Which of the following are examples of ways that our social selves can be both malleable and stable?

Social identity theory: guiding individual behaviour

Understanding and articulating organisational institutions, their power over social behaviour and the processes that create and sustain them provide a useful mechanism for framing and planning change to Web 2.0. As we saw in the last paragraphs of the preceding section though, one further level of detail is necessary. The modern workplace provides a major platform for the development and enactment of who we are – our identity and self-concept. Social identity is recognised as playing a major role in influencing the degree to which people demonstrate organisationally appropriate behaviour. We are interested next in understanding the conditions under which people will act and adopt behaviours which value the group’s well-being as a good in itself. Not the least important reason for this is that the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies is in the interest of the firm, not the individual. Social identity, by operating at the level of the self-perception of individuals, gives us a level of granularity for observing and predicting behaviours of people in specific groups. This predictive model is more specific than that of the norms and patterns perceptible as the whole of organisational culture, so we look now to social identity theory.

Self-identity is the feeling of the ‘self’, the foundational continuity that makes us ‘us’. Social identity is constructed by the lens we cast inwards to classify and judge our own being. While each of us is clearly many things inhabiting the same shell – parents, teachers, rugby players, engineers and rock musicians – within this there is a persistent self which adopts these roles to a greater or lesser conscious degree. Our social identity is taken mostly from the various groups in which we participate: this is also called the collective self, and generally our social motivation in this context of interdependence is to strive for collective welfare and agreeable relationships. The in-group prototype describes and prescribes the attributes which are appropriate to signify group membership in specific contexts. Our relational self defines us in terms of our dyadic relation to individual others. But we also define our self in terms of our unique traits and in this frame of personal self, motivations are generally egocentric and directed towards self-benefit. Indeed, the greater the strength of this personal self-identity, the lower the commitment of group members to group identity and its behavioural patterns.52

Group membership is characterised by three dimensions: the cognitive, the evaluative and the affective. We understand the criteria and boundaries of the in-group prototypes, we judge whether the group is attractive and gives status, and we feel an emotional bond with the group. The criteria around a particular identity allow a person to categorise themselves and create a subjective belief structure which drives behaviour. Belonging to a group is a strong determinant of how we perceive and act towards other people, institutions and objects.

The socio-cognitive processes around self-identity have two major drivers: the motivation to increase self-esteem and the need to reduce uncertainty around what I am and what I feel. Let us consider some aspects of how identity development influences effectiveness in business organisations:

Cooperative behaviour, that is the disposition to act in ways that are beneficial to the organisation and refrain from actions which harm the organisation, will be augmented in groups which enhance self-identity through being high-status. There is also a correlation with the group’s size – small groups, or groups that feel small, will tend to be more cohesive.

People’s affective commitment with a group, where their social identity has a strong emotional component, appears to be a crucial factor in determining whether group members behave in accordance with their group membership.

The development of identity through effective socialisation (with the associated acceleration of productivity) gains in importance when one considers the trend towards hiring temporary workers.

The exercise of power is intimately connected with self-construal and self-identity.53 A highly salient personal self is more likely to display competitive and assertive behaviour, where collectivist identity will lead to cooperative behaviour in accordance with group norms and values. Both the strength of social identity and the group’s norms are within the sphere of influence of organisational managers and leaders – if they know how. Experience and research show, however, that the relational self (and therefore willingness to cooperate) is enhanced by soft influencers, yet managers persist in using hard tactics.

Web 2.0 is technology which provides communication and collaboration facilities which contribute directly to the stock of organisational memory. It is in the interests of the firm that people adopt the more public and accessible Web 2.0 solutions. How do we mobilise people to adopt technology which leads to better outcomes for the group? We need to understand what motivates people to engage in any behaviour which is a good outcome for the group. For example, if the in-group prototype, or self-concept, for an entire firm is one of hard-hatted construction or steel making that disdains discussion, innovation or openness, then the desirable in-group attributes will militate directly against the adoption of Web 2.0 tools at the firm level.

