Society. It is suggested that these themes form part of a shared European heritage. Whilst the influences of modernity on social work are likely to have been uneven, there were common conditions faced by people in Europe and shared developments that gave way to the rise of social work in the nineteenth century.     

The comfort of strangers: social work,modernity and late Victorian England—Part II

This is the second of two related articles on the history of social work in late Victorian England. In the previous article I showed that the emergence of social work was best understood by aligning it with the complex cultural system of modernity. In this paper the influence of modernity on the formation of social work is taken further by focusing on the way that regimes of practice were shaped by material, physical and visual elements. A distinctive set of spatio-temporal elements are identified that have hitherto been overlooked in ‘histories of social work’. The paper shows how the power of place, and the power over place in early social work, relates directly to the modern experience of Victorian England while shaping the remit of contemporary social work. Home visits, for example, meant that social workers could for the first time attempt to ‘regulate at a distance’, and involved what is referred to as the ‘domestication of stranger relations’. The paper further explores the way in which the history of social work can benefit from exploring the experience-content of early social workers and how organizational imperatives for charity relief were often formed from the bottom-up during this period. At the end of the paper there are some considerations about the way in which a European approach to the history of social work can be instructive and beneficial.     

Beyond essentialism: negotiating Alevi identity in urban Turkey

In Turkey, the Alevi cultural ‘revival’ of the 1990s has been followed by a multifaceted identity-formation process that involves conflicting religio-cultural agendas, intersecting discourses and differing politico-ideological affiliations. Lacking a focus, this process continues to trigger an enriching public debate on Alevi identity, which has been coined an ‘enigma’ and is considered to be associated with ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’ by many. What lies beneath the veil of ambiguity has to do with the ‘anti-essentialist’ transformation of Alevism, which reaches beyond religious, cultural and political orthodoxies. As a result of diverse political loyalties, contestation of discourses on Alevi culture and identity and the equivocal character of the Alevi subject, the Alevis seem to be resisting essentialism. In urban Turkey, an anti-essentialist discourse potentially influencing Alevism, I argue, enables the Alevi self to act with a sense of reflexivity and to search for ways to avoid political, cultural or religious orthodoxies.     

The role of ethnic identity in school engagement: perceptions of immigrant Tibetan adolescents in select US public schools

This purpose of the study was to ascertain the level of ethnic identity formation and its perceived role on school engagement for Tibetan adolescents enrolled in public schools in two Midwestern states in the USA. The journey of these students from culturally encapsulated schools from Nepal, Bhutan, and India to multiculturally diverse settings was one of the most fascinating facets of the Tibetan Diaspora. Subjects included 16 girls, 25 boys, and 2 who did not identify their gender. The multigroup ethnic identity measure was used to determine the level of ethnic identity formation of Tibetan students while a questionnaire gathered information on school engagement. The overall ethnic identity measure for this sample was high with a mean of 3.58, while the cognitive and affective aspect of the measure was also high with a mean of 3.56 and 3.74, respectively. The girls showed more emotional commitment to ethnic identity, as their mean score was 3.92, while boys scored 3.62. The results clearly corroborated findings and conclusions drawn by other scholars. School and community partnership contributed to the healthy ethnic identity development of adolescents who were thus encouraged to be more engaged in meaningful school activities.     

Beyond pain and protection: politics of identity and iban girls in Korea

This study analyzes the complexities in the exploration of iban girls' identities and the various ways how girls appropriate varied sources such as popular culture to examine the heterogeneousness of identity explorations and rethink the politics of identities. Against the tendency in current discourse on homosexual youth in Korea, protection discourse and pain discourse, the notion of identity itself will be critically examined and the girls' agency in destabilizing heteronormativity will be discussed. This study also deals with the appropriation of popular culture by the girls, suggesting that cultural critiques should reveal complex dynamics in concrete experiences. doi:10.1300/J155v10n03_04.     

Critical Thoughts on American Social Work and the Crisis of Modernity: Lessons From Theory and Current Events

Social work in America is at a curious junction: continue down the status quo path of professionalization or embrace an antagonistic and critical, political stance toward global institutions and the logics of injustice. This article defines the junction as a crisis of modernity wherein the institutions and logics reflecting modernity’s primary forms—capitalism and democracy—suffer material and affective setbacks. The New Social Work Left movement is advocated as a useful response to the crisis of modernity, and initial strategies are offered for fostering a New Social Work Left in the United States.     

The identity and professional culture of the educator at the beginning of the university path in Italy

To work as an educator in Italy has required a specific university degree for only a few years now. This change has institutionalized the educational path regarding some factual knowledge and skills. However, the profession of educator also relates to an experiential culture and to personal motivations affecting and sustaining each individual's choice of the profession. This paper examines the ideas of professional identity held by a group of Italian students at the beginning of their college career. The sample includes two groups at the University of Padua, one group learning to work in social work, one group learning to work in health care. During the first three years of the new academic requirement, first-year students in both groups were qualitatively and quantitatively surveyed. In particular the study explores the reasons students orient towards these curricula, and the distinctive elements, competences, experiences and values they include in their image of an educator. Statistical multi-dimensional methods of data analysis are used.     

