Collective Identity

Framing of Collective Identity

The concept of collective identity has been associated with political action, for example, through social class, locality, place and nation, and ethnicity and religion. Traditional political understanding of collective identity was framed by class politics and strongly linked to large-scale groupings often determined by economic structures, so that typically it was political contexts that mobilized social categories into a group, as exemplified in the Marxist distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself. A class for itself has the conscious collective identity to be motivated to act politically. The crucial distinction here is between a group that is classified as such by others as a category and a collectivity that defines itself as a distinct self-conscious group.

Marxist theory influenced the Frankfurt school interpretation of power in shaping collective identities through somewhat one-way, deterministic mechanisms, which has been challenged by more recent developments that demonstrate, first, the diversity of sites at which identities are collectively constituted and the expansion of consumer knowledge that creates diversity and, second, the importance [Page 201]of inner worlds and the psychic investment made by individuals in specific circumstances. In daily life, people are exposed to myriad ways of making sense of themselves and presenting themselves to others, through the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, their taste in music, their knowledge of sports and different popular cultural forms, as well as through more organized forms of attachment, to a set of religious beliefs, a political party, or an activist group, as well as the diverse identities that are created through employment and the corporate world.

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