From a Web 2.0 perspective we should also attend to the capability of these social software tools to facilitate positive in-group prototypes and provide access to participation in such groups. Figure 6.10 shows how we might use the social identity construct to predict the likely adoption of Web 2.0, the behaviour within the Web 2.0 nexus and how the use of Web 2.0 might influence social identity.

So why do certain groups of people adopt the wiki and start writing and not others? Who will start to use social networking software in your firm? Will it be the young, scientifically oriented males? Broad demographic features are insufficient: demographic analyses show that 30 per cent of 40-year-old web users have a MySpace or Facebook profile and around 20 per cent are in LinkedIn, the professional networking site – so we cannot restrict ourselves to a specific generation. Social identity theory provides insight upon which we can build expectations of who will use the systems and how. Self-categorisation occurs through the application of an in-group prototype: this prototype includes certain behavioural expectations, some of which are instrumental (for example to generate certain outcomes such as reports or accounts) and some are affective or modal (aloofness versus familiarity, self-promotion versus modesty). Observations of successful and unsuccessful wiki implementations (or of disparities between groups within the same organisation) suggest that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of adoption is a group identity profile which aligns with blog and wiki functionality. The sorts of characteristics we would expect would be dispositions to:

participate in non-directive, evolving behaviour;

accept group norms;

produce imperfect ‘works in progress’.

For example, take managers as a group with social identity and a standard in-group prototype. The very leadership behaviour required to transform a group to use Web 2.0 software to enhance knowledge growth might contradict managerial in-group prototypes which require a manager to be aloof, authoritative and above critique – not very Web 2.0, in other words.

The Self-Representing Self

Our psychological sense of self-identity seems to be grounded in explicit and conceptual representations, such as one's own memories, personality traits, beliefs, and attitudes. A sense of identity over time is given by autobiographical memory. Research on autobiographical memory has not provided a definite answer as to whether autobiographical memory is functionally independent from other memory systems. Neuropsychological case studies demonstrate that it is possible to have intact autobiographical memory despite severe impairment in semantic memory system. Similarly, the evidence for specific neural correlates of autobiographical memory is inconclusive. The overall pattern across studies suggests that retrieval of autobiographical memories is associated with activations of medial frontal cortex and the left hippocampus (for a review, see Maguire, 2001). However, many of the studies have failed to control for various confounding factors between autobiographical and other memory systems (for a review, see Gillihan and Farah, 2005). Importantly, autobiographical memory provides both a sense of continuity over time and a sense of identity. The sense of continuity over time is given by the fact that autobiographical memory provides a template of the past against which new experiences can be assimilated. The sense of identity is generated by the fact that all these experiences are related to me, rather than to someone else.

Social cognitive neuroscience has focused on the neural circuits that are common to both self- and other-representations, which may be critical for social cooperation and empathy. A meta-analysis of the functional anatomy of action-execution, mental simulation of action, verbal generation of actions, and more importantly observation of other people's actions showed that for all four processes, overlapping activation was found in SMA, dorsal premotor cortex, supramarginal gyrus, and SPL (Grezes and Decety, 2001). The activation of an overlapping neural network for both the representations of self-generated and observed actions suggests that some representations are agent-neutral and shared. More evidence for common representations for self and others comes from the neural substrates of empathy. Bilateral AI, rostral anterior cingulate cortex, brainstem, and cerebellum were activated when participants received pain and also when a loved one experienced pain (Singer et al., 2004). The existence of an overlapping neural network, or ‘mirror system’ that underpins both self- and other representations may support social communication and interaction. This discovery raises the interesting possibility that some aspects of the awareness of self resulted from mechanisms that initially evolved through attempts to predict the behavior of others through representing their internal states and justifies the claim that perhaps consciousness is for other people.

Abstract

The transition to parenthood challenges self-identity, labor market positions, and gender relations. It brings about an emotional register and a new set of expectations and responsibilities. It also transforms everyday life and the spaces and places of daily life. Place and space play a substantial role in defining parenthood, mothering, and fathering both at a global, national, and local scale. Studies within geography on mothering and fathering have discussed in particular relationships between city form, social welfare systems, and local parenting cultures, as well as individual emotional geographies of parenthood.

