CATEGORISATION
AND CONSEQUENCES
As argued in the previous chapter, every
organisation is a group, with members who recognise it and their own membership
of it. Organisations are also always networks of reciprocal identification:
self-definition as a member depends upon recognition by other members.
Specifically, membership must at least be registered by those who are
authorised to do so (i.e. by 'the organisation'). Hierarchies of authority and
control govern the reciprocity of identification within organisations, and
group membership is always in part a matter of categorisation. Thus it is even,
in extremis, possible to have
organisational 'members' who are authoritatively registered as such, but are
not themselves aware of their 'membership', or may not even exist.
Organisational
membership can be a penalty or a
resource or benefit. When the Committee of an exclusive Country Club interviews
a would-be member, none of the participants doubt that something scarce and
attractive is at stake. A job selection interview is also allocating an
organisational membership that is usually seen positively, as a resource.
However, an interview assessing someone for a place in a psychiatric
institution or residential care home is deciding something more ambiguous.
The examples immediately above prompt
the question, when are the two sides to the transaction actual or potential
co-members of the same organisation? The successful applicant and the Country
Club committee are co-members. On the face of things, so are recruiters and
recruits in an employing organisation. But that may not be straightforward. If
one is a manager and the other an hourly-paid worker, whose terms and
conditions of membership - among which is security of membership - are
dramatically different, in what sense are they co-members? Point of view is
important here, as is the interplay of similarity and difference within
organisations. Whether or not a psychiatric patient is a 'member' of the
institution will depend upon institutional policy and style. And also upon
point of view. Membership may be demanded of the patient by a therapeutic
regime emphasising inclusion and participation; she, however, may refuse to
connive in it, which in its turn may have consequences. Nominally she may be a
member, but virtually? Virtually she is an inmate. Therapeutic rhetoric aside,
she cannot enjoy membership of the same kind as her psychiatrist's.
To make a point which resonates with the arguments of Foucault and many others, although modern organisations produce engine parts, meals, telecommunication services, government information, or whatever, they also contribute to the production of people, identified in particular ways. And just as other organisational product ranges are diverse, organisational membership is by definition heterogeneous and stratified. There is no such thing as an undifferentiated category of 'member'.
For some organisations 'people-production' is their core business. Schools, colleges and other organisations of formal education are perhaps the most obvious examples, but they aren't the only ones. The criminal courts, for example, impose penal membership and stigmatising identification. Instead of branding a felon on the forehead, modern criminal justice interrupts her official biography - her 'record' - with a prison sentence. This cancels or suspends most of her existing organisational memberships, locking her into a new one - convicted prisoner and inmate - which overrides practically all others. Branding iron and prison record are both effective stigmata. Both change her identity.
To
take another example, institutional psychiatry, in addition to its provision of
therapeutic benefits and care, is in the business of containment and, arguably,
punishment1. Both involve the authoritative medical identification
of individuals as patients of a particular type, and their location in
appropriate niches within organisational hierarchies. 'Psychiatric patient'
('person with a serious mental health problem' or whatever) is another
identification, its origins organisational, which overshadows most other
aspects of individual identity. In Becker's terminology (1963: 32-3) - borrowed
from Everett Hughes - it is a 'master status', to which most other identities
are subordinate.
Identity
of any kind is consequential (otherwise it wouldn't be identity). Organisational identification is consequential in
particular ways. Membership may offer access to resources and it may have
costs; it may be a benefit or a penalty. For example, organisations are
generally something more than a symbolically constructed collective umbrella.
Even if only in a modest way, they are often corporate groups, in which
property and resources are vested and through which those resources are
distributed. Furthermore, as hierarchical networks of authority and power,
organisations entail the direction of the behaviour of members and at least
minimal individual submission to collective routines (if not actual rule).
Organisational membership closes some options as it opens others.
Members aside, organisations
deal with a wide range of people - customers, competitors, victims, clients,
and so on - on whose identifications they often have an impact. Take, for
example, the inevitable, if perhaps unintended, consequences of organisational
recruitment. An individual who applies unsuccessfully for organisational
membership is affected by the experience. Recruitment is, after all, a
labelling process: the rejected applicant's self-identification may change. She
may find herself stigmatised and excluded from access to other organisations.
