Process Of Collective Identity Formation Research Articles

Organising outsourced workers in UK’s new trade unionism - emotions, protest, and collective identity

ABSTRACT Drawing on the literature of social movements and emotions, this article analyses a case of the union-led movement against outsourcing in the UK. Our focus is on the emotional processes of collective identity formation and the movement culture of new grassroot unions, addressing the themes of movement culture, collective identity and political solidarity. Data consists of participant observations, interviews, and additional website and media material. The results show that the movement culture of the new grassroot unions is characterised by direct action and a collective identity based on a proud re-centring of BAME workers as subjects of labour struggles. Key emotional processes consist of sharing emotions of humiliation, anger, and exclusion, but also joy and feelings of solidarity. A crucial part of the movement’s expansion is due to the construction of political solidarity and coalition-building. The results demonstrate the importance of heeding the crucial mobilising power of shared emotions in the analysis of new labour unions. The article contributes to labour movement research with an enhanced understanding of immaterial claims on dignity, respect and care, alongside the cognitivist focus on material work conditions and labour rights.

State identity narratives and threat construction in the Horn of Africa: revisiting Ethiopia's 2006 intervention in Somalia

ABSTRACT The Ethiopian military intervention to remove the Union of Islamic Courts from Mogadishu in December 2006 has been interpreted in overlapping narratives of historical-religious conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia, proxy war with Eritrea, and counter-terrorism. This article adds another: the Ethiopian government's own dominant narrative of danger at the time. Based on a discourse analysis of materials generated during a year of fieldwork in Addis Ababa, the article explores how Ethiopia's political leadership constructed developments in Somalia as an existential threat to the Ethiopian state. It argues that the language and actions of specific actors were presented as threatening the idea of the post-1991 Ethiopian state and, more specifically, the foundational narrative with which the EPRDF-led Ethiopian government sought ontological security for Ethiopia as a distinct political community and international actor. By focusing on the relationship between processes of collective identity formation and perceptions of (in)security, this article highlights the role of state identity narratives for understanding evolving threat perceptions and their political implications in the Horn of Africa.

Collective identity construction in international collaborations

This article explores the dynamic processes of collective identity formation among the participating organizational members in interorganizational collaborations that cross national boundaries. A longitudinal, qualitative multi-case study research approach was adopted in the empirical investigation of collective identity in three international business collaborations that involve a Sino-British strategic partnership, a Sino-Australian, and a Sino-Polish joint venture. Based on the analyses of the data collected from in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival materials, a theoretical framework of collective identity (re)formation is developed. It suggests that two inseparable elements (states and processes) constitute a cyclic and enduring process of collective identity formation through partners’ orchestrating discursive resources involving a common sense of ‘we-ness’. The shifts between various states are driven by partners’ processes of negotiation, integration, solidification, and reformation of collective identity. A deconstruction process may also emerge, giving rise to the termination of the collaborative relationship. The research presented in this article advances the understanding of collective identity formation in the field of organizational identity by extending the discursive perspective of collective identity into the context of interorganizational collaborations that cross national borders. This research also provides further empirical evidence on the active role played by organizational members in the use of cultural narratives as strategic resources to express their identity beliefs, which differs from the deterministic view of culture in shaping organizational members’ behaviors.

Deciphering the modern Janus: societal multiplicity and nation-formation

ABSTRACTHow to theorize the nation’s Janus-like form, its simultaneous modernity and antiquity? This paper provides an original answer to this longstanding question. It argues that nations arise from the interaction of ‘societal multiplicity’ and the expansionist tendency of historical capitalism. The emergence of capitalism super-adds a modern inflection to the inherently relational process of collective identity formation by generating modern sovereignty as an abstract form of rule. Crucially however, just like its emergence, capitalism’s expansion also refracts through societal multiplicity. Non-capitalist societies are therefore pressured into ‘nationalist’ projects of emulative self-preservation in which the nation’s political form (i.e. the sovereign state) is forged before its sociological content (i.e. primitive accumulation). Thus, the original site of this process, France, produced the modular nation-form that unlike Britain’s imperial nationhood could be globalized. The paper therefore shows that IR’s premise of multiplicity may be the key to one of social sciences’ most enduring puzzles.

