Acerca del autor

Harrison C. White is the Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. His books include "Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production" (Princeton) and "Careers and Creativity: Social Forces in the Arts".

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

Identity and Control

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

IDENTITIES spring up out of efforts at control in turbulent context. But our everyday sense of reality then guides us. Being common sense, it enables communication among us, and thus makes our lives work. This book argues that "common sense" also obscures the social processes that lie behind us and our everyday perceptions.

An identity emerges for each of us only out of efforts at control amid contingencies and contentions in interaction. These control efforts need not have anything to do with domination over other identities. Before anything else, control is about finding footings among other identities. Such footing is a position that entails a stance, which brings orientation in relation to other identities. Biophysical context, of course, also impacts footings, most obviously as lines of visibility.

The control efforts by one identity are social realities for other identities. So this identity can be perceived by others as having an unproblematic continuity in social footing, even though it is adding through its contentions with others to the contingencies they face.

Thus, social contexts assert normality that is at odds with the improvisations and stumblings in direct experience. Perceived normality is a gloss on the reality of turbulent efforts at control by identities as they seek footings. Smooth social stories intrude into common sense. News broadcasts imply that everyday life is not newsworthy.

Researchers should put on different eyeglasses that unfold the complexities of the everyday. We often work outward from observation of some tangible pattern and can disregard notions of an overarching "society." At all scales, normality, and happenstance are opposite sides of the same coin of social action. Sociology has to account for chaos and normality together, and this book works toward suitably flexible framings.

Identity achieves social footing as both a source and a destination of communications to which identities attribute meaning. Consequently, without footing, identities would jump around in a social space without meaning and thus without communication. Gaining control presupposes a stable standpoint for orientation. Identity becomes a point of reference from which information can be processed, evaluated. Footings thus must be reflexive; they supply an angle of perceptions along with orientation and assessments that guide interaction with other identities, to yield control. So all these processes among identities in their footings can be understood only as an inextricable intermixture of social with cultural spreads, out of which meanings are constructed jointly.

1.1. Identities Out of Events in Context

A firm, a community, a crowd, oneself on the tennis court, encounters of strangers on a sidewalk-each may be identities. Identity here is not restricted to our everyday notion of person, of self, which takes for granted consciousness and integration, and presupposes personality. Instead I generalize identity to any source of action, any entity to which observers can attribute meaning not explicable from biophysical regularities. Those regularities are subsidiary to social context as environment, and persons will appear as bundles of identities.

I claim that all scopes and scales of social process induce themselves in some such fashion as the following: Identities trigger out of events- that is to say, out of switches in surroundings-seeking control over uncertainty and thus over fellow identities. Identities build and articulate ties to other identities in network-domains, netdoms for short. However, netdoms themselves remain subject to interruption from further switching with attendant netdoms. Thus, the world comes from identities attempting control within their relations to other identities. In their search for control, identities switch from netdom to netdom, and each switching is at once a decoupling from somewhere and an embedding into somewhere.

An Internet forum, as illustration, can flesh out this claim. There you can create an account in order to participate and use it. It's not the mere subscription but the postings that create your identity in a forum while linking you by stories to others and their comments. You don't exist in the forum as a whole person but as a user, contributing to the specific topic of the forum-e.g., football or sociology. Since you can have accounts in many forums, you can switch between them by logging out of, say, the football forum so as to log on to the sociology forum. We can see the forums as netdoms. The important point is that, although you log out, your identity in that forum, your account, remains, so your postings are not deleted by the logout process. In this sense, your activity has left a social trace consisting of the ties to other identities in the forum. But the interaction has just switched from one netdom to another.

The only moment in which you are less than a bundle of identities is in sleep. Each morning's awakening puts together a you that had been deconstructed within social and physical protections around sleep. You reconstruct out of various identities triggered earlier in switches among topics amid ties with others. The same few general sorts of identity can be found here as in social context.

