Having understood that collectivities
are more than the sum of their embodied parts, Durkheim, following Comte and
Spencer, made an error in adopting an organic analogy in order to understand
and communicate this: collectivity - 'society' - modelled as a corporeal
entity, a 'living thing' with firm boundaries, complex functional internal
relationships, and higher and lower systems. In this, he was adopting an
essentially common-sensical symbolisation of collective identity. Margaret
Thatcher, approaching the same issue, made what is arguably a worse mistake,
however, in declaring that there is no
such thing as 'society', other than 'you and me and our next-door-neighbour and
everyone we know in our town' (Raban 1989: 29-30).
A worse
mistake, but an easy one to make. Although their existential status is not
straightforward, individuals are at least embodied and obvious. Collectivities,
from the smallest network to the largest nation or global corporation, are
altogether more nebulous; in their definitively collective aspects they may be
difficult to 'see', whether in common sense or sociologically. An army on the
march or a stadium full of partisan sports fans have an embodied physicality
that presents itself with material immediacy. But even their tangible presence
- and many collectivities don't have that kind of presence - is a small part of
what constitutes each as a collectivity. There must be something else if an
aggregation of individuals is to be anything other than arithmetical (Jenkins
2002: 63-84). The fact of a lot of breathing human bodies occupying a territory
is not enough to constitute a collectivity.
Collectivities and collective identifications are to be found, in the first instance, in the practices of the embodied individuals that generate or constitute them. Two different kinds of identificatory process have been outlined: group identification and categorisation, corresponding, respectively, to the internal and external moments of the process of collective identification. These processes take place most definitively at the boundaries of identity, which, at the risk of repeating myself once too often, doesn't mean a territorial boundary. Nor is it like the physical boundary of an organism. It is a cumulative social construction that occurs when people who are identified as, say, Laputans interact with others who are identified differently in any context or setting in which being Laputan matters. In the process the relevant criteria of membership of Laputa - Laputan identity - are rehearsed, presented and developed, as are the consequences of being Laputan. These are political processes: negotiation, transaction, mobilisation, imposition, and resistance.
During
these interactions, an image of similarity that is the defining characteristic
of collective identities is symbolically constructed. But in the shade of that
image a range of diversity and heterogeneity exists with respect to what people
do: collective identity emphasises similarity, but not at the expense of
difference. Similarity and difference being irretrievably entangled in each
other, where the emphasis falls depend on the point of view. Difference is no
less socially constructed than similarity: both are 'culturally arbitrary', to
use Bourdieu's expression, but neither, to remember W.I. Thomas, is any less
'real'.
Individual and collective
identifications coincide in complex ways. A useful starting point if we are to
grasp these is the notion of institutions,
understood in an open, minimalist definition:
·
An
institution is a pattern of behaviour in any particular setting that has become
established over time as 'the way things are done'.
·
An
institution has intersubjective relevance and meaning in the situation concerned:
people know about it and recognise it, if only in the normative specification
of 'how things are done'.
Institutions are thus an integral part
of the human world, with reference to which, and in terms of which, individuals
make decisions and orient their behaviour.
The
study of institutions is a staple of the sociological diet, and their
constitution as appropriate objects for our attention is a matter of
fundamental methodological importance. Institutions can be understood as ideal
types, in both common-sensical and sociological discourse. Abstractions from
the complex ebb and flow of interaction, they allow us to think about, to
imagine, the patterns and regularities of everyday life. Once again, however,
they are anything but imaginary: they are consequential and constraining.
Institutions - much like identities, in fact - are as much emergent products of
what people do, as they are constitutive of what people do. They don't 'exist'
in any sense 'above the action'. Institutions are perhaps best understood as
our collective ideal typifications of continuing processes of
institutionalisation.
One
of the most lucid accounts of those processes, rooted in the phenomenological
ideas of Schutz (Schutz and Luckmann 1973), comes from Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann in their classic, The Social
Construction of Reality (1967: 70ff.). They identify habit - and whatever else we are, human beings are certainly
creatures of habit - as the cognitive foundation of institutionalisation. The
habitualisation or routinisation of behaviour brings with it two important
practical advantages:
·
Choices
are narrowed to the point where many courses of action or ways of doing things
do not have to be chosen (or, indeed, rejected) at all.
