Loseke - Study of Identity As Cultural, Institutional, Organizational & Personal Narratives

The Sociological Quarterly ISSN 0038-0253
THE STUDY OF IDENTITY AS CULTURAL, INSTITUTIONAL, ORGANIZATIONAL, AND PERSONAL NARRATIVES: Theoretical and Empirical Integrations
Donileen R. Loseke*
University of South Florida
I argue that the study of narrative identity would benet from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do.
A human is essentially a story-telling animal (MacIntyre 1984:216), and storytelling may be the way through which human beings make sense of their own lives and the lives of others (McAdams 1995:207, emphasis in original). Although we live in a culture of storytelling (Weeks 1998:46), social researchers until recently shunned the study of narratives, evaluated and berated as an ambiguous, particularistic, idiosyncratic and imprecise way of representing the world (Ewick and Silbey 1995:198). Yet the past two decades have witnessed remarkable change as a variety of scholars became dissatised with reigning theoretical or methodological frameworks driving their research. While such changes are a routine part of intellectual history, it is notable that changes across social science disciplines as well as across myriad substantive topics were similar in that they led to a narrative turn (Mishler 1995; Denzin and Lincoln 2000). The formerly criticized subjective and contextualized nature of the narrative form became praised as its precise strengths in examining multiple questions about how humans create and sustain meaning (Ewick and Silbey 1995), including the meaning of identity. Narratives create identity at all levels of human social life. At the macro-level, there are stories producing cultural identities, the imagined characteristics of disembodied types of people that simplify a complex world (DiMaggio 1997) and construct symbolic boundaries around types of social actors (Lamont and Virag 2002). At the meso-level, the policymaking process produces narratives of institutional identities, the imagined
*Direct all correspondence to Donileen R. Loseke, Department of SociologyCPR 107, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL 33620; e-mail: dloseke@cas.usf.edu
The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society
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characteristics of the targets of policy or law which justify policy decisions (Schneider and Ingram 1993) and therefore legitimize institutional arrangements promoting freedom or constraint (Alexander 1992). Also at the meso-level, there are organizational identities, produced by the increasingly common organizations and groups explicitly in the business of structuring and reconguring personal identity (Gubrium and Holstein 2001:2). These narratives inform service provision for the unique people who use agency services. Finally, at the micro-level, there are stories producing personal identities, the self-understandings of unique, embodied selves about their selves. These narratives serve as vehicles for rendering ourselves intelligible (K. Gergen 1994:186). Narratives of identity therefore are produced at cultural, institutional, organizational, and individual levels of social life. While scholars often note how these forms of narrative identity are reexively related, it is most common for questions to focus on only one type of narrative identity and bracket, or simply ignore, reexive relationships among different types of identities. My argument is that much could be learned by bringing an examination of these reexive relationships into the forefront of analysis. Such an integration would lead to a better understanding of how narratives work and of the work narratives do. I proceed by rst locating the study of narrative in social research. Then, I will examine the major questions about, and understandings of, cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narrative identity. After arguing that these types of narrative identity are inextricably interrelated, I conclude by exploring the potential usefulness of empirically exploring these relationships. LOCATING THE FIELD OF NARRATIVE INQUIRY Scholarly interest in narratives has a long history in literary analysis that traditionally examines narrative content and form in carefully crafted stories such as those in fairy tales, Greek myths, the Christian Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, or other drama evaluated as classic (see, e.g., Frye 1957; Polkinghorne 1991). Social researchers have greatly extended this object of inquiry. First, the texts deemed worthwhile to explore have expanded from classic works of ction to narratives offered as true stories in places such as court documents (Ewick and Silbey 1995; Nolan 2002), texts of public policy hearings (Stein 2001; Asen 2003), mass media newspapers (Clawson and Trice 2000), and social advocacy documents (Berbrier 1998). Second, while literary critics tend to focus on written stories, social researchers also examine the narrative form in speeches of politicians (Coles 2002; Johnson 2002), television news (Barnett 2005), and talk in support groups and counseling sessions (Irvine 1999; Maines 1991). Third, social researchers have expanded the notion of narrative genres to include a range of modern genres such as the ctional genre of romance novels (Radway 1984), as well as genres offered as nonctional such as autobiographies (M. Gergen 1994), social problems advocacy (Loseke 2003), daytime talk shows (Squire 2002), and the horror stories, war stories, and happy ending stories told by social movement activists (Fine 1995). Given the types of texts deemed worthy of study, social research on narrative obviously