Many other tangible examples surround you: switches in and out of committee meetings, mealtime switches, shopping expeditions ... The list is endless, and subsequent chapters troll through them. Communication remains central. Human social process typically orients around meanings of events and interpretations of relations among identities.

Speech presupposes language, and I aim for these chapters to provide a basis for appreciating how languages themselves emerged as by-products of the continuing spread of dances in identity and control. This communication need not be explicit speech-or even extension of speech by nonverbal means. For example, consider how students induct a newly arrived professor at a university into the implicit standards of grading and cognitive framing in curriculum for their campus (e.g., that technical but not historical sophistication is encouraged): none could articulate, and most are unaware of, the complex of pressures this subtle communication brings to bear. It is indeed effective control, but there is no intention there. It does not rely on intention to get fresh action, instead smoothing the new participant into the previously existing flow, the previously existing expectations.

Social organization is a by-product of the multiplication and the cumulation of these processes in control, which, inversely, shape how identities result from social process. The connections may be quite obscure, as in reshufflings of careers resulting from patterns of switchings in jobs. Also, identities and their contentions come wrapped up in and with larger contexts of many sorts (cf. Tilly The Contentious French). Interpretations emerge in patterns, weaving topics among identities and ties. When contending counteractions result in some dynamic equilibrium, even common sense perceives context as social structure. This is, for example, the case with kinship or social stratification.

Social organization has two faces: blockage and allowance of fresh action. The blockage can come from the intermeshing of identities despite some latitude, some decoupling. The other face cuts open the Sargasso Sea of social obligation and context to achieve openness sufficient for getting fresh action. Each of us has experienced how hard it is to push even the smallest social organization in a given direction. By what means, and when, does it become possible to break through rigidity in social organization to get fresh action at large scale and small? How can one effect action by intention despite social context? Are there any reliable guides to getting action? But then again, if there are, would that not generate paradox? This book builds toward chapter 7, where recursive conjugations of control across levels are examined to identify ways to overcome, sometimes, that blockage of action that is built into social organization.

My central claim entails that the lives of these identities are stochastic flows over time whose primary shapers and switchers come from the others, not just in local detail but also as overall patterns and dynamics-as co-constituted context. It follows that blockage and getting action provide the key contrast necessary for making sense of the complex arguments to follow.

1.2. Playground as Illustration

[In each chapter, with a section marked with an asterisk, I will point out how the studies there can also be seen from other perspectives. This playground example will be taken up again, more than casually, in sections 1.5 and 1.7, and in sections 2.2.1, 2.2.4, 4.3.2, 7.2.2, and 8.1.5.]

As an example both of how identities are formed and of how they help to create each other, consider children interacting across a playground. We can tease out some complexities from just this seemingly simple context. Dynamic models can be based and tested on observation of spatial patterns in free play of young children.

Likely as not, the identity for a given child on this playground was triggered from contingencies during play. The child's identity links to other identities in the playground through stories in that setting (e.g., Tom is the bad guy who always breaks the toys of other kids).

Strings of children may be seen rushing along, some following a leading child, while in other sets each child is just tagging along after a friend known from neighborhood or home or school. If the children are older, one can record some continuing networks of relations, of ties between pairs of children.

Or, a cluster of children may go about together because they are similar in their own and/or others' eyes. This recognition of similarity may be implicit, as when all the members are teenagers or each child is a fan of singer X; or it may be explicit, as when the group are Hispanics or are "fatsoes." Mostly these clusters are unnamed, even unrecognized. They depend on the kinds and degree of activity going on. Such clusters can come to be perceived as, and act as, identities, if they reappear repeatedly or in a variety of other contexts.

