ELEVEN
PREDICTABILITY
Collectivity may not require consensus,
but a degree of consistency is
important in the human world. The symbolisation of communal identity generates
an imagined similarity, which, as Anthony Cohen argues, permits difference and
heterogeneity to prosper. But if diversity were all, human life would be
complex and unpredictable to the point of being unimaginable. Because communal identity, for example, is a
cognitive and emotional reality to individuals - and it, therefore, influences
their behaviour - it is 'socially real' in W. I. Thomas's sense. People may or
may not think the same, but there must be some
reciprocal and consistent similarity, even if not uniformity, in what
co-members do. Identification is a
practical matter - something that people do - and it involves similarity as
well as difference.
Which
brings me back to Barth, for whom consistent patterns of behaviour generate
identity boundaries and collective forms more generally. Goffman alludes to
this when he talks about 'routines' and 'presentation', and Schutz seems to
imply it in his definition of a 'personal ideal type' - a model or typification
of a particular kind of person and of what it is plausible to expect of them -
as 'by definition one who acts in
such and such a way' (1967: 190, original emphasis). Should their behaviour not
conform to the ideal type, then eventually the individual will be re-identified
with reference to another ideal type.
One way to look at collective consistency is in terms of conformity and conformism.
Conventional social psychological wisdom (Aronson 1991: 12-55), which resonates
with Mead and Goffman, suggests that two motivations inspire conforming
behaviour: the desire to be correct, and the desire to remain in the good
graces of others. The first has its greatest impact on back-stage private
decision-making, the second on front-stage public behaviour. Each is rooted in
primary socialisation and each is an emotional allotrope of the desire to belong. External factors that impinge
upon conforming orientations vary according to local common sense and
knowledge, situational contingencies and individual point of view.
Non-conforming behaviour, deviance if you like, may come most easily to those
whose group membership is secure in the mainstream. Insecure membership may
thus encourage conforming behaviour, although one would expect to find a point
of marginality beyond which this is no longer true. This puts a new spin upon
Cohen's argument about the symbolic power of boundaries to license or
accommodate within them a degree of dissensus and heterogeneity.
Aronson
recognises that conforming behaviour may have sources other than these
conscious goal-orientations. Compliance,
for example, is produced by compulsion. While it may only be weak conformity, which won't survive relaxation of
the coercion, it is significant. Identification
depends upon affective powers of attraction, in intimate dyadic relationships
and in more collective or public contexts: here the result is conformism. Identification, of course, is
related to the desire to stay in the good graces of others. Internalisation, finally, results in
this model from learning and rationalisation. Here, conformism results from
doing whatever is thought - within local canons of rationality - to be the most
sensible response to the demands of the situation; it is also routinely
reflected in the thoughtlessness of habitual routines.
This
social psychological scheme is not wholly straightforward, however. Attempting
to distinguish 'internalisation' from the 'desire to be correct', for example,
looks like hair-splitting: locally specific canons of 'correctness' are central
to both, and in both there is a presumed motivation to be 'right' or, at least,
to avoid being 'wrong'. Similarly, the perceived rational thing to do may be to
stay in the good graces of others. Compulsion apart, therefore, the distinction
between goal-oriented and non-goal-oriented conforming behaviour - or, which is
a little different, between conformity and conformism - looks analytical, at
best.
Max
Weber's discussion of the nature of domination (1978: 53-4, 212-301) is
pertinent here. From Weber's point of view, conformity and conformism are, in
different ways, both product and expression of domination. In his model the
exercise of power - the capacity to
dominate others through coercion of one kind or another - is the pursuit of
compliance and conformity. The alternative to power, however, is more
interesting and more routine: authority
is legitimate domination, the conformism of those who accept its demand or
expectation as justified (Smith 1960: 15-33). Identification and
internalisation fall within Weber's categorisation of legitimate domination:
the first as the basis of charismatic authority, the second of either legal or
traditional authority. There are many modes of legitimate domination, and many
sources of conformism. All of them are intimately bound up with ideology and
the symbolisation of collective identification (cf. Bourdieu 1991; Bourdieu and
Passeron 1977; Gledhill 1994). If for no other reason, this is because to
identify oneself, or one's group, in a particular way, is to treat as
axiomatic, and hence legitimate, the arbitrariness of one's way of life and
relationships.
The
social construction of conformity and conformism is also, partly, an attempt to
render interaction predictable. This, it must be emphasised, does not imply
'objectively' accurate predictability: it is, rather, predictability for
practical purposes and, even more important perhaps, the comforting sense of predictability. It is what
affords individuals some expectations of the behaviour of others (and Others),
on the basis of which they can proceed with their everyday lives without having
to consider consciously everything in advance, and without excessive
uncertainty. Conformity of a kind may also, however, emerge out of uncertainty.
When one is unsure of local rules or customs, the behaviour of others may be
the single most important source of information about the right thing(s) to do.
Hence conformity. This is of major significance for childhood learning, but it
remains important throughout adult life (think, for example, about driving in a
foreign country), and offers another understanding of why behavioural conformity
may be at a premium at the boundary.