Materially, the resources that she invested in the bid for membership may be
lost. On the other hand, if successful, her recruitment may have consequences
for the members of her network, and for her position within it (if she joins
the police, for example, or if her working hours are altered). Joining one
organisation may mean having to resign from another. And so on. A change of
identity is a stick poked into a pond: ripples spread in all directions.
Organisational recruitment - or rejection - touches the lives and identities of
more people than those immediately involved.
Typically,
organisations are also substantial and visible in the human world: in
buildings, artefacts and public symbols, in the organisation of time
(timetables, the working day, the prison sentence, visiting time, opening
hours, etc,), and in the wearing of uniforms or other visible identifications
by members. Interactionally, an individual's organisational identification may
be framed at least as much by that organisation's public image as by her
presentation of self. This doesn't necessarily mean that, in the case of a
railway employee, for example, passengers 'see' the organisational identity
rather than the individual. But they certainly do see that, and to them it may be the most important thing about
her in that situation.
The
public presence of organisations is an important dimension of their impact on
non-members. From the dawning of our experience of the human world - during the
processes of primary identification - our environment is organised and
signified by organisations of which we are not members. Space is defined in
terms of its ownership or control by organisations. The skyline itself may be
outlined by their buildings and monuments: think of the Eiffel Tower, the
Sydney Opera House or the space left by the Twin Towers, the castles and
cathedrals of mediaeval Europe, or the great earth- and stoneworks of
prehistory. Most organisations are visibly symbolised more modestly: a flag
flies over the general's tent, the Post Office has a sign outside it, the
removal company van is covered in the firm's name and logo, the local football
club's fans wear its colours on match day, and so on. Individuals in public may
be identified with this or that organisation (which, as in the case of the
football fans, needn't mean they're members in any formal sense). The human
world is a highly visible world of organisations.
It's not just a matter of visibility,
however. For all sorts of reasons we all deal with organisations and their
representatives. Many organisations are in the business of allocating resources
or penalties to non-members, either as the theme of their organisational
charter or a by-product of their main activities. In this way they organise the
human world. The organised allocation of resources and penalties prompts
questions. How do organisations classify collectivities in the abstract, and
identify embodied individuals, in order to determine allocation? What are the
consequences for the identification those people of that organised allocation
(or denial)? What is the relationship between identification and the
categorisation inherent in organisational allocation procedures?
In
small-scale societies, without extensive markets or a state, the allocation of
resources and penalties has, historically, been a matter for organisations of
modest scale, with members typically recruited according to kinship or
locality: family, lineage, village, etc. Here the criteria that inform
allocation are implicit in the principles of organisation and predominantly
bound up with group membership (which does not obviate the need for
decision-making, or the competitive allocation of scarce resources: Sahlins
1974; Plattner 1989).
It
is different in the large-scale urbanised and industrialised societies of the
modern world. I shall concentrate on them for the purposes of illustration.
Modernity, perhaps before anything else, differs from other eras in the extent
to which everyday life is framed within and by complex organisations, and by
the number and heterogeneity of those organisations. The existence in most
modern states of a welfare system - even in countries, such as the United
States, which are not usually identified as welfare states - means that all
everyday life is entangled in organisations.
Organised
and organisational allocation is a pervasive aspect of administrative systems. Administrative allocation (Batley 1981)
takes place in many contexts; some have been touched upon in the discussion of
labelling in Chapter Seven, and in the previous chapter with respect to
organisational recruitment. A large literature discusses the topic in a range
of organisational and cultural settings (Collmann and Handelman 1981; Hasenfeld
et al. 1987). Administrative
allocation procedures have some features in common. They are typically found in
the organisations of the state and its licensees, although they also occur in
market settings (particularly the most bureaucratised and regulated of markets,
the labour market). They characterise agencies or enterprises (Weber 1978:
956), the main public spheres within and through which the large-scale
allocation of resources and penalties occurs in modern, institutionally diverse
societies.