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is a far more politicized endeavor than is the study of classic works of ction. Narratives have psychological, social, and cultural functions (Mishler 1995), so it is not surprising that many social movements now are characterized as identity movements, the goals of which are to construct new narratives or to change moral evaluations of existing narratives at all levels of social life (Bernstein 1997). Whether told as ction or as fact, a narrative is a recognizable story, and a good story is one evaluated as believable and important (for general reviews see Frye 1957; Linde 1986, 2001; Polkinghorne 1988, 1991; Maines 1991; K. Gergen 1994; Ewick and Silbey 1995; Mishler 1995). This means that narrative is distinctly social because stories are constructed, told, heard, and evaluated within particular historical, institutional, and interactional contexts, which include the background assumptions of storytellers and storyhearers as well as the prevailing norms of storytelling (Maines 1991; K. Gergen 1994; Ewick and Silbey 1995; Holstein and Gubrium 2000). These contexts inuence what stories and characters likely will be evaluated as believable and important and what moral evaluations likely will be attached to those stories and characters. For example, observers note that stories of individual lives in the United States typically have their beginnings in families (Denzin 1987) and promote individual cause of life experiences and the morality of individual responsibility (Loseke 2003). Furthermore, standard narratives in the United States typically contrast logic and reason with emotion and passion (DAndrade 1995), display gender differences in narrative construction and evaluation (M. Gergen 1994), and reect the characteristics of the surrounding social environment characterized by multiple forms of inequalities (Etter-Lewis 1991). The core of my argument is that understanding how narrative identity works and the work narrative identities do require examining reexive relationships among stories of cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal identity. Yet for presentation purposes, I will begin by erecting boundaries between these types of stories. Such boundaries, for the most part, reect the fragmented literature and, more importantly, they allow me to explore how different types of narrative identities are constructed for different purposes and do different kinds of work. My call for examining reexivity also raises questions about where to start. I will start with cultural narrative identity and end with personal narrative identity, but then I will demonstrate how a fully reexive model of narrative identity could mean that there is no necessary start or end of relationships.
CULTURAL NARRATIVE IDENTITY Cultural narrative identity is a social classication (Lamont and Fournier 1992; DiMaggio 1997), or a collective representation (Durkheim 1961) of disembodied types of actors. In our current world, stories producing such categorical identities associated with families, gender, age, religion, and citizenship remain from the past; story themes and identities of nationality and race/ethnicity have arisen as major areas of story construction, challenge, and negotiation. New categories of sexual identities have
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proliferated (Weeks 1998), as have the multiple categories of victims (Best 1997), and others produced as troubled and in need of repair (Edelman 1974). While I will use the term formula story (Berger 1997) to label narratives producing such cultural identities, these stories go by many other names including public narratives (Somers 1994), cultural narratives (Singer 2004), cultural stories (Richardson 1990), master narratives (Mishler 1995), or schematas (DAndrade 1995; DiMaggio 1997). Although each of these terms is located within broader sets of theoretical understandings, all refer to narratives of typical actors engaging in typical behaviors within typical plots leading to expectable moral evaluations. Our world is riddled with formula stories constructing cultural identities and this leads to questions: Who authors such stories? What characterizes a good story? What work do these stories do? Socially circulating formula stories are continually created, modied, challenged, and discarded. Some stories, such as the Standard North American Family with its categorical identities of husband/wife, mother/father, son/daughter, and so forth (Smith 1999), or citizenship with its identities of citizen/noncitizen (Alexander 1992), were authored long ago and observers examine how such stories are continually reproduced through the work of social institutions and practical reasoning in daily life. There also is considerable attention given to the stories created by politicians, media, and social activists, who, in theory and in common sense, are expectable formula story authors. For example, observers have examined how Presidents of the United States regularly tell stories creating the categorical identities of Americans, citizens, and enemies (Coles 2002; Johnson 2002); how television talk shows create narratives of cultural outsiders such as sexual minorities (Gamson 1998), white trash (Squire 2002), or immoral sinners (Lowney 1999); how newspapers construct characters such as the poor (Clawson and Trice 2000), the deserving poor (Loseke and Fawcett 1995), the crack baby (Lyons and Rittner 1998), and the she-devil crack mother (Meyers 2004). There also has been considerable attention given to the work of social movement activists who are characterized as deliberative, utilitarian and goal-directed in creating new stories and new identities (Snow and Benford 2000), such as gays and lesbians (Bernstein 1997) and the battered woman (Rothenberg 2002). While it is common for observers to examine how politicians, media, and social activists create narratives of cultural identities, empirically examining narrative authorship can be difcult. For example, stories authored by social activists often are changed when they are transmitted through the media (Gamson and Wolsfeld 1993). Stories also can have multiple, as well as unexpected, authors. Socially circulating stories of ethnicity and ethnic identities, for example, have been authored by the sometimes organized, and sometimes independent, work of researchers, professional heritage preservers, ethnic leaders, benevolent elites, ethnic organizations, heritage schools, media targeted to general audiences, and media targeted to particular ethnic audiences (Berbrier 2000). Likewise, a new type of troubled identity, the drowsy person, who is the main character in narratives about accidents of many types, has been produced through the distinctly noncoordinated work of medical researchers, popular magazines, the National Sleep