Looking
at these matters anthropologically, Mary Douglas (1966) argues that notions of
ritual pollution and supernatural danger reinforce other pressures towards
conformity. Both tend to be associated with the boundaries of identity:
examples might be marriage rules forbidding certain alliances, or ghost stories
associated with the territorial spaces between groups. Her particular emphasis
is upon symbolic classifications and their boundaries: between different membership
roles within groups, between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, between
dirt and cleanliness, etc. Without classificatory systems, everyday life is
unthinkable. Every human group has such a system or systems, some competence or
participation in which is a criterion of practical group membership. Inter alia, classification systems focus
our attention on boundaries: of the group, of acceptable behaviour, of purity,
of humanity, of whatever. Issues of classification are always issues of identification.
Ritual
pollution and supernatural danger combine in the 'incest taboo'. Conventional
anthropological wisdom suggests that a ban on incest, in one local form or
another, is the universal regulation
for humans - the ultimate boundary - and that incest is the ultimate
transgression. From Frazer to Lévi-Strauss, and since, debates about
incest have a long history within anthropology. Fortes brings out their
relevance for this discussion1. He argues that the notion of incest,
the identification of particularly close categories of kin between whom sex is
prohibited, provides a basic 'us-them' template for the wider human world,
creates a need to form relationships between us and them, and offers the basic
model for the rules of everyday life in general. It is thus the foundation of
the human world:
'without rules there can be neither society nor culture...it was the emergence of the capacity to make, enforce, and, by corollary, to break rules that made human society possible.' (Fortes 1983: 6)
The argument is plausible (although one
major qualification would be that organisation requires more than rules).
Fortes posits an intimate relationship between identification and our capacity
to live collectively integrated human
lives. While one can overplay the notion that human experience is orderly,
human relationships are certainly ordered. In this sense, the original sin of
incest is to generate disorder, a confusion of identities. Incest places
individuals in two incompatible places at the same time: how can one's mother
also be one's sister, for example? Fortes further suggests that rules do not create identities. The message of incest
prohibitions is that, if anything, it's rules that emerge from the
classification and categorisation of individuals. By these lights,
identification - knowing who's who, what’s what, and what that involves - is an
irreducible aspect of being human and living together.
Stereotyping and attribution are
important dimensions of classification and identification. A further social
psychological conventional wisdom suggests that stereotyping, the labelling and
classification of collectivities in a partial and incomplete fashion,
simplifies otherwise excessive information flows in and about complex
situations (Aronson 1991: 227-37; Tajfel 1981b). By this argument, stereotyping
is but an extreme example of the general classificatory process of ideal
typification. In its encouragement of everyday predictability - which, let me
repeat, isn't 'objectively' accurate predictability - stereotyping underpins
habituation and facilitates institutionalisation (Berger and Luckmann 1967:
74-5). I will return to this in the next chapter. At this point, the important
thing to grasp is the mundane nature of stereotyping. Although the word has in
many quarters come to attract wholly negative connotations, stereotyping is a
routine, everyday cognitive process upon which we all to some extent depend.
However,
important as they are, stereotyping is about much more than the interactional
and cognitive demands placed upon individuals by the demands of information
management in a complex human world. Tajfel, for example (1981b), argues that
stereotyping is also a collective process, involving the creation and
maintenance of group values and ideologies, and the positive valorisation of
the in-group. In other words, collective boundary maintenance and
symbolisation, pace Barth and Cohen,
are also important (McDonald 1993). In a thoroughgoing revision of theorising
about stereotypes, which is also an exhaustive historical account, Pickering
(2001) emphasises their political role in the 'social exorcism of the Other',
their extreme dramatisation of differentiation and boundaries.
All
of which reminds us that stereotypes, almost before they are anything else, are
powerful symbols:
'symbolic discourse...only retains from experience a minimum of fragments to establish a maximum of hypotheses, without caring to put them to the test.' (Sperber 1975: 4)
Stereotypes of the inhabitants of either
side of an identity boundary demarcate its contours with a particular, albeit
illusory, clarity. Stereotypes are at best partial and always - like all ideal
typifications - constructed from a point of view. They are not, however, necessarily hostile: a stereotype can
flatter (a similar point to that which was made in Chapter Seven about
labelling). Apropos Schutz, and my general argument about collective
identities, it is in the nature of stereotypes to emphasise a small number of
putative similarities between the stereotyped rather than their infinite array
of particularities and differences. Stereotypes are extremely condensed symbols
of collective identification.