The Gargantuan Project and Modernity in Provincial Thailand

Many leaders in Asia have competed to build public goods of superlative size. Focusing on an observation tower in Suphanburi, an agriculture-based rural province of Thailand, this paper shows that a seemingly wasteful and pretentious public project serves as the site where collective pride is forged. The tower, the tallest observation tower in provincial Thailand, has made an otherwise lacklustre and ‘backward’ Suphanburi famous throughout the country. The tower has thus become the unique symbol of Suphanburi's modernity, and many residents have come to identify with it as such. This paper highlights a ceremony held by Banharn Silpa-archa, the creator of the tower and Member of Parliament from Suphanburi, to advertise the distinctiveness of the tower and to mobilise provincial pride around it.     

Class belonging: a quantitative exploration of identity and consciousness

The recent revival in interest in class subjectivity has been largely premised on class belonging as a form of identity, eschewing talk of class-consciousness. Evidence in this debate has been mostly qualitative and focused on specific social groups. This paper uses data from the 2003 British Social Attitudes Survey to map the sense of class belonging in England and to assess the strength of class belonging when placed alongside other social identities, such as gender and nationality. The paper also explores the extent to which class identity could be conceived of as class-consciousness through its links with attitudes to redistribution and workplace relations.     

Beyond liking or following: Understanding public engagement on social networking sites in China

Corporate pages on social networking sites (SNSs) have become the key platform where publics interact with companies and organizations around the world. Focusing on one of the most important world economies, China, this study explored the types of public engagement with corporate pages on leading Chinese SNSs as well as the motivations and antecedents that drive such engagement. Given the participatory and communal nature of SNSs, this study proposed a conceptual model incorporating social media dependency and several social relationship factors, including parasocial interaction, perceived source credibility, and community identification, that influenced Chinese publics’ engagement with companies on SNSs. We conducted a web survey with a random sample of 245 Chinese SNS users to test the proposed model. The results confirm that with the exception of perceived credibility, social media usage and relationship-oriented factors played a significant role in inducing public engagement in China.     

后现代视野中的阿拉伯—伊斯兰传统

后现代仍然是现代性的一部分,只不过是批判性、颠覆性的那一部分。而现代性是根植于西方基督教传统的一种业已意识形态化了的并随着资本主义的全球扩张而渗透到世界各地的观念形态。本文认为,阿拉伯—伊斯兰传统虽然日益受到西方现代性的逼仄,但却仍然是独立于西方现代性之外的、可为思考西方现代性问题提供借鉴的一种文化资源。     

Social Work in Rural New South Wales School Settings: Addressing Inequalities Beyond the School Gate

Children and young people in rural Australia experience disadvantage compared with metropolitan counterparts, with low educational attainment and disengagement from schooling being linked to poorer health outcomes. Schools are an existing contact point between individuals and health services. However, these health services are often overburdened and have limited scope to address broader social issues and teaching staff are focused on achieving curriculum outcomes. Embedding social workers within schools may provide an avenue for supporting students, yet social workers are rarely present in New South Wales public schools. This paper describes a study to determine teachers’ understanding of the socioeconomic issues faced by school students, and the role of the social work profession in addressing such issues as part of the early stages of establishing a Social Work in Schools (SWiS) project. Eighteen semistructured interviews were undertaken with teachers across four rural Australian schools. Participants identified their awareness of potential risk factors that could lead to educational disengagement, reflected on their own limitations in dealing with these broader health presentations given their teaching focus, and provided insights into their understanding of the potential role of social workers.     

Cause identity: A measurement of disability organizations’ communicated values

This article introduces the concept of “cause identity” as an important consideration in public relations practice as well as research. Ten different disability organizations were used to examine how – as measured through communicated values – organizational identity is expressed. Results of a quantitative content analysis of marketing and public relations materials used by the organizations indicated very few distinctions in their organizational identities. Rather, a strong collective identity was shared among all ten organizations.     

Social media time,identity narratives and the construction of political biographies

ABSTRACT

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.     

Palestinian perceptions of home and belonging in Britain: negotiating between rootedness and mobility

In this article based on ethnographic research among Palestinians in Britain, I argue that applying a ‘decentred’ conception of diaspora provides an understanding of the complexity of Palestinian identity-making in Britain. After a critical review of theorizations of the notion of diaspora and its relevance to this case study, I discuss ethnographic data to illustrate how processes of rooting and mobility are linked together in various contexts in which personal migration trajectories and positionalities play an important part. I demonstrate that, for Palestinians in Britain, diaspora relates to connections constructed both in relation to their homeland and other frames of reference: in relation to both roots and mobility.     

Online collective identity: The case of the environmental movement

Social movements are making extensive communicative and organizational use of the Internet in order to identify social problems and bring about change. We present a model of an online social movement, where actors exchange practical and symbolic resources through hyperlink and online frame networks. Our positioning of these exchanges within a continuum of conscious and unconscious expressive behavior informs our framework for the empirical analysis of online collectives. An application using data collected from the websites of over 160 environmental activist organizations reveals significant fragmentation in this field of contentious activity, which we suggest reflects offline social divisions.     

Bodily Offerings of Belonging: Chinese-Australians in Perth

Under the auspices of a prominent Chinese association, a group of young Chinese girls diligently practise, produce and perform what they understand to be Chinese cultural dance in Perth, Western Australia. The public performance of this cultural dance form has been a common sight since the implementation of multiculturalism in the Australian landscape in the 1970s. This paper explores how a uniquely Chinese-Australian belonging is enabled for a migrant community in one of Australia's key cities by focusing on the processes through which Chinese cultural dance is postured, practised and produced. It underlines the dynamic reflexivity and resilience demonstrated by the community in seeking to define their belonging within a state-imposed framework.