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Foundation, the National Highway Trafc Safety Administration, and advertising for mattress companies (Kroll-Smith 2000). Formula story creation is a pervasive activity in our postindustrial world. New stories are created and age-old stories and their characters are reproduced, modied, or discarded. It is not surprising that our world contains so many storieshumans are drawn to stories so narratives evaluated as believable and important will tend to be effective in gaining supportfor a social cause, a social policy, or a consumer product. Many stories are told, yet only some are evaluated as believable and important. What, then, distinguishes a good story? To begin with generalities, the stories told by professionals or scientists often are given a more generous welcome (Gamson and Wolsfeld 1993:119) than those told by others. Conversely, narratives told by disadvantaged people, such as African-American women (Collins 1989; Etter-Lewis 1991) or survivors of rape, incest, and sexual assault (Alcoff and Gray 1993), often are ignored. Also, while this might change with the seemingly increasing power of internet communications, narratives in the recent past enjoying widespread appeal were those transmitted through mass media outlets which tend to privilege stories reecting prevailing political biases (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988), as well as those characterized by vividness, drama, and splash (Schudson 1989). Finally, narratives that might make sense of recent or dramatic events tend to be evaluated as more important than those that seem peripheral to immediate concerns (Schudson 1989). This was clearly demonstrated in the United States by the events of September 11, 2001, which quickly produced a widely circulating formula story titled terrorism with its terrorist primary character constructed as a man who appears Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim (Folpp 2002). Formula stories evaluated as believable and important therefore tend to have particular authors, plot lines, and story forms. Furthermore, and critically, a good narrative is one that makes sense given what audiences think they know, what they value, what they regard as appropriate and promising (Davis 2002:1718). Appealing cultural narratives reect widely circulating symbolic codes (Alexander 1992), which go by other names such as cultural codes (Alexander and Smith 1993), semiotic codes (Swidler 1995), interpretive codes (Cerulo 2000), cultural coherence systems (Linde 1993), cultural themes (Gamson 1988), symbolic repertoires (Williams 2002), ideological codes (Smith 1999), ideological frames (Polletta 1997), cognitive and representational meaning systems (Deaux and Marti 2003), or discursive formations (Foucault 1980). Again, while each of these terms is located within distinct and often complex theoretical frameworks, all reference densely packed, complex, and interlocking visions of how the world works, and of how the world should work. Symbolic codes are an aspect of collective conscious (Durkheim 1961); they are about the impersonal archipelagos of meaning . . . share[d] in common (Zerubavel 1996:428). Some such codes, such as Christmas gift giving (Caplow 1984) are widely shared but supercial and discrete. Others are constantly debated, challenged, and modied yet remain deeply held, inescapable relationships of meaning that dene the possibilities of utterance in a cultural universe (Swidler 1995:32). Gender, race, ethnicity, family, and capitalism are among such symbolic codes woven throughout social life. So, too, are
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democracy (Alexander and Smith 1993), individualism (Bellah et al. 1985), family values (Williams 2002), love (Swidler 2001), romance (Kirkman, Rosenthal, and Smith 1998); (Wood 2001), aging as decline (Tretheway 2001), sympathy (Clark 1997), violence (Cerulo 1998), and victim (Holstein and Miller 1990; Best 1997; Lamb 1999). Symbolic codes surround cultural narratives of identities because they contain images of the rights, responsibilities, and normative expectations of people in the world, and of the expected affective responses to these people. Symbolic codes in the Western world typically construct one identity in contrast to another (Coles 2002), often as binary opposites (Alexander 1992; Lamont and Fournier 1992; Smith 1998) such as deserving poor/undeserving poor (Loseke and Fawcett 1995), victim/agent (Picart 2003), victim/victimizer (Holstein and Miller 1990), good mother/bad mother (Barnett 2005), heterosexual/homosexual (Quinlivan 2002), citizen/enemy (Alexander 1992), and so on. While narratives evaluated as believable and important will therefore have narrative delity (Benford and Snow 2000) or cultural resonance (Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Schudson 1989), it most certainly is the case that the plural and differentiated characteristics of postindustrial social orders lead to predictions that there often are great variations in what is interpreted as an appropriate, reasonable, or persuasive narrative (Ewick and Silbey 1995). Culture is not a singular, overarching meaning system. On the contrary, there are multiple thought communities (Zerubavel 1996), rival interpretive communities (Smith and Windes 1997), local cultures (Holstein and Gubrium 2000), or idiocultures (Fine 1995). Within a social order where consensus is a rarity, if not an impossibility (Jacobs 2001), formula stories are evaluated amid a ow of contending cultural discourses (Calhoun 1994:11). This summary of what is known about cultural identities shaped through formula stories