·
Since
we don't have to think and decide about every little aspect of our daily lives,
space for 'deliberation and innovation' is opened up: there is no need for
every situation to be perpetually encountered and defined anew.
More than simply rendering the human
world predictable, habitualisation almost obviates the need for predictability
in many situations: it creates a substantial, and secure, environment of 'the
way things are', which may not be easy to reflect upon consciously, much less
change (Bourdieu 1977; 1990).
Habitualisation
may a necessary condition for institutionalisation, but it isn't in itself
enough. A degree of intersubjectivity - shared meaning - is required. When a
number of people begin to share the same habitualised pattern of activity, to
possess some sense that they are doing it, and
to communicate to each other in the same terms about what they are doing, that
is the beginnings of institutionalisation. If it persists for any length of
time, a pattern of activity acquires a history. People encounter it as 'the way
things are done'. It has become institutionalised as a taken-for-granted
feature of the human world.
As
part of this process, sanctions are likely to become associated with deviation
from institutionalised routine: 'the ways things are done' may quickly become
'the way things should be done' (if, indeed, there is much difference in the
first place). Institutions, perhaps before anything else, involve control. Lest
this be misunderstood, however, Berger and Luckmann are clear that the very
existence of the institution, as an axiomatic part of the human world - 'the
way things are' - is the primary form of control. Doing things otherwise is
simply difficult to imagine. Additional processes of control are necessary only
if institutionalisation is less than complete or effective.
The
human world that we encounter as axiomatic during early socialisation is a
world of institutionalised practices. As the products of history, we encounter
them as 'objective', as not to be questioned, and we seem to move in and out of
their shadows. It is, of course, we who actually cast those shadows:
'Knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of the
word, in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the
sense of ongoingly producing this reality.' (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 84)
This is how institutions 'hang
together'. They are 'real' - W. I. Thomas again - because we think they are and behave as if they are. The logic which institutions appear to
possess derives not (only) from their own organisation, but is imposed by the
reflexive consciousness of actors. We 'know' that they are logical and
integrated and therefore de facto
they are. Language - discourse - is the pre-eminent source of this order, in
the form of ritualised speech, rules and laws, written records, narratives,
etc.
Institutions
order everyday life, provide predictability, and permit actors to exercise
lower levels of attention than might otherwise be demanded by the complexities
of the human world. They provide templates for how things should be done. But
they do require legitimation in order to presented successfully to each new
generation: 'The same story, so to speak, must be told to all the children'
(Berger and Luckmann 1967: 79). The more intersubjective meanings are shared in
any collectivity, the greater scope there is for the thoroughgoing and
interpenetrating institutionalisation of everyday life. This we may call
'axiomatic legitimation' (Jenkins 1983: 7).
Where
a range of constituencies each constructs the world from differing points of
view - which is likely, no matter how 'simple' or 'complex' the setting in
question - then the institutional order will be more fragmented or limited in
scope. Legitimation is more problematic in the presence of alternatives. Berger
and Luckmann (1967: 110-46), while drawing in the first instance on Weber,
broaden the notion of legitimation to encompass more than the overtly
political. They insist that the legitimation of the institutional order is a
matter of knowledge rather than, or
as well as, values. Legitimation
emerges from the production and reproduction of 'symbolic universes':
cosmologies, implicit and explicit specifications of the nature of the world
and the place of people and their creations within it. In my terms, symbolic
universes may be thought of as collective points of view or common knowledge1:
'bodies
of theoretical tradition that integrate different provinces of meaning and encompass the institutional order
in a symbolic totality...symbolic
processes are processes of signification that refer to realities other than those of everyday experience.' (Berger and
Luckmann
1967: 113)
One of the key words in the above is
'processes'. At the heart of these processes is language, the primary
constituent and framework of symbolic universes.