2 Asian Americans

The Suinn-Lew Asian Self Identity Acculturation Scale (SL-ASIA; Suinn et al., 1987) has been widely used with this group. Due to several psychometric problems with this scale, namely the unidimensional measurement of acculturation and an inability to distinguish among the diverse Asian ethnic groups, newer measures have been developed for this population. Measures include the East Asian Acculturation Measure (EEAM; Barry, 2001), Asian Values Scale (AVS; Kim et al., 1999), Vancouver Index of Acculturation (VIA; Ryder et al., 2000), the Asian American Multidimensional Acculturation Scale (AAMAS; Chung, Kim, & Abreu, 2004), and the General Ethnicity Questionnaire (GEQ; Tsai, Ying, & Lee, 2000). Both the AAMAS and GEQ require additional research, but seem promising in their psychometric properties and conceptualization of acculturation (Lee, Yoon, & Liu-Tom, 2006). Similarly, the ARMSA-II (Cuéllar et al., 1995) has been found to measure bidimensional acculturation for Asian Americans, and also requires additional research (Lee et al., 2006).

New Avenues for Creativity and Self Research

A sociocultural analysis of the creative self, as argued earlier, focuses our attention on the inner dialogues of the self (in their relation to external dialogues) while creating. In contrast, traditional research on the self and creativity, usually situated at the intersection between social cognition and individual differences, focuses on the person’s beliefs and evaluations about creativity either in general or in specific types of activity. We therefore have here a substantial difference in approach: from relatively stable systems of beliefs to dynamic dialogues of voices or perspectives within the self, from cross-sectional measurements of self attributes to a longitudinal concern for the interplay between self and others in creative action. However, despite this difference (or rather, because of it), I argue in this section that there is great scope for cross-fertilization between theoretical approaches and for opening up new avenues for research based on rethinking old and new concepts—for example, creative identity, creative self-efficacy, or creative mindsets—from a sociocultural standpoint.

Let us start from the most general notion of creative self-concept, defined by Karwowski (2015a) as a multifaceted construct covering aspects related to the creative self-concept, creative personal identity, self-rated creativity, and creative metacognition (CMC). This cluster of beliefs and assessments, the author shows, develops gradually during the first decade of one’s life and changes as the person transitions to adulthood. If we were to consider this construct through sociocultural lenses, we would probably refer to different “concepts” of the creative self the person “acquires” in the life course by interacting with multiple others (from family and friends to fellow students and coworkers). These concepts (or conceptions) are what Bakhtin and Hermens refer to as voices within the self or what Mead, Martin, and Gillespie would call perspectives. These voices or perspectives are relational—they connect different I-positions, inner and outer others, and make reference to generalized Other/societal discourses about creativity—and their “object” is the creative self. The outcome of their dialogue is a situated and heterogeneous creative (or noncreative) identity that develops through ongoing interactions with other people. The making and transformation of this identity do not concern therefore only the person, but reflect the relation between the person’s perspective on creativity and the perspectives of others, including the generalized Other; this relation can be largely supportive for developing a creative self identity, oppose it, or become problematic and tense because of contradictory demands on the person (see Glăveanu & Tanggaard, 2014). In any case, the study of this complexity cannot be reduced to the use of questionnaires about one’s creative self-concept since numerical values obscure rather than illuminate inner dialogues that are at the core of the phenomenon being studied (also Rosenbaum & Valsiner, 2011). A “creative” methodological solution in this regard might be, time permitting, to use scale items as open interview questions and, following this, subject the answers to a dialogical type of analysis (see Aveling et al., 2015).

