Identity Negotiation

Since the late 1970s, identity negotiation, as a process of coming to know the self in relational, social, and cultural contexts, has been an increasingly popular object of inquiry in the social sciences. Communication scholars (as well as those in sociology, anthropology, and social psychology, among other disciplines) have built on symbolic interaction, social constructionist, and constructivist theoretical frames to study the various ways individuals come to understand themselves simultaneously as unique and as part of numerous social groups, as mainstream or dominant, marginalized or oppressed—or in fact all of these things at various moments and places. Identity negotiation has been examined as part of a constellation of concepts and constructs, and in terms of perspective or cognition, of ideology and structural condition(ing), as well as actually occurring interaction. In fact, research into the processes through which selves or identities came to be understood in social context has formed the bedrock upon which all social sciences have been built.

Identity negotiation can thus mean so many things as to mean nothing. To explicate the concept for the purposes of understanding its use and usefulness in contemporary theory building and research, this entry first looks briefly at the historical context in which identity negotiation was named as a significant developmental process for the purposes of inquiry. In the 1970s, researchers in sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and communication became interested in the processes through which individuals come to identify with social groups as well as those processes through which they are identified as insiders and outsiders to those social groups. Importantly, the research and theory building that gained attention at this time was also a reflection of historical circumstances in the United States, when mass protests for civil rights, countercultural movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War created a sense of disorder and discomfort among researchers and in their institutions. Since the 1990s, as the phrase identity politics gained prominence on the political stage, academic research on identity negotiation moved from the focus on culture. In this manner, the development of self and identity negotiation research can be seen as an attempt on the part of scientists to find order in the chaos of societal changes.

Epistemologically, then, identity negotiation is most popularly studied as a process through which a self comes to represent its entity or interests in interaction with society. The modern study of identity negotiation as meaning making places identity as both subject and object of inquiry. This process necessarily involves a boundary crossing (although certainly not one way) from the internal world of thoughts and perceptions (self) to the external world of significant others (including mediated others). One both has an identity (avowed) and is assigned an identity by others (ascribed); one's avowed and ascribed identities often overlap, and confusion may result when an avowed identity is not mirrored in the responses of others, and vice versa.

Nested in a particular ontology of the self as individual, separated from other selves and from the environment, identity presents an epistemological dilemma for scientists, although it has been somewhat ignored. Bounded by individual bodies and minds, the self is unknowable, and yet, identity also assumes some sociocultural categorization. One is made of substance and that substance is contained and knowable in the social world. Edward Sampson discusses the modern individual as coherent, self-contained, and, most importantly, singular. Yet, even in its singularity, the self registers its credibility in terms of deviations from the norm. In different disciplines, and among different philosophies, that norm (as White, middle class, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, etc.) is now widely questioned. Still, ontology and epistemology run deep, and so to the degree that social sciences in the Western world rely on the concept of a bounded, [Page 366]knowing, and knowable self (i.e., separate from a physical body, from others, and from nature), the individual as an isolatable substance, capable of objectification and of being objectified, remains.

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