Agencies
and enterprises are bureaucracies, and the legitimacy of bureaucratic action is
to a considerable extent grounded in procedural correctness. However, this
doesn't necessarily mean that allocatory procedures are wholly, or even
thoroughly, formalised. Formality and informality - much like control and
deviance - are inescapably entailed in each other (Harding and Jenkins 1989:
133-8). The interview is at the heart of these procedures. As a ritualised
encounter, between those-who-decide and those-about-whom-decisions-are-made, it
requires the interviewee to engage in a presentation of self and the
interviewer to categorise; each is involved in different identificatory work.
The interview is an oral form, an organised encounter that blends the formal
and the informal. Literate procedures, such as the written examination (Ong
1982: 55-6) or the diagnostic test (S. Cohen 1985: 183-96; Hanson 1993), are
increasingly influential in some arenas of administrative allocation and do not
depend upon the immediacy of interaction and situation. These are
characteristically modern procedures; testing, in particular, exemplifies what
Giddens describes as the increasing importance in the modern world of 'expert
systems' (1990: 27-9). The test offers a vision of decision-making
uncontaminated by its immediate context, 'objectivity' guaranteed by scientific
method. With the I.Q. test as a basic model, a multitude of standardised tests
- promoted by an expansionist academic discipline, psychology, and exploited in
their professionalising strategies by personnel and training specialists - are
now used to assess intelligence, motor skills, personality, aptitudes, etc.
Formal testing adds apparent rigour and legitimate authority to bureaucratic
classificatory processes. The relationship between testing and interviewing
varies - either can rationalise decision-making - but testing, with its focus
upon suitability rather than acceptability, is rarely determinate in itself.
Allocation
is concerned, in large part, with rationing. Although scarcity is frequently
exaggerated or constructed, if only to maximise organisational control over
resources and increase their value, resources are always in finite supply.
Penalties too, if they are to have meaning, must not be devalued by overuse.
How to rationalise rationing is thus an important matter. Legitimate procedure
is important, but so are reasons; these reasons are categorising judgements
about whether or not recipients qualify.
The politics framing administrative allocation mean that these judgements often
derive from or reflect ideology and policy agendas.
Categorisation
operates in two apparently contradictory, but actually complementary, modes: discretion and stereotyping. For a range of reasons, discretion is central to
policy formulation and implementation in modern states (Hill 1987: 127-225;
2000: 85-108). Far from being a departure from bureaucratic niceties, without
discretion bureaucratic organisations don't function well. Discretion permits a
flexibility of response and decision-making that is appropriate to conditions
of scarcity - whether real or imagined - and to the complexity of individual
differentiation and situational variety. The interview has become so central to
bureaucratic work because it creates the formally constituted space within
which discretion can operate legitimately. Organisations are structured by
rules, but rules only become meaningful in their operation and interpretation,
and in the elaboration of exceptions.
The
necessary simplification that facilitates judgement also encourages recourse to
identificatory stereotypes. And discretionary exceptions aren't easily allowed
without stereotypes from which to depart. Just as classification involves
stereotyping - as argued in Chapter Eleven - stereotyping is inherent in
institutionalisation. In addition to its contributions to group identification
(Pickering 2001; Tajfel 1981b), stereotyping is a routine feature of human
attempts to enhance predictability - or at least a sense of predictability - in everyday situations of complexity
and/or uncertainty. The maximisation of predictability is one respect in which
bureaucratic organisations can claim what Weber called 'technical superiority'
(1978: 973), so we should not be surprised to discover 'a close relationship
between popular stereotypes and bureaucratic classification' (Herzfeld 1992:
71).
In
everyday terms, what does all this mean? Some examples may help. Recruitment
into employment was discussed in the previous chapter, and here the resource
being allocated or denied is also an identification. As a competitive process,
discrimination - defined neutrally as the evaluation of a number of options and
selection between them - is inherent in employment recruitment. Apropos
scarcity, however, the more vacancies there are, the more competition will
favour the job seeker and the less discriminatory recruiters can be, the less
discretion they can exercise (and, of course, vice versa). The recruitment process may be administrative, but
market conditions are crucial, not least in determining the intensity of
competition.
