Download - Social identity and Social control
ID 501SOCIAL IDENTITY & SOCIAL CONTROL
The Social Science Encylopedia
Selma Kadiroğlu1561729
• Social identity is a self definition in terms of one’s membership of various social groups.
• Personal identity is based on physical attributes, personality traits, interpersonal styles and the like.
• Erikson(1960) worked on identity conflicts and identity diffusion in the individual life cycle.
• A subsystem of personality and assigned a major role in determining a person’s participation in the social system (Parson’s ‘general theory of action’)
• Researches focussed on: self-esteem, locus of control and level of aspiration (not social identity)
• Kuhn and McPartland(1954) devised the Twenty Statements Test
• Zavalloni (1974), it allows to attach different valence and meaning to different subgroup identification.
• Driedger(1976), short scale in which the respondent is allowed to affirm or deny different aspects of ingroup membership.
• Social identity theory proposed a casual link between social identity needs and various forms of intergroup behaviour (Tajfel,1978).
• Social identities are sustained through social comparisons, which differentiate the ingroup from relevant outgroups.
SOCIAL CONTROL
• The processes that help produce and maintain social order
• the concept to explore the problem of social order was developed in the industrialized and urbanized societies
• it is a subject of continuing contestation and tied into political debates
• Disruptive and antisocial human nature can be reined in by the imposition of group controls and sanctions.
• Social controls operates in and through the individual rather than over against individuality
• Internal self control is important as the rules and regulations
• Positive: elicit and evoke action• Negative: restrain and repress
• It was adressed as part of a controversy about social organization of primitive societies. Social control involved not only individual internalization of norms, but also active pursuits of self interest and the operation of coercive sanctions.
• Three modes of control (Malinowski) Coercive controls Utilitarian controls of remuneration Normative commitment
• 1970s, consolidation of subordination and control of lower classes
• 1980s, developmental forms and functioning of control apparatus
• There has been an increasing expansion, widening and invisibility of the ‘net of social control’ (Orwell,1984 and Huxley,Brave New World ).
• Diverse strategies and practices of governance can be said to share a common source and a common purpose.
NATIONALISM
• Each unit has a right and the duty to constitute itself as a state.
• “A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.”(Stalin)
• Granting a nation to any group of people who regard themselves as one is the recipe for anarchy.
Nature of nationalism
• The “good” kind is confined, meaning that nationalists are merely striving to create, or maintain their own nation.
• The “bad” kind of nationalism pitted own’s “superior” nation or race against all others in a struggle for survival of the fittest.
• France: rally the entire nation to fight its enemies in the aftermath of the French Revolution
• Italy and Germany: become unifying
• Habsburg and Ottoman empires: become disintegrating
History of nationalism
• French Revolution(1789): first nation-state is created
• 19th century : the spread of literacy expenses of language of empires economic reasons
• National consciousness has been a much more important influence on people than international class-consciousness.
• Romantic: arguing for the self-determination of peoples• Racist: positioning one’s own people above all others
• This idea emerged as a reaction to alien rule and caused end of the age of empires.