Identity Conceptions: From the Personal to the Collective

The rise of activism in social research in general, and in intercultural research in particular, is reflected in the recent trend in academic conceptions of identity. Increasingly, researchers have moved away from the pri­macy of the individual personhood and dis­tinctiveness of the individual accorded in the tradition of Erikson (1950, 1959/1980, 1968).

This shift in emphasis toward the collective dimension of identity appears to have resulted in a corresponding decrease in the attention given to the personal and unitary nature of identity originally articulated by Erikson (1950, 1959/1980, 1968). Cultural categories have become the prevailing focus in many con­temporary conceptions of identity. In cultural anthropology, identity of a cultural group is often viewed as a kind of temporal continu­ity or common tradition linking its members to a common future reflected in the com­munal life patterns associated with language, behavior, norms, beliefs, myths, and values, as well as the forms and practices of social institutions (e.g., Nash, 1989). In sociological research, identity has been generally treated as an ascription-based social category of an entire class of people associated with a set of extrinsic and intrinsic qualities or conditions associated with national origin, language, religion, race, and culture. Such is the way, for instance, Glazer and Moynihan (1975) investigate the phenomenon of “ethnic stratification” in the United States. For the social psychologist De Vos (1990), the identities of members of an eth­nic group are regarded as being rooted in “the emotionally profound self-awareness of parent­age and a concomitant mythology of discrete origin,” providing “a sense of common origin, as well as common beliefs and values, or com­mon values” and serving as the basis of “self­defining in-groups.” Giordano (1974) likewise sees ethnic identity as a psychological founda­tion offering the individual a “ground on which to stand” that “no one can take away” (p.

Despite the increased emphasis on the col­lective dimension of identity, however, the traditional identity conception as an individu­ated and unitary psychological system contin­ues to influence psychological studies of ego identity (Augusto & Kimberly, 1995; Bentz, 1989; Csikszentmihalyi, 1993; Ford & Lerner, 1992; Kroger, 1993, 2007; Syed, 2012) and of an individual’s self-other orientation (Kim, 1988, 2001, 2005a, 2005b, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). The unitary nature of identity is similarly articulated by Hecht and his asso­ciates (Hecht, Warren, Jung, & Krieger, 2005) in their communication theory of identity, in which identity is described as a joining point between the individual and the society, and communication is the link that allows this intersection to occur. In addition, many social psychological studies of intergroup relations merge the personal and social dimensions of identity by focusing on the variations among individuals in the degree of subjective identifi­cation toward their cultural or ethnic origins (cf. Alba, 1990, p. 25).