Stereotypes
that are systematically related to situationally specific criteria of
suitability and acceptability come into widespread play in employment selection
(Jenkins 1983: 100-28; 1986: 46-79). The generality of the distinction between
suitability and acceptability is suggested by the range of analogous concepts
in the literature - 'functional' and 'extrafunctional' criteria (Offe 1976:
47-99), or 'quantitative efficiency' and 'qualitative efficiency' (Gordon 1976:
22-6), for example - and its subsequent use by other researchers (Collinson et al., 1990; Curran, 1985). It is
particular significant because acceptability invokes perceived identity as an
indicator of employability.
Examinations
and diagnostic tests are most likely to feature in employment recruitment in
the context of decisions about suitability. Even when 'personality' is tested,
this is typically with respect to effectiveness in a particular post, rather
than organisational 'fitting in' or general reliability. Acceptability is
arguably less predictable than suitability, if only because it is difficult to
define and highly context-specific. So we might expect recourse to stereotypes
(and discretion) to be more common when acceptability is in question. Not only
does this seem to be true, but some stereotypes are general enough to produce
patterned outcomes across a range of unconnected recruitment occasions. There
is ample evidence of the cumulative influence in employment recruitment of
common stereotypes relating to 'race', ethnicity, gender, disability, class,
and so on.
Take
family responsibilities as an example. With respect to men, and particularly in
secure, routine jobs, a stereotypical model of the ideal employee as
'a-married-man-with-two-kids-a-house-and-a-car' has been documented in British
research (Blackburn and Mann 1979: 105; Jenkins 1986: 67-8; Nichols and Beynon
1977: 97, 199). It is strongly related to age-based notions of maturity. These
'steadier' workers, recruiters believe, because the burden of their domestic
responsibilities disciplines and habituates them to be so. If, as a
consequence, men in this category stand a disproportionate chance of
recruitment to secure manual jobs, then their perceived 'stability' will, at
least in part, be a product of the stability of those jobs. In the process, a
particular kind of worker is (re)produced: one who can afford a mortgage, a
car, etc., who values a degree of predictable minor prosperity, who recognises
the rewards attached to behaving in particular ways, who is tied in to
consumerism.
Organisational recruitment
decisions, and the criteria which inform them, are one of the processes whereby
particular class identities - in this case, relatively affluent, 'respectable',
politically conservative, and working-class - are constituted as distinct
'types'. In this case, the process is also predicated upon, and reproductive
of, a set of gendered identifications. For a woman, employers may perceive the
same domestic responsibilities as a disincentive to recruitment, because it is
believed that they will weaken her commitment to a stable work pattern
(Collinson et al., 1990: 192-213;
Curran 1985: 26-9). The example further illustrates the power of routine and axiomatic
ethnocentrism in the specification of the 'normal' family.
Administrative
allocation is significant in other contexts and with respect to other
resources: housing, for example. In the owner-occupier market and
private-rented sector, decisions are conditioned by a variety of factors,
particularly the contingencies of supply and demand at any particular moment.
Looking at local relationships between identification and wealth, a great deal
of the spatial materiality of identification - residential segregation - is
generated in bilateral market transactions between private individuals,
mediated by financial and brokerage organisations. In public housing2,
however, demand - particularly for 'desirable' housing - typically exceeds
supply, and scarcity is the norm. In the public housing sector - certainly in
Britain, given its recent contraction - the scope for tenant choice is limited.
The
organisation of public housing is more bureaucratised than in other housing
sectors. This scarce public resource is allocated through assessment, involving
the interviewing by officials of individuals and families. Assessment is
conditioned by implicit or explicit stereotypes of eligibility and need, on the
one hand, and of particular categories of people - 'blacks', 'single-parents',
'problem families', 'roughs', the 'homeless', or whatever - on the other. This
may be reflected in local policy formulation (Gill 1977). More typically it
operates in the immediacy and privacy of specific allocatory decisions (Flett
1979; Karn 1983), involving classificatory work such as the assessment and
grading of housekeeping standards: here we have discretion and stereotyping
combined, once again. Desirable housing is a resource, undesirable housing a
penalty, and they may be allocated as such. Access to public housing may be
denied altogether. These tendencies may be encouraged by the politics of
clientage to which local government is vulnerable. The end product is a spatial
arrangement of public housing which identifies individuals as of greater or
lesser worth according to where they live, and places them where they live on
the basis of the identification of their worth. This is another way in which
identification becomes mapped onto public space. It also illustrates the
virtualities of identification. People are allocated a house in a 'good' area
because they are judged to be worthy of it; because of where they live they are
judged to be 'respectable'. And so on, and vice
versa.