leads to a series of expectations. First, we would expect many variations in how unique social actors evaluate the believability and importance of any particular narrative. Even the most widely shared symbolic codes are not shared by all and must be interpreted through individual sensemaking. Second, we would expect that formula stories and their characters would not offer adequate descriptions of the practical experiences or the unique characteristics of embodied people. Most obviously, widely circulating narratives tend to exclude the experiences and views of some sectors of society while including and privileging others(Mishler 1995:109). Also as obvious, broadly circulating formula stories tend to involve high drama and contain onedimensional characters who are somewhat easily evaluated as good or bad, while experiences in daily life most typically are not so dramatic and embodied people are not so easily morally classiable. In brief, ongoing life is heterogeneous (Schutz 1970; Zerubavel 1996). Effective stories at the cultural level of social life ignorebut do not erasereal life complexities. Nonetheless, widely circulating narratives of cultural identity can become codes that organize information (Melucci 1995:41) and can construct symbolic boundaries around types of social actors (Lamont and Virag 2002). Cultural narratives of identity describe types of people, and they prescribe particular social relationships among types
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of people (Alexander 1992). As these narratives can shape the symbolic universe, it is not surprising that some social movement activists believe that altering cultural codings is one of the most powerful ways social movements actually bring about change (Swidler 1995:33). Broadly circulating cultural narratives of identity also can shape the social world. Regardless of theoretical and commonsense predictions that these narratives will be insufcient images of real people, stories can become social structure through the institutionalization process (Alexander and Smith 1993). In these cases, culture, a superstructure of mental life, becomes sewn into the fabric of the economy, society, and the state (Starr 1992:264). Cultural understandings become the structural categories by which we organize our actions (Lamont and Fournier 1992). Narratives creating symbolic distinctions can be tied down (Schudson 1989) and become narratives of institutional identities in public policy. INSTITUTIONAL NARRATIVE IDENTITY Narratives constructing institutional identities in public policy, including law, are similar to those constructing cultural identities in that both are formula stories creating categorical identities of types of actors engaged in types of acts with expectable moral evaluations. There is, however, an important difference: While cultural narratives of identity mightor might notbe evaluated as believable and important by a signicant number of people and therefore mightor might notshape the symbolic world, narratives of institutional identities are, by denition, consequential. Social policy sorts unique people into identity categories. Real people enjoy the benets, and suffer the burdens, of policy targeted to types of people. For better or for worse, narratives of institutional identity shape the social world and its inhabitants life chances. Scholars interested in institutional narratives of identity have examined three primary questions: How do narratives enter the policymaking process? What are the characteristics of effective stories in the policymaking process? What work do such stories do? While observers of public policy traditionally examined how elite self-interest shapes policy, attention expanded in the 1990s to the interplay between these self-interests and ideas circulating in the surrounding culture (Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Mazzeo, Rab, and Eachus 2003). Clearly, no one claims that the construction of policy . . . is the result of some free-oating discursive struggle that is independent of structural or material factors (Jacobs, Kemeny, and Manzi 2003). However, ideas do matter because the policymaking process most typically involves the construction of causal stories, which dene the problem, the cause of the problem, and the need for policy of particular types (Stone 1997). These causal stories have characters, here called the policys target population (Schneider and Ingram 1993). The proceedings of policy hearings as well as the texts of the policy itself therefore can be read as constructing institutional narratives of identities such as welfare queen (Asen 2002; Hancock 2004), poor woman (Mazzeo et al. 2003), wives and mothers
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(Burnstein and Bricher 1997), women victims (Picart 2003), or lone mothers, refugees and asylum seekers (Jacobs et al. 2003). As with all narratives, these characters reside within moral universes (Mohr 1994) in that some target populations are constructed as moral people deserving sympathy and help, while others are constructed as immoral people deserving condemnation and punishment (Schneider and Ingram 1993). Narratives enter the policymaking process and policy itself through causal stories, and only some are effective in informing policy. Persuasive narratives in policy are similar to those at the cultural level in that they will have cultural resonance (Gamson and Modigliani 1989) with what I have been calling symbolic codes, and with what policy observers call normative beliefs or cognitive paradigms (Campbell 2002), interpretive packages (Burnstein and Bricher 1997), or collective imaginations (Asen 2002). In this way, policies concerning women, work, and welfare were justied by constructing their value as supporting the symbolic codes of traditional family and gender (Burnstein and Bricher 1997; Asen 2003). The symbolic code of maternalism justied the 1935 legislation on welfare (Mazzeo et al. 2003); justications for the Violence against Womens Civil Rights Clause were accomplished through constructing