Collective Identity in the anglophone Social Psychology

Abstract

The present article is aimed at offering a non-exhaustive although comprehensive review on the academic activity around the topic of collective identity in Englishwritten Social Psychology during the last years. In our view, a useful criterion to draw the line between the highly permeable sociological and socio-psychological arenas regarding collective identity is that it has been sketched in the latter as an individual property and not as a sui generis social entity, in contrast with the dominant Marxian and Durkheimian paradigms in the sociologies of identity. Hence, this review has been made on those perspectives on identity that share a methodologically individualistic perspective that is congruent with the standards of the mainstream Social Psychology, even if it has been developed by sociologists.In the last three decades of the twentieth century two different theories on identity were developed among sociologists (Identity Theory) and social psychologists (Social Identity Theory). Although they developed independently they share similarities such as the claim that between individual behavior and social structure there is a dynamic mediation of a self which is socially constructed. We will describe both theoretical models, as well as some of the social psychologists' efforts to systematically compare them in the years thereafter, in order to create a unified theory on collective identity out of both explanatory frameworks that have occupied parallel but homonymous universes. Additionally, we will make a journey into the discourse analysis' fields on identity, and we will explore some of its key features. Although this article is not aimed at discussing a particular hypothetical body, we would like to state that our thesis is clear: greater inter-paradigm communication and commonality of goals will lead to greater comprehension levels of broad identity phenomena.