A particular topic within the creative self-concept that received, by comparison, considerable attention in creativity research in the past decade is creative self-efficacy. Broadly defined as self-judgments about one’s ability to generate novel and useful outcomes (Beghetto, 2006), creative self-efficacy is believed to influence, at least in part, creative performance. Most importantly though, judgments about one’s creative efficacy relate, predictably, to the view of other people and the feedback received from them (see Beghetto, 2006; Beghetto, Kaufman, & Baxter, 2011; Karwowski, Gralewski, & Szumski, 2015) and also the mere presence of creative peers can strengthen an individual’s creative self-concept (Karwowski, 2015b). These findings offer further support for a sociocultural analysis focused on the number and nature of exchanges between students, a usual population for this research, and other people regarding creative performance. This analysis should, however, go beyond classic student–teacher interactions and extend the research focus, as much as possible, to other significant or immediate others, such as parents, friends, and peers. This kind of study becomes even more important when discrepancies are found between student and teacher judgments of creativity (Beghetto et al., 2011). Although correlates between creative self-efficacy and other internal attributes, such as personality traits (Karwowski, Lebuda, Wisniewska, & Gralewski, 2013) or curiosity (Karwowski, 2012) are interesting in their own right, more research is needed on the relation between creative self-efficacy, social interactions, and cultural context in a longitudinal view (e.g., of current research, see Karwowski, 2015b; Karwowski & Barbot, 2016; Karwowski et al., 2015). Tierney and Farmer’s (2011) considered, in this respect, the development of creative self-efficacy and creative performance over time in an organizational context. Including other domains of activity and comparing them would be a useful addition in future research.

Last but not least, creative mindsets emerged recently as a new area of study within the field of creativity and the self. Karwowski (2014) reported on an ample program of research exploring the structure, correlates, and consequences of creative mindsets. The author defines mindsets as “beliefs about the stable-versus-malleable character and the nature of creativity” (p. 62). His findings point to the fact that the stable and malleable mindset about creativity should not be conceptualized as two ends of one continuum that exclude each other; rather, they are relatively independent, even if negatively correlated, constructs. From a sociocultural standpoint this finding makes perfect sense considering the fact that, as suggested before, beliefs about the self and one’s abilities are conceptualized not as stable and autonomous mental structures but dynamic voices or perspectives in dialogue with each other and the social world, including culture (Tang, Werner, & Karwowski, 2016). The first sociocultural question that comes to mind concerning mindsets is the following: what are the positions from which the perspectives of creativity as a fixed or as a malleable quality are being constructed? Which voices within the self argue for one mindset or the other and what kind of dialogues with other positions and voices do they engender? A second area of concern would be for the role of context in the dialogue between fixed and malleable perspectives. Karwowski (2014) found that people prefer a malleable over fixed mindset—in which situations would the same people go against their preference? In other words, what contextual factors contribute to a change in perspective and why?

In conclusion, issues related to identity, self-concept, self-efficacy, and mindsets are all important, including from the standpoint of sociocultural psychology. What this discipline proposes is the study of dialogues between perspectives concerning creativity and self, dialogues that are both situational and developmental; this is thus a call for more ecological and qualitative research to complement, when suitable, the traditional use of scales. While the situational aspect needs no further explanation—as it brings us back to the focus on the specificity and uniqueness of self—other relations developed “within” and “outside” the self—a final note is required regarding the developmental part. Martin (2014, 2016) recently developed and illustrated, including case studies of creative people, a specific type of method called Life Positioning Analysis (LPA). This method is based on PET (explained in the section “Pragmatism and the Perspectival Self”) and, more generally, on a pragmatist conception of personhood developed through embodied and situated participation in social interactions throughout the life course. The five phases of this kind of research include the following:

an identification of particular, influential others (highly significant others with whom a focal person has interacted, exchanged, and coordinated positions and perspectives) and relevant generalized others (broader social, cultural traditions, practices, and perspectives that form a background of assumptions, understandings, and ways of relating and living) within the life experience of the focal person;

an analysis of positions and perspectives occupied and exchanged with particular and generalized others within different phases of the person’s life;

a thematic analysis of positioned experiences and perspectives across the different phases of the person’s life;

an analysis of the manner and kind of integrations the person has achieved across the different positions and perspectives that have defined her or his life experience, with an emphasis on processes of distantiation, intersubjectivity, and identification;

the construction of a life positioning summary that attempts to depict the person’s embeddedness within the positions and perspectives of the overall life experience (Martin, 2014, pp. 5–6).