a story of the monolithic woman as a pure victim (Picart 2003:97), and the symbolic code of family values weaves through debates over appropriate policies for teen pregnancy (Asen 2002). Effective narratives of institutional identity in policy also reect culture in a second way because [p]olitical willingness to make [policy]commitments is generally conditioned by societal perceptions of the people who are going to benet (Rochefort and Cobb 1994:23). In other words, effective narratives of institutional identities are sensitive to socially circulating symbolic codes and formula stories. In practice, positively evaluated target populations tend to receive more than their fair share of policy benets; negatively evaluated targets tend to receive more than their fair share of policy burdens (Schneider and Ingram 1993). Hence, members of Congress who construct welfare policy recipients as deserving types of people are considerably more supportive of assistance to poor people than those members constructing recipients as undeserving (Asen 2003); states with the most negative constructions of the criminal and potential criminal cultural identities spend dramatically less on inmate health relative to other states (Nicholson-Crotty and Meier 2003). The work done by institutional identity narratives can be visible in the policymaking process. The identity of Vietnam veteran, for example, was important in the policymaking process surrounding the Vietnam War where veterans were disqualied as witnesses because the Vietnam veteran as a type of person was constructed as dysfunctional (Ewick and Silbey 1995). Consequences of institutional identities become durable when they are located in the policies. A vivid example is the Tolen Commission hearings, which led to the policy of interning Japanese Americans (but not German Americans or Italian Americans) in the United States during World War II. Texts of these hearings can be read as constructing a narrative titled A Nation at War. The central character in this narrative was the Japanese, a type of character constructed as
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disloyal to the United States, not American, and therefore not to be trusted (Petonito 1992). The narrative identity of Japanese therefore justied the internment policy. Likewise, welfare reform debate in the mid-1990s revolved around the story of the welfare queen, a woman constructed as African American, lazy, and overly fertile. As read within widely circulating cultural codes of both racism and individualism, this narrative identity justied a punitive policy promoting individual responsibility and employment (Hancock 2004). As with cultural narratives of identity, we again would expect that narratives leading to institutional identities in policies would not always or even usually be good descriptions of the unique people who will experience the benets and burdens of policies. First, and most simply, stories in policy hearings can be told but not heard. This was the case in the Tolen Commission hearings where many individual Japanese Americans told stories constructing themselves as loyal citizens. Policymakers heard these stories but evaluated the America at War story with its disloyal Japanese character as more believable and important (Petonito 1992). Second, policy hearings do not always include testimony from people who will become the targets of policy. This was the case in policies surrounding the Vietnam War, where veteransthe policy targetswere excluded because they were a priori evaluated as not capable of telling true stories because of their war traumas (Ewick and Silbey 1995). Likewise, exceedingly few women who were targets of welfare policy were allowed to tell their personal stories during the welfare reform hearings in the mid-1990s (Hancock 2004). Third, even when policy targets are allowed to tell their personal stories and hence inform policy, only some are allowed to do so. We can assume that policy proponents and opponents do not ask a representative sample of policy targets to tell their personal stories in policy debates. Rather, we should expect that people asked to tell their personal stories would be selected precisely because they would tell a story supporting the agenda of whomever asked them to participate. Fourth and nally, even if the playing eld in policy debates were fair and a representative sample of personal narratives entered these debates, the ensuing narrative of institutional identity would not be complex enough to encompass practical experience: Policy targets can include thousandsif not millionsof individuals who each have their own unique circumstances. In brief, as with cultural narratives of identity, narratives leading to and embedded in social policy are categorical and only more or less reective of individual experience and understandings. Nonetheless, these narratives of institutional identities have powerful social functions: They serve as justications for policy and they categorize all people into two groups: those who are, and those who are not, included in policy target populations. Narratives of institutional identities in public policy therefore construct social boundaries, objectied forms of social differences creating unequal access to and unequal distribution of social resources and opportunities (Lamont and Virag 2002). Some types of people are constructed as morally good and deserving of sympathy and help while other types of people are constructed as morally decient and deserving of condemnation and punishment. Narratives of institutional identity justify social inequality (Alexander 1992).
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Categorical identities also are incorporated into social services (Starr 1992). Organizational narratives of identity are created by, and in the service of, the specic organizations, programs, and groups designed to repair identities dened as troubled and in need of repair. It is in these places that categorical narratives of identity directly confront the personal narratives of embodied people.
