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.