I would argue, together with Martin, that such a careful study of dialogicality could greatly benefit creativity research, in particular research on the creative self. Its main contribution, more generally, is to challenge traditional studies of the creative person in terms of “components” (i.e., personality traits, intelligence, and so on) and replace it with a holistic and developmental account of creative actors specific for sociocultural theories.

Surveillance and the “Data Body”

Interestingly, as cyberspace has become more embedded in our everyday lives, our self-identity has become more constrained. We are not required to have new nicknames and new identities everywhere we go. Instead, we are asked if we want to use our Facebook or Google account details to log on. This practice of using a single identity in cyberspace means we are giving up our anonymity and forgoing the right to mask our identities. As a result our offline and online identity is more closely aligned than ever as cyberspace is an integral part of our everyday lives. In fact, we are beginning to live in cyberspace.

Alongside this living in cyberspace, we are becoming more aware of different types of surveillance and the existence of a “data body” for each individual. We are constantly being tracked, measured, classified, and recorded in millions of bytes of metadata. Called “surveillance capitalism” by Zuboff (2015), metadata collection in cyberspace is pervasive and ubiquitous and is raising concerns across economic, political, and cultural domains. The least worrying outcome is that such economic metadata allow for the creation of targeted advertising. More worrying outcomes include the ability of political entities, government agencies, and other large corporations to construct a systematic digital representation of cyber users' lives. Indeed, allegations and reports of data mining (see Cambridge Analytica) and election rigging by targeting millions of Facebook users with individualized campaign materials are prevalent in the media.

Think for a minute about who holds information about you: police, military, customs offices, passport control, the “taxman,” benefits agencies, local councils, TV licensing agencies, employers, Email/telephone account companies, hospitals and your family physician, banks, supermarkets, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and location services, to name a few. Of particular interest to human geographers are the growing ways in which location services and geographic mapping can be combined to reveal insights into our daily and hourly movements and activities. In Spying with Maps, Mark Monmonier questions how location services and geographic mapping are used across a wide range of fields including military intelligence, law enforcement, market research, etc. Monmonier explains how geospatial technology works, what it can reveal, who uses it, and to what effect.

As a researcher I am becoming increasingly aware of the collection of metadata seemingly without a reason but rather with the hope that it will be useful later—a phenomenon referred to as “function creep.” For example, recently I read an article about the fact that Google has been tracking everything consumers buy online by harvesting purchase receipts sent to consumers' personal Gmail accounts. Intrigued, I investigated my own account and discovered purchase receipts going back 6 years, to 2013. It is data like these that define all of us as individuals, both in cyberspace and elsewhere.

As I sit at my computer and think about my daily experience of data surveillance and metadata collection, I am uneasy about these myriad small actions that define me as a “data body.” Felix Stalder explains how we are defined as individuals by our data body that both measures and classifies us. He suggests that this data body is not simply built up as we move around cyberspace so that we add another layer of identity when we visit somewhere. Rather, it also precedes us, dictating how we are treated when we arrive, as with, for example, targeted advertising. I have to wonder if there is ever a moment when I am not being watched, measured, and classified in cyberspace. It does feel as if Big Brother has morphed into many little brothers in cyberspace. As Orwell said in his famous dystopian novel 1984: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.” I am not alone in that thought as others including Felix Stalder worry that surveillance in cyberspace takes this even further and encourages a culture of pervasive monitoring in which we can assume that every movement is scrutinized at all times and in all locations.

Much of this monitoring and metadata collection is through the ubiquitous smartphone, a very useful, intimate technology that mediates much of our everyday life. A smartphone combines a mobile phone with email and the Internet, music and movie player, camera, camcorder, GPS navigation, location tracking, voice recorder, alarm clock, flashlight, photo album, calendar, address book, and much more. It has been called out as the “spy in your pocket” because of the huge amounts of metadata that it collects daily. It offers a very detailed picture of our everyday social lives and identity even when our location services are switched off.

