Product Description

This third edition builds on the international success of previous editions, offering an easy access critical introduction to social science theories of identity, for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates. All chapters have been updated, extra material has been added where relevant and there are two new chapters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64864 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From the Back Cover

The third edition of Social Identity builds on the international success of previous editions, offering an easy access critical introduction to social science theories of identity, for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates. All of the previous chapters have been updated and extra material has been added where relevant, for example, on globalisation. Two new chapters have been added; one addresses the debate about whether identity matters, discussing, for example, Brubaker; the second reviews the postmodern approach to identity.

The text is informed by relevant topical examples throughout and, as with earlier editions, the emphasis is on sociology, anthropology and social psychology; on the interplay between relationships of similarity and difference; on interaction; on the categorisation of others as well as self-identification; and on power, institutions and organisations.

About the Author

Richard Jenkins is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK. Trained as an anthropologist he has done research in Ireland, Britain and Denmark. Among his other books are Foundations of Sociology (2002), Pierre Bourdieu (2nd edition 2002) and Rethinking Ethnicity (2nd edition 2008).

Excerpted from Social Identity by Richard Jenkins. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Chapter One: KNOWING WHO’S WHO

It is a cold Friday night, rainy and windy. You are dressed for dancing, not the weather. Finally you reach the head of the queue outside the club. The bouncer – or, as he prefers to be known, the doorman – raises his arm and admits your friend. He takes one look at you and demands proof of your age. All you have is money. That isn’t enough (or, rather, you don’t have enough).

You telephone the order line of a clothing catalogue to buy a new jacket. The young man who answers asks for your name, address, credit card number and expiry date, your customer reference number if you have one, establishing your status as someone to whom, in the absence of a face-toface encounter, goods can be dispatched in confidence. And also, of course, putting you on the mailing list if you’re not already there.
On a train, the stranger in the opposite seat smiles and excuses herself: she has noticed you reading last week’s newspaper from a small town several hundred miles to the east. You explain that your mother posts it to you, so that you can keep up with the news from home. She recognised the newspaper because her husband is from your home town. You, it turns out, were at school with her sister-in-law. Before leaving the train she gives youher telephone number.
You hand your passport to the immigration officer behind her glass screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name. She checks your visa. These declare your legitimacy as a traveller, your desirability as an entrant. She looks at the photograph, she looks at you. She asks you the purpose of your visit. She stamps the passport and wishes you a pleasant stay. Already she is looking over your shoulder at the person behind you.
In everyday situations such as these, one’s identity is called into question and established (or not). But identification is not always so routine or so trivial. It can shake the foundations of our lives.
You hand your passport to the immigration officer behind her glass screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name. She checks your visa. She looks at the photograph, she looks at you. She types something into her computer terminal. She asks you the purpose of your visit. During the conversation she checks again the screen beside her and presses a button under her desk, to alert airport security. Abruptly you find yourself being removed from the queue of incoming passengers by two male officers and led away to an interview room. Already she is dealing with the person behind you in the queue.
The annual company dinner. You have always gone alone, and always left alone, early. This year, however, you have someone to bring. What will your colleagues, the MD especially, think of her? There is a promotion coming up in February, and you know what they’re like about that kind of thing. You take a deep breath, push open the glass door, and walk into the bar of the Thai restaurant. Your boss, smarmy Mark, comes across, hand out, glass of red in his hand: ‘Susie, lovely to see you.’ He turns slightly, there is a question in his eyes . . . Big deep breath: ‘Mark, this is my partner, Alison.’
Belfast, 1973. The buses are off. Finding a public phone box that works you try for a taxi. Your usual number has nothing available: a bomb scare’s tying up the traffic. Do you walk home? No, it’s too far and it wouldn’t be safe. You find what’s left of the phone book and start dialling other taxi companies. Eventually you get one. Ten minutes later it comes and you settle in for the ride home. It doesn’t take you long to realise that instead of heading up Divis Street to the Falls Road you’re driving over the bridge into protestant East Belfast. The next afternoon, when you come round in hospital, a voice that you don’t recognise is telling someone else that you were lucky to get off with a shot through the kneecap, some burns, and a bad beating.
The morning of your sixty-fifth birthday. As well as birthday cards and presents, it brings retirement, a pension instead of a salary, a concessionary public transport pass, and special rates every Tuesday at the hairdresser’s. Beyond that, free medical prescriptions and invitations to the Senior Citizens Club at something called ‘the Day Centre’ are intimations of dependence and disability. Death. It may be the same face you see in the bathroom mirror but you will no longer be quite the person that you were yesterday. Nor can you ever be again.
Who we are, or who are seen to be, matters enormously. Identification is not just a matter of the encounters and thresholds of individual lives, however. Although it always has implications, at the very least, for individual biographies, something else – collectivity and history – may also be at stake.
Gay or lesbian identity, for example, is not reducible to individuals in or out of the closet. Mass public occasions such as the Sydney Mardi Gras, or Gay Pride in London, are public affirmations that being gay or being lesbian can be collective identifications. For participants these occasions may – or, indeed, may not – affirm their individual sexual identities, but they are collective rituals, celebrations of identification and political mobilisation, before they are anything else.
Imagine a contested border region. It might be anywhere in the world. There are a range of ways to settle the issue: violence, a referendum, international arbitration. Whatever the means adopted, or imposed, the outcome will have consequences for people on both sides, depending on who they are. While some will accept it, some may not. Populations may move, towns and regions may be ‘cleansed’, genealogies may be rewritten. The boundaries of collectivity may be redrawn.

Customer Reviews

internal-external dialectic
This is not as the synopsis implies, an easy read. It is incredibly detailed and concise covering other authors interpretations as well as their misintetrpretations. Jenkins central thesis is that the internal-external dialectic is the fundamental link between individual and collective identities. If you are coming at the subject with more than a passing curiosity then this will help you sort the fact from the historic fiction of what it is to be human and conduct oneself in modern society. More meaty than Bauman, more detailed than Goffman and essentially more informative than any other 'identity' text I have come across. You will think you have had a marathon read in this little 180 odd page text, and in fact you will have. Covering Mead, Goffman, Barth and many others his 'pragmatic individualism' will haunt you cognitively long after finishing the book.