Social identities in talk: Speakers' own orientations

Abstract

What happens if one treats social identity as a flexible resource in conversational interaction? Close attention to the sequencing of talk suggests that speakers' identities are much more subtle than simple pre‐given category labels suggest, and that they change rapidly as a function of the ephemeral (but socially consequential) demands of the situation. Were a psychologist to have sampled the interaction only at one given point, they would have seen a participant using, or being attributed with, only one identity; but we show that speakers use, and attribute each other with, a variety of different identities as their business progresses. In so doing, the speakers can be seen not only to avow contradictory identities but also to invoke both group distinctiveness and similarity—and neither of these strategies are easy to square with social psychological theories of identity. We put what we find in this particular case study into the debate between, on the one hand, ethnomethodological preference for working from participants' own orientations to identity and, on the other hand, social psychological research practices which tend to privilege analytically given social categories. At the very least, we argue, the social psychological approach can be enriched by attending more to identity as a matter of situated description and less as a matter of perceptuo‐cognitive processing.

Standards and Separatism: The Discursive Construction of Gender in English Soccer Coach Education

“…In reviews of the organizational literature, these have been summarized as lack of trust, poorer working experiences, increased segregation and decreased commitment (Cunningham, 2004), as well as poor social cohesion, higher levels of conflict and poor communication (Mannix and Neale, 2005). However, we stress that it is through organizational member's everyday discursive practices that such categorizations are enacted for motivated and strategic purposes (Antaki et al, 1996;Gumperz, 1982a,b;Meân, 2001, Potter, 1996. Therefore, central members of the football category can routinely position women-only courses as justification for the saliency of gender and the exclusion of women from the coaching category via the standards discourse-that is, if women need "assistance" to access coach education, are they capable of achieving the standard necessary for category membership?…”

“…Categorizations are fluid, strategic and motivated (Antaki, Condor, & Levine, 1996) and thus can take salient (but irrelevant) social and contextual features and make them relevant, such as gender or race. This means that categorizations can be based upon social features that are made significant to enhance psychological boundaries and construct difference.…”

The construction of ethnic minority identity: A discursive psychological approach to ethnic self-definition in action

“…We explore issues of ethnic self-definition and ethnic minority identity for young urban Mapuches as a matter of social actors' situated and interested descriptions of themselves and others (cf. Antaki et al, 1996;Stokoe, 2009;Verkuyten, 2003). We treat ethnic minority identities as descriptions, as something that does not just appear or simply pre-exists contexts of use, but something that is creatively, flexibly and contextually constituted, and making sense as part of interactional structure.…”

Parental discourse and identity management in the talk of indigenous and migrant speakers

“…Relevant to the above are the microsociological notions of footing and face that DP draws on as analytic devices of the manifestation and management of accountability. Footing as developed by Goffman (1981) refers to alignment in relation to what is occurring in interaction and to speakers' local identity orientation to the utterances they produce (Antaki, Condor and Levine, 1996). In other words, footing refers to how one relates to what one says.…”