Nations, national identities and human agency: putting people back into nations

This article stresses the necessity of more detailed considerations of social action and human agency in sociological theorising on national identity. It argues that, as much as other sociological categories such as 'class', 'gender', 'race', categories of 'nation' and 'national identity' are of important practical use in giving order to the social world. The article is primarily intended as a critique of a good deal of the sociological work in this area, and suggests the need to more systematically consider how individuals actively organise and account for ideas of nation and national identity. There is now a growing corpus of qualitative studies of national identity; what is needed now is to begin to work towards a general sociological theory of national identity.