Attribution, the attempt to understand others, particularly the motivations of others, by inference from the limited information provided by their verbal and non-verbal behaviour, is also at work within stereotyping. Attribution is another attempt to understand the human world and render it more predictable: rather than cognitive overload and complexity, this is the other side of the coin, the fact that often humans don't have sufficient information to make sense of what’s going on (Eiser 1990: 99-122). All people, all of the time, need to explain and anticipate the behaviour of others. To do so, we often need to go beyond the available information. Ambiguity and uncertainty in such situations lead, Aronson suggests, to the use of stereotypical attributions (1991: 229-37). It may, therefore, be no coincidence that, according to Douglas, anomaly and ambiguity are likely to attract a symbolic charge (1966: 41-53). Ambiguity or anomaly, uncertainty about which way to jump or what to do, are characteristic of boundaries and borders, hence the need to map them with imaginary precision or to dramatise them ritually (and it is, of course, precisely the ambiguity of boundaries which underlies Barth's understanding of them - and of identities - as fluid and permeable).
Before
leaving this topic it is vital to remember, or insist, that stereotyping is but
one aspect of cognition and
identification. It's probably not even the most important. Returning to one of
my central themes - the relationship between similarity and difference - humans
attend to particularity and differentiation no less avidly than they do to stereotypical
homogeneity (Billig 1985; 1987: 118-55). In order to live successfully in a
complex human world we need to be equally concerned with each: that's the whole
point of the model of identification presented in this book. If cognition were
only a matter of simplification and stereotyping - regardless for the moment of
why stereotyping happens - then we
would have only the most rudimentary sense of who's who and what's what, and
the human world would in all respects be a very different place indeed.
To recapitulate another core theme,
although individual and collective identification are matters of symbolic
classification and boundary maintenance, they are matters of classification in interaction and practice. Group
membership, for example, demands, as a practical accomplishment, some
behavioural conformity: some consistent similarity in what individual members
do. Every member has to be able, to some extent, to 'bring it off'. As we have
seen, however, this doesn't entail consensus. The symbolisation of group
boundaries and identifications (the 'umbrella'), the distinction between
private judgements and public behaviour, and the variety of types of
domination, all suggest that normative consensus is not necessary for the
existence of a shared identity.
Nor
do marginality, deviance or non-conforming behaviour necessarily imply
normative dissent. At the margins of the group, where the frameworks of
predictability are less firm and intrusive, there is likely to be ambiguity
about membership criteria and appropriate behaviour. Group boundaries may thus
be generated by uncertainty, emerging as an ordering response to the relative
unpredictability of encounters. Strong pressures encouraging conforming
behaviour - with penalties attaching to deviance - may oppress most those whose
membership or identity is insecure. Powerful signals about conformity and
deviance, dramatising group membership and boundaries, are easily expressed as
stereotypes of insiders and outsiders. This is the exorcism and dramatisation
of the Other, to recall Pickering's argument (2001). For individuals on the
collective margins, the price of admission may be some subordination of their
own ambiguity, submission to the minor tyranny of the everyday predictability
demanded by others. The less securely one belongs, or the more one wants or
needs to, the higher that price is likely to be. And in this, once again, it is
possible to see an internal-external dialectic of identification at work.
Symbolisation
is central to more than individual and collective dialectics of identification,
however. For Abner Cohen symbolisation underlies,
'the whole process of institutionalisation...Social relations are developed and maintained through symbolic forms and action.' (1974: 5)
Institutionalisation is one of the most
consequential ways in which individuals participate in, or take on, collective
identifications. It also contributes massively to the production and
reproduction of environments of relatively predictable collective behaviour.
To
follow the thread of the argument back as far as Mead, I have been considering
predictability as an emergent and symbolically-constructed property of everyday
life. People identify themselves in particular ways at least in part in order
that others may know what to expect of them. This involves a minimum of
appropriate behaviour: a performance. In identifying myself within any setting where there is even a minimum of
intersubjective understanding, I also render the behaviour of others easier to predict (or, at least,
to imagine). In identifying myself, I can imagine their position or orientation
vis-à-vis myself. In
presenting myself, I may make an active contribution to their behaviour towards
me. Similarly, identifying others in particular ways permits me to imagine that
I know what to expect of them. I will, more often than not, orient my behaviour
towards them in terms of their presentations of identity. And so on.
Throughout, one can see the interactions of internal and external moments of identification,
the emergence of individual and collective senses of who's who and what's what.
Nor,
again, must predictability be 'objectively' well-founded or accurate, or
identification actually predictive of behaviour. It may be, but that isn't the
point. Our ideal typifications of ourselves and others allow us to proceed in
our everyday lives without fretting perpetually about what other people are
going to do: we are afforded an intersubjective sense of the predictability of the human world. On the basis of who
we think they are, who we imagine them to be, we accept them at behavioural
face value until there is reason not to do so. Most people most of the time
'know' who they are, 'know' who others are, and 'know' what to expect. This is
fundamental to understanding identification.
To talk about institutions and
institutionalisation, as I have begun to do in this chapter, necessitates going
beyond the discussion so far. Institutions are organised, and organising, with
respect to identification and behaviour. No less imagined than any other human
phenomena, institutions are enormously consequential in everyday life. In the
next chapter I discuss institutions and institutional identification, and
explore further arguments about the importance of identity as a conceptual
bridge linking the individual and collective within a unified understanding of
the human world.