ORGANIZATIONAL NARRATIVE IDENTITY Organizational narratives of identity are created by the organizers and workers in ongoing organizations, programs, and groups designed for people who evaluate themselves, or who have been evaluated by others, as having troubled identities in need of repair. Such places include schools, counseling centers, 12-step programs, prisons, rape crisis centers, programs for at risk youth, and so on. While such places differ in myriad and important ways, each is in the business of repairing identities dened as troubled. Several questions can be asked about organizational narrative identity: What are the relationships between narratives of institutional identities in public policy and those informing the specic organizations or groups designed to repair troubled identities? What is the work of organizational narratives? What are the relationships between organizational narratives of identity and the personal narratives of unique people receiving social services? At times in such places, the narratives embedded in social policy are rather deterministic in that they dene possible client classications. Schools receiving money from Title 1 legislation, for example, must classify their individual students in terms of their deciencies (Stein 2001); workers in programs receiving money from Work Incentive Program(WIN) legislation were required to classify their clients into a limited number of predetermined categories (Miller 1991). The narratives informing policy also can shape organizational services such as programs for gay and lesbian youths, which began with social policy constructing such youths as at risk for emotional, social, and psychological problems. The services spawned from these policies reect that image of these youths as gravely troubled (Mayberry 2006). Whether organizational workers agree or not, institutional identities contained in public policy narratives can become a part of organizational principles and logics (Friedland and Alford 1991). While it sometimes is possible to trace inuences of institutional narrative identity on narratives of organizational identity, narratives of organizational identity do not alwaysor perhaps even usuallystem from social policy. Some places rather begin their work with the formula stories and cultural identities constructed by social activists. Informing early shelters for battered women, for example, was the formula story of wife abuse and the cultural identities of battered woman and abusive man. These stories and identities were constructed by social activists attempting to convince a disbelieving public that wife abuse was a problem and that the battered woman type of person deserved sympathy and help (Loseke 1992). Organizational identities also can be appropriated from places other than policy or social advocacy. Books, such as Co-Dependent
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No More and Beyond Codependency, are important resources in self-help groups for co-dependents (Irvine 1999), and the Big Book repeatedly is referenced in Alcoholics Anonymous groups (Denzin 1986). Regardless of the origin of organizational narratives of identity, ongoing services must have images of their typical client because these images justify organizational procedures and services by offering stock answers to important practical questions: Who is our client? What are our clients problems? What does our client need? How should our client be morally evaluated? Hence, observers have found the particular services offered to people who are blind depend on the agencys image of the characteristics of a type of narrative character called the blind (Scott 1985); agencies organized around different types of stories about dysfunctional families (Gubrium 1992),teen mothers (Rains et al. 2004), or poor people (Allahyari 2000) likewise offer very different types of services in very different ways. Narratives of organizational identity therefore shape social services. They also can be a day-to-day resource for workers in that they offer a tool kit of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views which people may use in varying congurations to solve different kinds of problems (Swidler 1986:273). In practice, narratives of organizational identities can be a members resource (Garnkel 1967), interpretive structure (Miller and Holstein 1989), or membership categorization device (Sacks 1972). The use of organizational narratives of identity as a members resource is nowhere more obvious than in places explicitly seeking to change clients stories so that they conform to organizationally sponsored stories dened as those the clients should embrace as their own. For example, advocates for battered women in courts (Emerson 1997), shelters (Loseke 1992), or support groups (Loseke 2001) explicitly work to modify the unique stories of individual women so that they will be more or less similar to the battered women type of character. In the same way, self-help groups encourage members to identify as types of characters such as the gambler (Rossol 2001), the battering man (McKendy 1992), the diabetic (Maines 1991), the transgendered (Gagne, Tewksbury, and McGaughey 1997), or the transsexual (Mason-Schrock 1996). Mental health workers in psychiatric programs for Latinos also attempt to encourage their clients to see themselves as similar to the organizational image of the Latino (Santiago-Irizarry 2001), and workers in welfare-to-work programs attempt to change their clients self-stories to reect organizationally preferred stories (Miller 1991). Narratives of organizational identity can be powerful. To achieve desired services, or to avoid undesired punishment, clients must tell the right story, and clients refusals to do so can have dire consequences: Women wishing the services of shelters for battered women must tell a story hearable as that of a battered woman if they are to achieve entry (Loseke 1992); court-mandated drug treatment programs will not release a client from court monitoring until the right story is told (Nolan 2002); prison counselors require that the right story be told, and be told convincingly, before parole is possible (Fox 1999). Yet because such organizationally promoted narratives can more or less mimic socially circulating formula stories, it is not surprising that clients or potential clients can be well aware of how to tell the right story. Hence, workers in a battered