While
wishing to avoid the reification which bedevils discussions of this kind, a
symbolic universe is, if you like, the story which a collectivity tells about
itself, the world and its place in the world. A symbolic universe - and Anthony
Cohen later said something very similar - is, for Berger and Luckmann, the
unifying umbrella under which the discrepant diversity of everyday life can
come together. Nor is this only a collective matter:
'By the very nature of socialization, subjective identity is a precarious entity. It is dependent upon the individual's relations with significant others, who may change or disappear...symbolic universes...are sheltering canopies over the institutional order as well as over individual biography.' (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 118, 120)
For Berger and Luckmann, then, symbolic
universes are the sources of collective and
individual consistency, continuity and constancy: 'psychology always
presupposes cosmology' (1967: 196). Returning to the concerns of this
discussion, one paraphrase of this might suggest that psychology is to
cosmology, as individual is to collective identification.
Unfortunately,
after all these kind words, it has to be said that Berger and Luckmann's
conception of the 'symbolic universe' is perhaps a little grandiose. It is
certainly much too integrative. A back-door functionalism, consensus in the
final instance, lurks in the 'totality' of it all. As earlier chapters have
argued, consensus - whether normative or cognitive - is neither necessary nor
likely. We might, perhaps, do better to imagine the human world as a complex of
greater and lesser symbolic universes - 'provinces of meaning' in the quotation
above? - which interlock and conflict with each other in a variety of ways and
with uncertain outcomes. Modest examples of symbolic universes in this sense
might be godparenthood, the medical profession, a neighbourhood community, a
government bureaucracy, or a voluntary organisation. Each of these rests on a
minimal intersubjective definition of the situation, sufficient at least to
actually conjure up the institution as a reality in the human world. Each also
integrates within it a certain amount of institutional diversity in terms of
detail and practice.
The centrality to Berger and Luckmann's
model of cognition - symbolisation and knowledge - is no less problematic. When
it first appeared, The Social
Construction of Reality was a welcome corrective to
structural-functionalism's emphasis upon normative integration and values.
However, as I have just suggested, the model of ultimate cognitive integration
with which Berger and Luckmann replaced it shared many of the same problems.
Even more serious - and there is a similar problem in Anthony Cohen's work - is
their neglect what Barth called 'the material world of causes and effects', and
the contribution that it makes to the way that the human world 'hangs
together'. This is most significant, in the present context, with respect to
the location and sedimentation of institutions in embodied individuals,
artefacts, and territorial space2.
This
of course varies, depending upon which institutions we are talking about.
Marriage is an institution, for example. It exists, it hangs together, and it
persists, as a fairly abstract institution, because people believe in it as a
symbolic universe within wider symbolic universes. But it also hangs together
in a very material sense: in the sexual, domestic and economic practices of
cohabitation, in common property, in the physical presence in the everyday
world of married couples, in specific places which one has to attend and
specific rituals - whether secular or religious - which one has to perform
there in order to be married, in the ring and the ring finger, etc. Without the
full symbolic consecration of marriage it is possible to be married after a
fashion by doing it: cohabiting,
behaving as a married couple, even wearing rings. And symbolic consecration
alone may not be sufficient: without cohabitation, without doing 'being a married couple', is it a 'proper' marriage? Each
scenario is recognised in British law and everyday discourse: one is a
'common-law marriage', the other constitutes grounds for divorce, or refusal of
admission by an Immigration Officer. How often, for example, have we heard
people say things such as, 'The marriage was really over years ago'? Nor do the everyday practices of marriage
and its symbolic specification have to harmonise in order for the institution
to make sense. That, for many people, they appear not to at the moment doesn't
mean that marriage, as an institution rooted in appropriate symbolic universes,
is necessarily weakening.
A
more straightforward example is a university. A university is an institution in
two senses: as an example of 'the university' - a type of institution of higher
learning - and as this particular
university (of Poppleton, for example). Symbolically it is conjured up within
and by a rich universe of statutes, traditions, ideals of scholarship, rituals
of consecration, funding mechanisms, recruitment processes, and so on. This
constitution has developed historically within the broader institutional field
of education, although these days it also has something of the air of a
business enterprise (does this undermine it as a university?). More mundanely,
however, it also exists as a body of people and as a collection of buildings, a
campus, and playing fields. Getting off the train at Poppleton, for example, it
is possible sensibly to ask for, and expect to receive, directions to 'the
University'.