Administrative
allocation is wide-ranging and pervasive. Discretion and stereotyping in
allocatory decision-making can be seen at work in benefit allocation in social
security offices in the United Kingdom (Dalley and Berthoud 1992; Howe 1990:
106-35). They have also been documented in 'street-level bureaucracy', social
work encounters of one kind or another in the United States (Lipsky 1980;
Prottas 1979). In Prottas's expression this is a business of 'people
processing'. The 'gatekeeping encounters' of the interview room are concerned
with 'social selection' as well as with allocation (Erickson 1976). In fact,
selection and allocation are one process, of authoritative classification: in
contexts such as the administration of immigration rules this is particularly
clear. Much policing work exhibits the same combinations of discretion and
stereotyping, and can be understood as administrative allocation, in this case
largely of penalties (Cicourel 1968; Turk 1969).
Reference
to policing is a useful reminder that I am talking about labelling processes
here. Although the labelling model originated in the study of deviance, as
argued in Chapter Seven it can be applied to identification in general.
Administrative allocation is a process of labelling, imbued with organisational
and administrative authority, in which positive and negative stereotypes of
particular categories are applied to individuals, systematically influencing
the distribution to them of resources and penalties.
Identificatory stereotypes are,
therefore, consequential, affecting people's life-chances across a range of
situations. But which stereotypes,
and is there consistency in their mobilisation? Some are obvious: gender,
sexual orientation, ethnicity, 'race', all of the usual suspects. Among the
more interesting are stereotypes of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving'.
These are typically concerned with attributes of lifestyle - cleanliness,
thrift, sobriety, honesty - many of which are understood to be visibly
embodied, encoded in appearance and demeanour. Allied to categorical
distinctions such as 'rough/respectable' and 'reputable/disreputable' (Ball
1970; Matza 1967), these are particularly applied to working-class people. With
their origins in nineteenth-century ideals of self-help and improvement, these
ideas and categories are implicated in the ideologies of free-market
capitalism, and still constitute an influential thread in the formulation and
implementation of social policy in industrialised societies (Handler and
Hasenfeld 1991; Katz 1989).
Stereotypes
of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' are significant in a number of
respects. The research cited in previous paragraphs (see also Hutson and
Liddiard 1994; Jenkins 1983) suggests that in a variety of allotropes they
inform policy and administrative allocation in Europe, North America, and
elsewhere. They are also conspicuous in everyday common sense. This is a
cumulative and consistent classificatory process that is anything but trivial.
Categorical boundaries are drawn that gloss morality and identity on to each other
in a forthright manner.
It is this moral register,
resonating as it does with underlying notions about fairness and justice, that
makes these stereotypes so appropriate to allocatory decision-making. From its
own point of view, the process appears, not as denial, but as a means of
ensuring that the deserving are not deprived of scarce resources by the
undeserving. What is more, stereotypical classifications such as these are
sufficiently blunt to permit widespread application, yet sufficiently discriminating
to allow their discretionary interpretation (and, as I have argued, the two
things are not unconnected). They are general collective categories that can be
applied to individuals. They are flexible, and adapt well to changing
circumstances. They can be mapped onto other stereotypes - such as gender or
'race' - to produce cumulative and potent classifications of ineligibility and
exclusion (Karn 1983: 170-3). They also resonate with homologous themes such as
the discourse of moral responsibility informing the modern medical model of the
patient (the 'sick role', as in Parsons 1951: 428-54).
However,
stereotypical classification doesn't only affect the disadvantaged, and it
isn't always disadvantageous. Nor do written examinations or other formally 'objective'
assessment procedures guarantee immunity from the influence of stereotyping or
discretion. Allocatory decision-making is enormously consequential in education
(Cicourel and Kitsuse 1963), and here too we find stereotyping and discretion.