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womans shelter complain that some women know just what to say to get in here (Loseke 1992); women wishing to be evaluated as victims of sexual harassment know that they must tell a story dramatizing their weakness and fearfulness to have their court cases taken seriously (Dunn 2001); and men requesting services from an agency for the homeless know that in order to achieve desired services they must account for their problems in ways constructing them to be down on their luck and hence worthy of services (Spencer 1994). While there is evidence that social actors often know what type of story they should tell to achieve their goals, there is ample evidence that clients can strongly resist workers attempts to change their stories. Be these boys in a home for juvenile delinquents (Kivett and Warren 2002), violent men in prison (Fox 1999), members of support groups for women (Tretheway 1997), residents of a battered womans shelter (Loseke 1992), or residents in a chronic care clinic (Paterniti 2000), social actors enter organizations, programs, and groups with their own narratives of their lives and selves. Even though organizational workers might try to change clients stories, social actors will refuse to embrace a new story about their selves unless the story makes sense. This, of course, leads to questions about personal narrative identity. PERSONAL NARRATIVE IDENTITY Many scholars have noted that characteristics of modern industrial or postindustrial societies make it difcult for social actors to achieve a sense of personal identity. There are many practical reasons why experiencing a sense of continuous and individual self-hood in this era is challenging (McAdams 1996:297): Identities no longer are necessarily or securely rooted in religion, community, and family (Calhoun 1994); modernity partitions human life into a variety of segments (MacIntyre 1984); immigrants nd themselves in new surroundings not supporting previous identities (Duany 1998), and so on. Nonetheless, it remains that social actors want a sense of coherent identity and that most social actors do experience a more or less coherent sense of personal identity over time (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). The question therefore is how a sense of identity consistency can be constructed within a world that can be nonsupportive of, or even antagonistic to, such coherence. Making sense of the buzzing confusion of practical experience requires constructing coherent connections among life events, and this is what narratives of the self can do. Rather than seeing a life as simply one damned thing after another, personal narratives allow the creation of coherence (K. Gergen 1994:187), the possibility of linking diverse life events into unied and meaningful wholes (Polkinghorne 1991:136), the ability to integrate a reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated futures in terms of beginnings, middles, and endings (McAdams 1996:298). There are many questions about personal narratives. Observers of social movements, for example, have examined the conditions under which social actors tell stories locating the self within broader categorical identity communities (Polletta and Jasper 2001; Davis 2002). This is an important issue in a culture privileging the symbolic code of
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individualism, which isolates selves and hinders mobilization for social change. Yet questions about collective identity beg two other questions: What kinds of stories can social actors tell about their selves? What are the relationships between the stories actors tell and characteristics of the surrounding social order? Both questions can be examined only by returning to the level of culture. What is true about all types of narrative identity is that narrative can not be understood apart from history and cultureboth local and writ largebecause the multiple contexts of storytelling dene what is, and what is not, evaluated as an acceptable or a good story (Maines 1991; Riessman 1992). To be evaluated as believable, stories crafted by individuals must at least partially reect the kinds of stories that prevail in . . . culture (McAdams 1996:301). Stories that seem too different from culturally sanctioned narratives might be evaluated as untrue or incredible, tellers of such stories might be evaluated as mad (Alcoff and Gray 1993). The implication is that people must use socially circulating stories as a members resource in crafting their own narratives of personal identity. Whether called formula stories, or cultural stories (Polkinghorne 1991; Singer 2004), canonical stories (Hausendorf 2002), or canonical life stories (Bruner 1987), socially circulating narratives offer a model for making sense of the self. There is considerable evidence that broadly circulating formula stories function in the background of thinking, provide hypotheses, and sometimes lter perceptions in daily life (DAndrade 1995). White employers, for example, sometimes lter their perceptions of African-American women workers through that single mother element formula story (Kennelly 1999). Social actors also might use their understandings of socially circulating formula stories as yardsticks with which to evaluate their own experiences: Women who are raped can categorize their own experiences and selves based on their understandings of some standard episode in the classic rape story (Wood and Rennie 1994). Likewise, women experiencing violence know how they should respond to this violence because of their awareness of the cultural script of wife abuse (Baker 1996), and womens understandings of the formula story of wife abuse can help shape their understandings of their own experiences (Riessman 1989, 1992). Black women also talk about the changes in their personal stories and identities made possible by the new stories created by the civil rights and womens movements (Brush 1999). Social actors also perceive others as using their understandings of formula stories as resources for understanding unique individuals. Women relying on welfare (Seccombe, James, and Battle Walters 1998; Hancock 2004), mothers who are teens (Kirkman et al. 2001), and people who eat at soup kitchens (Cohen 1997) talk passionately about how unknown others automatically respond to them as individual instances of morally decient narrative characters. For the good and the bad, social actors can use their understandings of socially circulating formula stories as resources to make sense of their selves and unique others. Indeed, there are indications that people experiencing grave illness or other identity dilemmas consciously seek out stories to make sense of their troubles (Frank 1995; Plummer 1995). At the same time, it is wrong to assume that social actors simply look out into the horizon and appropriate an existing formula story as their own. Relationships between personal and cultural narratives of identity are anything but straightforward.