2.2 Psychosocial Support

Psychosocial support refers to those aspects of the relationship that enhance the protégé’s competence, identity, self-worth, and effectiveness in a professional role. The close interpersonal relationship that exists between the mentor and the protégé encourages the development of trust and intimacy and enables the various roles to be fulfilled. These include the following:

Counseling. This refers to the mentor serving as a sounding board to the protégé so that the latter can share with someone who will listen to his or her concerns and doubts about self, work, and family. The mentor provides empathetic listening and serves as a confidant or as someone who provides advice and encouragement.

Acceptance and confirmation. This refers to the feeling that both parties (mentor and protégé) have toward each other that allows them to feel comfortable in expressing their views. The feeling of acceptance by the mentor enables the protégé to feel that he or she can try new things and speak candidly. The mentor shares positive feedback that he or she has heard about the protégé. The mentor sends encouraging messages (e.g., e-mail, phone) to the protégé to help him or her deal with pending challenges.

Friendship. The mentor and protégé spend time together in a nonwork setting or in leisure activities or more relaxed settings (e.g., meals, sports, outings).

Role modeling. This refers to the protégé’s interest in modeling himself or herself after the mentor. In this case, the protégé has great respect and admiration for the mentor and identifies with him or her. The protégé tries to emulate the mentor’s relationships with others or the ways in which the mentor works on tasks. The mentor explains what he or she is doing and why. This is so common among mentors and protégés that some researchers consider it a third (separate) function in addition to career development and psychosocial support.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the initial evidence from both social cognition and social identification research illustrates that understanding homeless people’s self-identity may well be pivotal for increasing homeless people’s participation in housing and housing-related services, as well as in more successfully facilitating their empowerment and longer-term social inclusion. One important facet we have woven into the story is that the methods used allow for the development of practical measures. These in turn provide a detailed picture of homeless people’s perceptions, illuminating why homeless people make a transition to being semipermanently or permanently accommodated, as highlighted in the introduction to this article. This helps make the case for the continued implementation of rigorous measurement and statistical techniques that will enable us to further answer key research questions about the scale and pattern of support needs required by the diverse and unique population. Thus, research using a social psychological perspective can provide reliable data for understanding the motivations of homeless people, in particular how they view the services offered to aid them.

Social psychological perspectives have more to offer to our understanding of homelessness. First, there are major areas of research on how people respond to various types of social exclusion (Abrams and Christian, 2007), suggesting that people may choose both adaptive and maladaptive strategies either because of habit and personality or because pressures in the situation lead them to do so (e.g., self-regulatory focus theory). Other theories and evidence dwell on how people deal with stigma, in particular the psychological threat posed by negative stereotypes of their groups. Our point here is to emphasise that bringing these approaches to bear on homelessness will greatly enrich the analysis as well as lead to more practical and effective interventions that do not treat people as identical members of social structural categories but as active interpreters of their own social context, actively defining their own sense of identity. These approaches can therefore augment more traditional approaches deployed in the homelessness literature, as we suggested at the outset of this article. By designing research that taps reasons underlying homeless people’s behaviours and use of service interventions, this research can potentially answer key questions about the most effective means for providing assistance – especially in the long term.

Discourse, Identity, and the Self

The speaker's interactional self would be placed at the bottom vertex of the inverted triangle. In this case, as suggested above, self-identity is shaped and modified by daily and ordinary conversational interactions. Interlocutors continuously negotiate a relational identity with and through others. Consequently, one's current (and past) conversational exchanges will shape or affect the relationship between participants and speakers' relational self-identity. Far from being a stable, unitary identity, one's identities change according to conversational roles and situations. This is why De Fina et al. (2006, p. 14) distinguish discourse identities (mainly the individual's roles during an interaction) from situated identities, which are instantiated in particular types of situations. But individuals also acquire a personal discourse-related identity in the shape of personal idiolect, defined as a “particular combination of accent and dialect, that particular assemblage of formal and informal registers, that particular pattern of stress and intonation which, if we were to look closely and cleverly enough, we would find unique to the individual” (Edwards, 2009, p. 21).

