The Study of Identity As Cultural, Institutional, Organizational, and Personal Narratives: Theoretical and Empirical Integrations

Abstract

I argue that the study of narrative identity would benefit from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reflexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients' personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do.

Kids, You Make the Choice: Religious and Secular Socialization among Marginal Affiliates and Nonreligious Individuals

“…Tying this back to Berger and Luckmann (1966) and Loseke's (2007) work, primary socialization mechanisms (i.e. family) are critical for how and why children approach religious or secular worldviews.…”

“…They claimed that primary socialization sources were the most influential over how a person thought and behaved. Loseke's (2007) exposition on narrative identity extended the discussion to understand how cultural narratives influence primary and secondary socialization mechanisms (i.e., "organizational narratives," to use Loseke's language), which ultimately inform personal narratives. In the following I refer to the data presented thus far to unpack the varied ways that primary and secondary mechanisms shape marginal affiliates and nonreligious individuals' past, present, or projected future handling of religious or secular socialization.…”

“…Here is where Donileen Loseke's (2007) work on cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narrative identity is useful. Loseke contends that macro-level cultural narrative identity, or generally agreed upon social norms, narratives, and symbolic codes that bind a group of people, exists in a dynamic interaction with micro-level personal narrative identity, or a person's sense of self; each narrative identity informs the other.…”

“…To situate the data and findings from my interviews, I first summarize Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's (1966) theory of socialization and Donileen Loseke's (2007) work on identity as cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives. I follow this with an overview of the socialization literature that anchors my results and analysis.…”

Breaking the connections: reducing and removing environmental health risk in the Canadian nuclear power industry

“…Its strategy has been to minimize risk and hazard as it communicates its image and brand. As Loseke [7] notes, the power of the narrative of organizations is to tell convincingly the 'right' story to, we would add, the 'right people in the 'right' way. In this paper, then, we illustrate the sophistication of the industry response to the stigma around its core activities by ignoring, trivializing or minimizing the often unspoken risk.…”