Thus
one can see and encounter physically both marriage and a university.
Metaphorically, where marriage is a shifting archipelago of particular and
historically ephemeral marriages, a university is a substantial landmass (which
is not to ignore its eventual historical impermanence). The point is not that
Berger and Luckmann are wrong to emphasise the symbolisation of institutions.
Quite the reverse: everything about the materiality of marriage and a
university which I have described above is, in fact, definitively symbolised
and cannot be otherwise.
The
point is, rather, that symbolisation is always
embodied in very material practices, in their products, and in
three-dimensional space (which also involves time, since space doesn’t make
sense outside a temporal framework, and vice
versa). In their desire to move beyond the materialist-idealist impasse
this, perhaps, was something that Berger and Luckmann neglected. Collective
life hangs together as much in the visibly embodied doing as in the thinking
(and the two are, indeed, not easily disentangled). Berger and Luckmann's
notion of 'society as objective reality', meaning symbolically objectified
reality, does not take the embodiment of collectivity - in people and in things
- seriously enough. Institutionalised collective forms may be imagined, but
they are not imaginary: the practices of people, and their products, constitute
them as tangible in space and time.
There
are other criticisms of Berger and Luckmann. The cognitive and the normative,
for example, are not as distinct as they sometimes seem to imply: the way
things are done and the way things should be done often amount to much the
same thing. The power of ideology resides precisely in its combination of the
two. Nor is the distinction between habituation and institutionalisation always
clear. There is a continuum from the individual to the collective in this
respect: collective habit is a form of institutionalisation, and habit is often
the individual expression of institutionalised patterns (hence Bourdieu's
notion of the habitus).
Berger
and Luckmann's underplaying of power and compulsion is more telling. Their
emphasis upon legitimation is an important recognition of particular aspects of
domination, and of the stratification which is an inherent characteristic of
knowledge and symbolic universes. Nor do they wholly ignore power: 'He who has
the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality'
(1967: 127), is only one example. But power could be more prominent in their
model than it is. This is particularly important for our understanding of
internal-external dialectics of identification. External identification does
not have to be legitimated or accepted by those who are its subject and object
- they don't necessarily even have to know about or recognise it - in order for
it to be consequentially real for them.
Such criticism notwithstanding, Berger
and Luckmann's account of institutionalisation is plausible and
straightforward, allowing us to think about flexible, fluid and
loosely-specified institutions, as well as those that are constituted more
formally. It also helps us to understand the nature of collectivities and
collective identification. While not every institution involves identification
or membership - 'going for a walk' might be a mundane example, or 'having a
bath' - all collective identities are, by definition, institutionalised: as
'ways of being' they are 'the way things are done'3. Thus ethnic
identifications, for example, are institutionalised, as are locally specific
gender norms and conventions, or the most loosely knit friendship group or
temporary interest-based coalition.
To
reverse the thrust of the argument, it's no less important that institutions,
such as events (i.e. an annual
village fête), estates (i.e.
marriage) and corporate groups (i.e.
universities), are sources and sites of identification. Even when they are not
in themselves collective identities, they are productive - in Barth's terms,
generative - of identifications. The village fête has an organising
committee and a structure of tasks and offices that are occupied by
individuals, whose incumbency differentiates them from each other and from
those who merely attend the fete and may have wider resonance within the
politics of the village. Being married differs from being single, being
divorced, or being widowed (all of which are, however, identifications that are
necessarily rooted in the institution of marriage). Being a university lecturer
is an identification constituted in and by the institution of the university,
from which, at least in part, derive the frameworks of similarity and
difference which situate it - and any particular
university lecturer - with respect to, say, a university porter, on the one
hand, or a lecturer in a college of further education, on the other.
As
'the way things are done', collectivities and collective identifications are
institutionalised. And institutions are sources and sites of identification for
individuals. But what, for example, is the relationship between institutional
identities and the individuals who occupy them? Ralph Linton addressed this
issue when he defined status and role (1936: 113-31). A status is an
institutionalised identification viewed in the abstract, as 'a collection of
rights and duties' (ibid.: 113). For
example, 'husband' and Professor of Sports Marketing at the University of
Poppleton are both statuses: the actual individuals who may be identified with
the status are irrelevant. Every status has a practical element, in the role
attached to and specified by it: this is what the occupant of the status does
when acting in that status.