Analysis of the self as developed and affirmed through daily interactions and situations goes back as far as the 1950s, with interactional sociolinguists (Schiffrin, 1994), with Goffman (1959) as one of the main contributors to this trend of research. Goffman argues that the self is a social construction (specifically, an interactive construction). This is clearly exemplified by the identity-related notion of face, defined as the social value that speakers effectively claim for themselves in the course of a conversational interaction. What Goffman focuses on is the social value of conversational involvement, the way different social and conversational settings involve specific expectations and display of this involvement, which normally entails the use of certain ritualized forms of address. Schiffrin (1994) also includes Gumperz in the label of interactional sociolinguistics because of his view of language as a culturally constructed system and which can be used either in order to reflect macrolevel social meanings or to create microsocial meanings at the level of ordinary conversational exchanges.

Another trend of research which focuses on the social implications of daily conversational interactions is ethnomethodology, with Garfinkel as one of its main representatives. This trend focuses on the cognitive rules by which members of a society assess the significance of actions in everyday life. People's previous experience and their knowledge of the institutions and practices of the world around them act to constrain their interpretations of what they see and hear. Under ethnomethodology, conversational scenes acquire an essential importance in the display and shaping of self-identities, which are only knowable through the understandings displayed by the interlocutors themselves: “membership of a category is ascribed (and rejected), avowed (and disavowed), displayed (and ignored) in local places and at certain times, and it does these things as part of the interactional work that constitutes people's lives” (Antaki and Widdicombe, 1998, p. 1).

The main conclusion of this research is that people's self-identity is not a fixed feature of their lives, but a dynamic attribute continuously under negotiation, reshaping, transformation, as people engage in daily ordinary communication with others. When some social or cultural aspects are continuously brought into conversations, they tend to become attached to the identity of interlocutors as part of their background of group membership. For example, Georgakopolou (1999) focuses on identities of the young and how peer networks are created in the conversational repetition of specific elements in the discursive (sub)culture of the young. For them, symbolic cultural associations such as dress styles and others such as music preferences, activity patterns, etc. are firmly located in their conversational interactions, especially in the unfolding of conversational narratives.

On the other hand, self-identity is also achieved in the feeling of personal specificity when contrasted with others in the course of a conversation. In this case, Davies and Harre's (1990) term positioning as ‘discursive production of selves’ is very interesting. They agree that self-identity is not fixed but constituted and reconstituted through the various discursive practices in which people participate. Positioning would be the discursive process through or within which people's selves are foregrounded in conversations. There can be interactive positioning in the sense that what one person says positions another, and reflexive positioning, when one simply positions oneself.

Markus and Nurius' (1986) theory of possible selves also deals with the way people acquire a sense of self-identity through the conversational interactions in which they participate. These possible selves represent the picture that all interactants have about what they are and what they would like to become. In this sense, possible selves influence people's future behavior and are a constant evaluation of people's current state of their self-identity. People's social and cultural contexts play an important role in this shaping, since the range of possible selves derives not only from people's personal experiences (e.g., prior conversational interactions), but also from categories which acquire prominence in a specific sociocultural and historic context, together with images and symbols provided by (highly influential) media discourses constraining the personal choices of self-identity.

Abstract

With a primary emphasis on the nonlocalized nature of Japanese culture, this article introduces how almost all features of what we call Japanese culture, including shifting self-identities, were born at the interface of local and global forces. It highlights the internal complexities, comprised of the ‘Agrarian Japanese’ vs the minorities, those along the lines of gender and age, and overseas Japanese and returnees. The Japanese educational system, religions, health care, youth culture, and sports have all undergone transformations at the confluence of the local and global, showing the dynamic nature of Japanese culture and society.