Bourdieu (1988: 194-208) analyses the relationship of generally mutual
reinforcement between the formal marks given to students' written work and the
stereotypical professorial judgements of that work, as 'clumsy', 'vigorous',
'brash', 'cultivated' or whatever, and how this maps on to the cultural capital
of the student, as indicated by class background. Bourdieu argues that 'social'
inputs (class) are converted into educational outputs (marks, scholarships,
university places) through the mediation of those stereotypical categories of
judgement. Stereotypes also come into play in the careful descriptive
qualification of formal results - the discretion - which the writing of
references demands. Even if students have similar formal achievements, their
work - and their worth - may be evaluated differently (another example of the
difference between the nominal and the virtual). Stereotypes enable classification to be euphemised as academic classification. This is
analogous to the way in which the various distinctions between the 'deserving'
and the 'undeserving' combine with procedurally correct allocations of
resources to represent collective classification as the just satisfaction of
legitimate individual 'need'.
Stereotypical
categories of allocatory judgement do not arise wholly, or even mainly, within
organisations. If they did they wouldn't be such common currency. Organisations
aren't self-contained. The classifications that are evident in organisational
categorisation are also mobilised and developed outside organisations. Indeed
they feed into allocatory processes from the wider environment (which, of
course, consists, in part, of other organisations). Officials, managers,
teachers, whomsoever: they have histories, upbringings and backgrounds, they go
home at the end of the day, they read newspapers, and they talk to their
friends. They live lives that are more than organisational. The mass
communication media - television, cinema, the press, advertising - and the
political institutions and arenas of the state, are significant frames of
everyday life in the modern human world. The media and politics are not
innocent with respect to each other: each feeds the other in the promotion and
agitation of public discourses and campaigns focussing upon particular issues and
particular categories of the population.
Some of these campaigns are familiar to us as 'moral panics', following Stanley Cohen's seminal account (1972) of the political demonisation of working-class youth culture - 'mods' and 'rockers' - in England in the 1960s (see also Goode and Ben-Yahuda 1994; Thompson 1998). However, the word 'panic' underplays the routine nature of many of these processes and overestimates their drama. Becker's notion of the 'moral crusade' (1963) is more downbeat, and has the virtue of emphasising organisation and direction. However we describe them, these campaigns are not new phenomena: the recurrent identification of working-class youth as a threat, for example, has a considerable history (Pearson 1983). Their volume, variety and pervasiveness have increased - and this is doubtless something other than a mere increase in magnitude - but there is a remarkable degree of historical continuity. These collective public discourses affect what individuals do - in administrative allocation, for example - and, in turn, they reflect individual behaviour. Hutson and Liddiard's account (1994) of the relationship between the construction of 'youth homelessness' as an issue and the bureaucratic processing of the young homeless illustrates this interplay between 'public issues' and 'personal troubles'.
Other
categories which have been the recent subject and object of public agitation in
this way include black youth (Hall et al. 1978; Solomos 1988: 121-45), welfare
recipients (Golding and Middleton 1982), homosexuals and HIV-positive people in
general (Cook and Colby 1992; Watney 1988), and young people organising and
attending 'raves' (Critcher 2003: 48-63). Some public moral campaigns - dealing
with child abuse and paedophilia (Jenkins 1992) or satanism (Richardson et al.1991), for example - in addition
to identifying deviant categories, whether real or imaginary, dramatise and
normalise institutions and identities such as the family and Christianity. To
re-emphasise that these campaigns are not distinctively modern, a parallel can
be found with medieval and early-modern anti-semitic public discourses, for
example (Dundes 1991; Hsia 1988). Other, more routine collective public
discourses - for example, the signification of conventional gender roles -
dramatise and promote 'normal', positively valorised identities. These are less
likely to be crusades or panics, more ubiquitous themes in advertising, cinema,
literature, and so on (Goffman 1979; McRobbie 1991).