Linton's
notion of role, with its implied theatrical analogy, anticipates some aspects
of Goffman's dramaturgical model (se Chapter Seven). Indeed, the status-role
dyad - for they are inseparable concepts, each entailed in the other - was
fundamental to the development of social theory. However, it is problematic in
at least three key respects. First, as Merton pointed out (1957: 369), 'a
particular status involves, not a single associated role, but an array of
associated roles'. Merton preferred to refer to the 'role-set' attached to a
status: 'that complement of role-relationships which persons have by virtue of
occupying a particular social status'. Taking Merton's point further, any
institutionalised identification - any 'status' - can be done in a variety of ways, depending upon the individual
occupant(s), contextual constraints and possibilities, and the demands of
significant others.
The
second problem is that the practical concomitants of any institutionalised
identification are unlikely to be as clear and unambiguous as both Linton and
Merton appear to think. No doubt some
of the practical requirements or expectations of any status are obvious and
definite: fidelity is part of the role of 'husband' in western Christian
societies, for example. But much will be situationally sensitive and, as
recognised by Goffman and Bourdieu, improvisatory within the interactional ebb
and flow of the human world. Another way of saying which is to remember that
institutional identifications, like all human phenomena, are simultaneously in
the individual, interaction and institutional orders. The role-expectations of
a 'status' may be contradictory or incongruent: fidelity figures prominently in
Christian marriage vows, but locally it may also be regarded as perfectly
appropriate for a 'good' husband to discreetly take a mistress. But in that same
local context, failure to take a mistress does not amount to failure as a
husband.
The
final problem with Linton's definition may in part account for the
'difficulties and weaknesses of general role theory' (Jackson 1972: 5). Put
simply, if a 'status' is a collection of rights and duties, why do we need a
further concept of 'role' in order to define its performative aspects, unless
they are somehow different from the rights and duties concerned? Rights and
duties are, after all, practical matters: rights are what you can expect of
others, duties what they can expect of you. Since Linton, and many subsequent
sociologists, have understood role as the operationalisation of the rights and
duties of status, the former entailed in the latter, the concept of role looks
redundant (Coulson 1972). What's more, 'status-role' looks suspiciously like a
version of the problematic distinction between thinking and doing, and its
associated allotropes of structure/action, and culture/society.
From
the point of view of the beginning of the 21st century, 'status' and 'role'
might, therefore, appear to be antediluvian; they are certainly no longer much
used. But they don't deserve to be simply forgotten. For example, in suggesting
that rights and duties are definitive of institutionalised identity, they shed
further light on the internal-external dialectic of identification. Rights may
be what I expect of others as an
aspect of my institutional identity, but they have no effect - in fact they
don't exist - if those others don't recognise them. I cannot simply assert this or that 'right': it has to
be specified in a legitimate collective discourse about rights and the
entailment of rights in particular identifications. This is, in fact, the point
about institutionalisation. A similar point in reverse can be made about my
duties: the call of duty may be collectively
issued, but it has to be recognised - and that duty done - by me as an individual.
Thus
status, as a collection of rights and duties, alerts us to the complexity of the
dialectic of identification. Nor is it the only useful lesson to be drawn from
Linton:
'A
status, in the abstract, is a position in a particular pattern. It is thus
quite correct to speak of each individual as having many statuses...However,
unless the term is qualified in some way, the
status of any individual means the sum total of all the statuses that he
occupies.' (Linton 1936: 113)
Although this is a little too simple,
using the same word for both the abstractly
institutional and the concretely individual
encourages an appreciation of the interpenetration of the individual and the
collective. Individual identification is revealed as, to a considerable extent,
a customised collage of collective identifications.