Certainly what you observe at a given moment is there only because of some underlying orderliness of process. This orderliness partially comes from, and is reflected in, talk. One can listen to the standard tales being offered across the playground in accounting for what this or that cluster does. Stories go along with expressing habits and habitus. But it is conflicts and inconsistencies in which a child finds itself caught up that start generating identity. With children it is not repetitive family domestic life, and not playing with the same bunch, but rather clashing gangs that cause, and work from, identities. A common set of stories, as we shall see in chapter 2, is what can meld such identities into a network.

This orderliness is also affected by the physical environment. How slides and swings are arrayed influences how children sort themselves into groups, with geometric ordering overcoming some social disorder. And other identities of the children come from mismatches elsewhere between two netdoms like home and school, for example, when a kind of food newly enjoyed with peers at school is rejected when the child goes home. Or the mismatch may occur when the clothes that classmates insist upon, as their badge of belonging, are disdained by a parent at home who resists purchasing them.

Any identity comes out of the energy for, which becomes the energy from, bringing together many disparate bits, as when the child becomes the weird dresser in the parents' eyes. Having an identity in the common sense of that term requires continually reproducing a joint construction across distinct settings. This is better described as having a bundle of identities. That is the dictionary notion of the person, a placeholder term embracing identities, often conflicting, from different settings.

Even though the playground is a casual setting, one can observe conflicting identities and orderliness at the same time. If the playground is observed over a long period, certain clusters of children will emerge repeatedly. This is what is meant by "finding footing" through control struggles. Choosing up sides for games will go on. This may partition children into teams, almost every child going to one team or another, but likely there will be a straggle of leftovers. Thereby identities find positions in relation to other identities. Together with the stories that tie them together, structure and meaning are produced. Any such crowd may partition anew, into teams, which make claims about specialization in relations and tasks. Or the crowd may dissolve instead into casual chasing or gossiping. Neat accounts only faintly reflect the real turbulence, energized by unending searches for self and control. In this sense, the social never stands still. Identities couple and decouple, thus continuously creating social space and time.

On the playing field, teams may come to visit for tournaments. If so, grown-ups probably come along with the visitors, and this activates local adults to come out and spend time on the playground. These adults favor and slight various children, patronize them, according to how they themselves get caught up in the tournament. A much more elaborate social organization is created, or rather is shown to have been there in potential, and in the perceptions of some, all along.

1.3. Control and Structural Equivalence

The triggering of one identity activates control searches by other identities, with their own impetus toward control of any and all exigencies, including each other's. Each control effort presupposes and works in terms of realities for other identities. Endemic efforts at control are exactly outside any given identity, and are fitted into relations by drawing on the outputs of undisrupted identities. Observer always is in some interaction with observed.

On a small scale, identities in a grouping may come to be seen as structurally equivalent by themselves, and by still other identities. This equivalence may be because of a shared attribute, or because all are tied to each other in a clique, but the basis may be more indirect and abstract. To gain footings means to fashion structural equivalence.

Control is both anticipation of and response to eruptions in environing process. Control projects participate in how identities array in social structures, with social order as a possible by-product. Social processes and structure are thus traces from successions of control efforts. In the words of Chanowitz and Langer (1980, p. 120), "Control is not something that we possess. It is some way that we are.... The exercise of control is a whole situation that cannot faithfully be fully reproduced as a number of parts or measures." And further, control efforts become entangled in ways that need not be visualized as projects of individual actors.

The accuracy of observing the process is enhanced through deciphering which identities are structurally equivalent with respect to context, overall or partial. And control can be equally real when it is fugitive, since it uses disorder as material from which to evoke order. So control efforts are responses by identities to endless stochastic contingencies, to which others' control efforts add. Context is crucial; context is experienced rather than designed. This is why "power" is not the right term for these processes.

1.4. Netdoms, Networks, and Disciplines

Control efforts take place in demarcated social spaces. Netdom is a suitable descriptor: "dom" from domain of topics and "net" from network relations. Identities switch from netdom to netdom, finding footings in different networks in differing domain contexts.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Identity and Controlby Harrison C. White Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.