The identification and construction of
the 'normal' has many facets. Returning to administrative allocation, the role
of testing is important in this respect. Inspired in part by Foucault, Ian
Hacking (1990) argues convincingly that the notion of 'normality' is in large
part a modern artefact of the exponential growth of mathematics as a cultural
discourse and a way of understanding of the world. The development of
statistics transformed the imprecise everyday probability of chance and
experience into a hard image of predictability, legitimated by science and
suited to the needs of bureaucracy. This facilitated the imperialism of
increasingly sophisticated and unforgivingly firm models of statistically
'normality'. Hand-in-glove with this went the elaboration of categories in
general:
'many of the facts presented by the bureaucracies did not even exist ahead of time. Categories had to be invented into which people could conveniently fall in order to be counted.' (Hacking 1990: 3)
The census of population - while it has
antecedents in the empires of antiquity - is a distinctive product of the
modern state's statistical governmentality that has had massive identificatory
consequences (Kertzer and Arel 2002). From colonial Africa and India to the
contemporary US, census and other population classifications have interacted in
complex ways with local collective identifications: reinforcing some,
downgrading some, and inventing yet others, inspiring responses ranging from
cynical manipulation to resistance (Anderson and Fienburg 1999; Cohn 1988:
224-54; Lentz and Nugent 2000; Sundar
2000).
Censuses aside, the
apparently aloof distance of statistical abstraction doesn't mean that mundane
human life is unaffected. Hacking argues that the science of statistics has
created a powerful general framework
for everyday individual experience:
'The normal stands indifferently for
what is typical, the unenthusiastic objective average, but it also stands for
what has been, good health, and for what shall be, our chosen destiny. That is
why the benign and sterile-sounding word 'normal' has become one of the most
powerful ideological tools of the twentieth century.' (1990: 169)
One invented modern category - which
definitively invokes 'normality' - is 'mental retardation' (in the US) or 'learning
difficulties' (in the UK). Where once some individuals were seen as 'idiots',
'half-witted' or whatever, a distinct population category has been created out
of the diffuse individual diversity of intellectual (in)competences (Jenkins
1998). While its legitimacy is based in authoritative testing and
psycho-medical diagnosis, such coherence as this category possesses derives
largely from the treatment and services its members receive, rather than their
'intrinsic' collective characteristics (Trent 1994). Research in the USA by
Mehan et al. (1986) and Mercer (1973)
suggests that testing may be pre-eminently influential in the construction of
individual institutional careers and identities as 'mentally retarded'. The
symbolic power of the statistical model of normality is such that internal
individual differentiation is submerged in a dominant classification of
similarity, constituted in an external relationship of difference vis-à-vis the rest of the
population (whose 'normality' it simultaneously confirms). In the process, the
imagined has become anything but imaginary, and powerfully consequential in the
lives of individuals.
Hanson
(1993), also drawing on Foucault, offers a further perspective on testing. His
concepts of authenticity tests and qualifying tests are broadly homologous
with 'acceptability' and 'suitability'. Authenticity is concerned with
commitment, attitude, faith, or whatever; qualification is largely a matter of
competence or ability. Whereas the assessment of authenticity, through procedures
such as the ordeal, is documented throughout history, Hanson, documenting the
centrality of testing to much administrative allocation in the contemporary
United States, argues that the quantitative assessment of qualification is
distinctively modern.
Hacking
and Hanson agree on the degree to which the categorising effects of
normality-assessment procedures frame the identification of individuals and
population categories. In the general contours of their argument and in their
debt to Foucault, they are not alone. Rose (1989) argues, for example, that the
twentieth century has seen the increasingly authoritative (and authoritarian)
social construction, by practitioners of expert systems such as psychology, of
a normalised model of responsible, autonomous and 'healthy' selfhood. More
generally, Cohen talks about the 'classified society' (1985), Polsky about the
'therapeutic state' (1991) and de Swaan of the 'management of normality'
(1990).
In the historical
background, imperialistic normalisation has roots other than the statistical.
The increasing centralisation of the nation-state, beginning in Europe in the
late eighteenth century, was manifest in the codification of law, state
education, language policies, public health reforms, and public welfare (de
Swaan 1988). The standardisation, centralisation and imposition of national
identity (Calhoun 1997) went hand in hand with programmes of cultural
homogenisation. It's not a coincidence that one of the chosen vehicles of
French cultural integration and the modernisation of the state called the Ecole Normale (Weber 1976: 303-38).