Building the nation's body: The contested role of abortion and family planning in post-war South Sudan

This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of public health policies and interventions targeting unwanted pregnancy (family planning and abortion) in contemporary South Sudan as part of wider ‘nation-building’ after war, understood as a process of collective identity formation which projects a meaningful future by redefining existing institutions and customs as national characteristics. The paper shows how the expansion of post-conflict family planning and abortion policy and services are particularly poignant sites for the enactment of reproductive identity negotiation, policing and conflict. In addition to customary norms, these processes are shaped by two powerful institutions - ethnic movements and global humanitarian actors - who tend to take opposing stances on reproductive health. Drawing on document review, observations of the media and policy environment and interviews conducted with 54 key informants between 2013 and 2015, the paper shows that during the civil war, the Sudan People's Liberation Army and Movement mobilised customary pro-natalist ideals for military gain by entreating women to amplify reproduction to replace those lost to war and rejecting family planning and abortion. International donors and the Ministry of Health have re-conceptualised such services as among other modern developments denied by war. The tensions between these competing discourses have given rise to a range of societal responses, including disagreements that erupt in legal battles, heated debate and even violence towards women and health workers. In United Nations camps established recently as parts of South Sudan have returned to war, social groups exert a form of reproductive surveillance, policing reproductive health practices and contributing to intra-communal violence when clandestine use of contraception or abortion is discovered. In a context where modern contraceptives and abortion services are largely unfamiliar, conflict around South Sudan's nation-building project is partially manifest through tensions and violence in the domain of reproduction.

‘Nuestra patria La Habana’: Reading the 1762 British Occupation of the City

This essay explores the 1762 British occupation of Havana. It argues that the military crisis served as a catalyst for the emergence of a discursive space where racial hierarchies were momentarily suspended as residents attempted to make sense of the unfolding events. 1762 thus functions as a window into the military transformations that the city experienced and their effect on race relations in colonial Havana. The descriptions of events and heroes can be understood within the larger process of collective identity-formation that was part of the racially inclusive independista discourses of the nineteenth century.

Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo‐Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth‐century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio‐sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.

Creating Cohesion from Diversity: The Challenge of Collective Identity Formation in the Global Justice Movement*

Collective identity formation is important because it plays a crucial role in sustaining movements over time. Studying collective identity formation in autonomous groups in the Global Justice Movement poses a challenge because they encompass a multiplicity of identities, ideologies, issues, frames, collective action repertoires, and organizational forms. This article analyzes the process of collective identity formation in three anti-capitalist globalization groups in Madrid, Spain, based on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork. The author argues that for new groups practicing participatory democracy the regular face-to-face assemblies are the crucial arena in which collective identity can form and must be both effective and participatory in order to foster a sense of commitment and belonging. The article raises the possibility that scholars should consider what seems to be an oxymoron: the possible benefits of "failure" for social movements.

EMAIL LISTS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN OPEN AND MULTIFACETED IDENTITY

Known for its internal plurality, the ‘movement for alternative globalization’ regularly comes together in events such as the European Social Forum (ESF), which are integral to the process of networking and cross-fertilization among its diverse participants. Yet apart from physical meetings, ‘alter-globalization’ activists also meet in a variety of online spaces. This article investigates the role of such spaces in the communicative process of collective identity construction by examining three email lists devoted to the organizing of the London 2004 ESF – a European list, a national and a national-factional. Considering collective identity formation as a communicative process, the article has focused on the design of the selected lists and the social context or ‘we’ that each one helped constitute. It also explored the communicative affordances of the lists for the process of collective identity formation by looking at bonding, trust-building and interactivity. The results show that depending on their purpose, accessibility and geographical scale, the email lists served as distinct but overlapping loci of collective identity. These settings displayed varying degrees of breadth and heterogeneity in terms of their themes and focus, their types of author, as well as the language in which messages were written. They also exhibited different degrees of interactivity with the factional list helping the formation of a cohesive collective identity for its members, while the European one allowed the emergence of a much looser, open and fragmented sense of the collective.

Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire Kirsten Silva Gruesz María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. xxxiii + 372 pp. Spain's Long Shadow is a bold and at times brilliant study, although not all of its arguments are developed with equal persuasiveness. Ambitious both in its two-century chronological range and its effort to read visual forms of representation such as painting, political cartoons, photography, and film, the book contends that from the very inception of the U.S., "Anglo-American identity has been dependent on Spain. Figures of Spain have been central to the dominant fictions of revolution, manifest destiny, birth/rebirth, and 'American' exceptionalism in general" (289). Although its primary audience would thus seem to be located among U.S. Americanists, there is much here to engage Hispanists, and Latina/o Studies scholars in particular. Professor DeGuzmán calls it, in fact, "a kind of Latina/o criticism, where 'Latina/o' functions as a perspective, a subjectivity, rather than a sociological object of study" (xxx). Indeed, some of the book's most provocative claims arise from its concluding survey of the way that Latina/o writers have self-consciously distanced themselves from "Spanishness." Much postcolonial theory seeks to bring psychoanalytic and Marxist frameworks together, but investigations into the process of collective identity formation tend to lean more heavily on one tradition than the other. Freud clearly dominates here. Professor DeGuzmán describes the development of U.S. attitudes toward Spain and Spaniards as a process that oscillates between extremes of disavowal and identification: what gets symbolically repudiated through the familiar tropes of the Black Legend will later be reformulated as an object of Orientalist desire, as in exotic morisco fantasies. During the era when Spanish power still posed an apparent threat to the new republic, she writes, "Anglo-Americans created a fantasy of racial purity through the representation of Spaniards as figures of morally blackened alien whiteness or off-whiteness and doomed hybridity" (xxiv). Spain functioned as an older rival power, an "alter ego/imago" in Lacanian terms. Thus, during the nineteenth century, "figures of Spain and Spaniards operate[d] as a third term or bridge between historically constructed subject/object positions" such as white/black, Old/New World (xxv). When, at the turn of the century, that empire retreated from the Caribbean and the Pacific in the face of U.S. expansionism, [End Page 438] the representational burden on "Spain" was only intensified, for "the life of the symbol depends on the death of the thing" (xvii). Modernist and postmodernist writers, she argues with reference to Freud's model of totem and taboo, assigned Spain the work of restoring to enervated expatriates their primitive essences, their authentic selves. Such broad claims about the cultural landscape are by nature highly speculative ones that hinge not only on the power of textual readings, but the logic of their selection—on the strength of the case that can be made for their representativeness. Chapter 1, "The Shadow of the Black Legend," focuses on Charles Brockden Brown's early-national romance Wieland (1798), three of Poe's short stories, and Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855): all classic meditations on identity written in the Gothic mode, whose characteristic doubles and shadows are suggestively read as emblems of Spain. Melville's novella obviously constitutes a deep engagement with Spanish identity, language, and politics, and her reading of it correctively restores the imperial contest to the forefront of this text, which has recently become a touchstone for discussions of the transnational dimensions of U.S. slavery. Wieland's link to Spain seems at first more circumstantial, but Professor DeGuzmán pulls off a bravura reading of the shadowy character of Carwin, who claims Spain as his "adopted" country. The discussion of Poe is somewhat less convincing when it unspools a reading of "William Wilson" (1839) on the basis of a single thread: the fact that the doppelganger wears a "Spanish cloak" to a masquerade. The effort to identify him as a Spaniard, as Wilson's (Anglo-America's) imperial...

The role of identity in health information systems development: A case analysis from Mozambique

There is a need to look beyond the immediate process of implementation of computerized information systems to understand the broader social context in which the information and communication technology is being implemented. Using an interpretive approach to the implementation of a computerized health information system in a rural district in Mozambique we reconstruct an important aspect of this context from our interviews and observations—how the process of collective identity formation and information systems implementation are interconnected. Using this understanding of collective identity, we emphasize the importance of communication and shared meanings in developing and extending the primary health care network and in the successful implementation of a computerized health information system. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The two deaths of basem rishmawi: Identity constructions and reconstructions in a muslim‐christian palestinian community1

This article illuminates political transformations in a West Bank Palestinian town over the past decade by examining the ways stories of a killing which took place in 1981 produced radically different conceptions of community during the period of intensive intifada mobilization and subsequently as the Palestinian National Authority established its rule in the wake of the Israeli‐Palestinian Oslo Agreements. The paper examines how political arrangements between the Israeli state and the Palestinian administration forced the local community to negotiate intra‐communal conflicts in the terms of an archaic and divisive idiom of tribal law that in turn accelerated the disintegration of the nationalist solidarity that had characterized intifada‐period social life. The paper contends that shared perceptions of antagonistic violence are central to processes of collective identity formation, and shows that discursive shifts can, in certain contexts, give rise to new formations of identity antipathetic to those that preceded them.

Constructing collective ethnic identities : The case of second generation Asian Indians

This paper examines the role of micro-level social interactions in the construction and maintenance of collective ethnic identity, taking as a case in point collective ethnic identity among the children of Asian Indian immigrants. An extensive ethnographic study of the behavior of first and second generation voluntary organizations reveals that the common public rhetoric claiming the second generation is “stuck between two worlds” bears little resemblance to the identity created as the second generation appropriates and reinterprets the rhetoric of first generation public life to differentiate itself from the immigrant generation. The analysis stresses the overlap of the social processes of collective identity formation and coming of age.