The
problems with 'status-role' seem to centre largely on the role side of the
equation. The distinction between the nominal
and the virtual may offer a more
promising way forward, in that it allows us to think about the fact that
abstractly collective institutionalised identifications (statuses) are occupied
by embodied individuals, yet are also independent of them. The nominal in this
case is the ideal typification of the institutionalised identity - its name or
title, the notional rights and duties which attach to it, etc. - while the virtual
is how that identification is worked out, given local vagaries of context and
allowing for individual variation, by any particular incumbent. This permits
comparison of the range of differentiation in everyday life between individual incumbents of the same
institutionalised identity, such as 'husband' or lecturer at the University of
Poppleton. At the same time we can compare local
differences in typification and practice with respect to institutionalised
identities: we might look, for example, at lecturers at the Universities of
Poppleton and Old Sarum to see what they have in common and how they differ.
Rather than persisting with the concepts of status
and role, we might therefore talk
about institutionalised identities in
their nominal and virtual aspects. This has the further advantage of
reducing the scope for confusion between the Weberian notion of 'status' - that
dimension of stratification which relates to 'social honour' or 'social
standing', judged according to a range of ascribed or achieved criteria (Turner
1988) - and 'status' as abstract institutionalised identification.
So far I have been talking about
institutions in very general terms. But what about different kinds of
institutions? Clearly there is, for example, a difference between 'marriage'
and an event such as the village fête. Both are institutionalised, and
both are sources of identifications, but I don't have to be a sociologist to
appreciate that they are not really the 'same kind of thing'. A first move
towards clarity is to distinguish institutions
from organisations.
Institutions
have already been defined. Organisations require a slightly more complex
definition, as particular kinds of institutions in which:
·
there
are always members;
·
members
combine in the pursuit of explicit objectives, which serve to identify the
organisation;
·
there
are criteria for identifying, and processes for recruiting, members;
·
there
is a division of labour in the specification of the specialised tasks and
functions performed by individual members; and
·
there
is a recognised pattern of decision-making and task allocation.
By this definition, the category of
organisations stretches to include many real life possibilities: from a
rhythm'n'blues band, to a New Guinean men's house, to an Ashanti matrilineage,
to a bowling club, to the CIA, to Microsoft, to the United Nations. Thus,
marriage is not an organisation - although any particular marriage may be -
while the village fête organising committee is.
The
sociological study of organisations is well established. Building on Weber's
initial observations about of bureaucracy, there is a huge literature, on
formal organisations in particular4, that doesn't need to be
reviewed here. But looking at organisations does help us understand the
interplay between individual and collective identifications. Organisations are
composed of members, actual individuals. My organisational memberships are an
aspect of my individual identity, although each is not equally relevant. Being
a member of the University of Sheffield has greater salience than being a
member of the National Trust. Once again, however, this depends on point of
view and context: to its staff my membership of the Trust is likely to be my only significant identification.
Organisations
are also networks of specialised nominal identifications: positions, offices
and functions organised as 'jobs'. This is where the organisation as a division
of labour comes into its own. Although occupied at any point of time by
individuals, these positions are identified with or part of the organisation:
at least in principle, their existence is independent of their occupancy by
specific individuals. Organisations create, in fact, the possibility of
specific, concrete identities that are not, at any particular point in time,
embodied (whether individually or collectively). That a post or an office is
vacant does not necessarily mean that it ceases to exist.
The
organisation of identification is an important part of what social scientists
talk about, often with a glibness that does them little credit, as 'social
structure'. If 'social structure' is to be found anywhere other than in the
aggregate abstraction of statistics, if it is to have anything approaching an
intersubjective reality in the human world, it is in institutions and
organisations, and the pattern of relationships between organisations and their
members. In the organisation of identification, the interaction order and the
institutional order are routinely and mutually implicated in each other.
I suggested in Chapter One that a
theoretical appreciation of identification is vital if we are to steer the
debate about structure and agency - the collective and the individual - out of
its present doldrums. In any local setting in the human world, organised
processes of identification are central to the allocation of rewards and
penalties, resources and costs, honour and shame. Organisations and
identifications are at the heart of the production and reproduction of
hierarchy and stratification. Furthermore, since the degree to which identity
is organised is likely to be a function of complexity - scale and institutional
heterogeneity - there is also something more to be said in this respect about
modernity and identity. These issues are explored further in the closing
chapters.