Finally,
also with respect to historical background, it would be inappropriate to move
on without pausing to remember the apotheosis - and the nadir - of the state
categorisation of individuals and populations, and the twentieth century's
elaboration of normality. The genocide of Nazi Germany against Jews and
Gypsies, and its assault upon those of its own citizens who were identified as
'unfit' in one sense or another, was rooted in scientific models of the
'normal' and in diagnostic procedures; it was, certainly in the first instance,
in the hands of authoritative experts (Burleigh and Wippermann 1991;
Müller-Hill 1988). The process was also thoroughly bureaucratised. It is
chilling to recognise the continuity between allocation procedures that
determined whether or not individuals should live, and our own mundane
procedures of employment recruitment or educational assessment. As Bauman
argues (1989), the Holocaust was a definitively modern phenomenon - with
lessons for today - rather than an atavistic throwback to barbarism.
Generally, organisations influence the
identities of non-members through categorisation during the allocation of
resources and penalties. A broad definition of resources, as something more
than the common-sensically material or economic, is implied here. While I have
focussed on administrative allocation - the exercise of legitimate bureaucratic
authority - resources and penalties can be allocated by other means. Typically
involving force, they are no less consequential for identification. However
achieved, the capacity of organisations to identify people - authoritatively or
powerfully, as individuals or collectively - and to make those identifications
'stick' through the allocation of resources and penalties, should not be
underestimated.
Identification and allocation are, in fact, mutually entailed in each other. Identity is consequential in terms of allocation: how you are identified may influence what, and how much, you get. Allocation is part of the process which generates identification: being deprived of or given access to particular resources is likely to colour the sense of what it means to be an X or a Y. A shared experience of being treated in particular ways may even generate a sense of collectivity where none existed before.
The significance of this
lies in distinctions drawn in earlier chapters: between the virtual and the nominal, and between groups
and categories. Identification is
consequential in everyday life. It is in those consequences that what an
identification means - whether individually or collectively - is generated.
Consequences vary from place to place, and epoch to epoch, but in those
consequences the virtualities of identification emerge. What it was to be
Jewish in Germany in the late 1930s was utterly different, for example, from
what it is to be Jewish in Israel in 2003. Nominally the same, virtually
different, Same name, different identity?
The
reciprocation between identification and its consequences is in large part
established during the allocation of resources and penalties. Organisationally,
this may be allocation to members (internal), or to non-members (external). It
is, however, generally - perhaps necessarily - organised and co-ordinated. It
is in the consistency over time and across organisations of
(stereo)typifications of identification and patterns of allocation that
'structure' - an organised pattern of relationships between relatively stable
collective identifications and the conditions of individual life - can be
discerned in the human world.
Theoretical
points about structure aside, the consequential nature of identification must
be central to our understanding of it. Alongside internalisation - which in
itself isn't enough - the weight of consequence is the main experience of
identification. Coming back to groups and categories, this means that a
collectivity or an individual can be categorised, and that categorisation
produce major consequences for them, without their being fully aware of it (or
aware at all). People with learning difficulties, who as individuals may be
unaware of their categorisation (Davies and Jenkins 1996), are a case in point.
Although there are particular groups
of people with learning difficulties - clubs, residential units, and so on - in
the largest sense they are a category, not a group. That category is a reality
for the 'rest of society', however, and its consequences real for people with
learning difficulties and their families.
Another possibility is that group members may know that they are nominally categorised by the Ys as Xs - indeed X may be what they call themselves - without understanding the consequences, the virtualities, of that categorisation. This is common in times of change. Many German Jews, for example, took a long time to realise the implications for them of National Socialist racial policies: that a census classification had become massively and fatally consequential. This example further illustrates how consequences can eventually feed into self-identification, through internalisation. The post-1945 history of Israel - and of Jewish people the world over - has been a painful working-through of the internalisation of the Holocaust, a re-working and historicisation of individual and collective experience in the construction of new Jewish identities (Hartman 1994; Kaplan 1994). That this process has also had consequences for how another group, the Palestinians, identify themselves and are identified by others is further support for the arguments of this chapter. Identification is never unilateral, never isolated, and never without its consequences.
Organisational processes of
identification take many forms, from the mundane to the terrible. The extent to
which they shape our lives - who we are and our experience of being who we are
- seems to be characteristic of the modern world. In the closing chapter I will
return to some of the questions about modernity and identity that were raised
in Chapter Two.