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First and most simply, a consequence of our mass-mediated world is that social actors are exposed to a milieu of multiple narratives (Gergen and Gergen 1983:263), an ever proliferating catalog of new stories (Weeks 1998:46). A social actor actively seeking a story likely will nd many from which to choose. Second, and related, social actors cannot simply appropriate a formula story because, while self-identities involve the establishment of some sort of moral stance (McAdams 1996:308), there is little agreement about what types of stories and what types of identities are socially valued. The gay as deviant story competes with the glad to be gay story (Plummer 1995); the neglectful mother character in the narrative of child neglect sometimes is constructed as willfully evil, sometimes as negligent only because of the privations of poverty (Swift 1995). There also can be vast changes in moral evaluations over time. When the behavior of spanking children was located within a narrative of necessary discipline, good parents spanked their children. Increasingly, though, spanking is included in the narrative of child abuse, and parents who do this are morally devalued child abusers (Davis 1994). As another example, the single mother in Great Britain was a sympathetic character in the 1970s when she was in a story about the structural problems of welfare policies. This same character now is in the formula story of the urban underclass and is condemned (Jacobs et al. 2003). In brief, while a sense of personal identity requires assigning morality, our storied world contains multiple and often competing narratives of which few have anything near unanimous and historically consistent moral evaluations. Still further, an image of social actors scanning the environment for stories to claim as their own is misleading because cultural and personal narratives have different purposes, do different kinds of work, and are evaluated by different standards. Cultural narratives are constructed by a wide variety of social actors because stories are effective in gaining audience support for one or another cause. At the cultural level, an effective narrative will be a simple story with stock characters and clear moral evaluations as read through existing symbolic codes appealing to target audiences. Socially circulating formula stories are useful precisely because they simplify the complex world (DiMaggio 1997). This same simplicity and clarity makes such formula stories of less than obvious use as individual sensemaking resources. Effective formula stories achieve their clarity by bracketing indeterminacy and complexity, while effective narratives of personal identity are those integrating the disparate roles and values in an individual life (McAdams 1996:306). Furthermore, while the stock characters in socially circulating formula storieswelfare mother, citizen, deserving poor, and so onare known only as these types of people, individuals do not experience themselves as one-dimensional characters. Still further, the binary characteristics of narratives of cultural identity divide the world into the morally pure and morally impure while moral evaluation in daily life typically is anything but clear. In brief, the characteristics of good stories change when they are evaluated as narratives of cultural or personal identity. Indeed, the melodramatic extreme case formula stories that are so effective in mobilizing public support actually decrease the possibilities that social actors will appropriate the story as their own (Wood and Rennie 1994; Gamson 1995; Loseke 2001).
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Finally, but critically, the authors of both cultural and institutional narratives of identity face a far easier task than do those constructing personal stories. The authors of formula stories can choose which individual stories to use in order to exemplify story characters that are categorical types of people. Indeed, if the real world offers no truly compelling personal story, a composite character can be constructed. Formula story authors also can decide where to start and end their narratives; they can construct a story with one plotline or one where various subplots are obviously related in ways supporting the desired moral lesson. In stark contrast, social actors . . . enter a stage which we did not design and we nd ourselves part of an action that was not of our making (MacIntyre 1984:213). Characters in personal narrativesfamily, coworkers, and so onare not always freely chosen, they often cannot simply be written out if they disturb a preferred plotline; human experience often does not have a clear beginning or end, and each person plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others and each drama constrains the others (MacIntyre 1984:213). Finally, but critically, the characteristics of a good story depend on the audience. Who a person was, is, should be, or wishes to be, depends on why the story is told and on the audience to whom it is told. Modern social actors in plural and heterogeneous social environments often tell their stories to very different audiences for very different reasons. In summary, socially circulating formula stories with their categorical identities can be conceptualized as members resources for crafting narratives of personal identity. Yet social actors are not mere message receivers. They better are understood as self appointed members of the story telling team [who take] the narrative baton and carry that baton, aggressively forging their own communication route(Cerulo 2000:43). This requires the complex, situated process of sensemaking within the complexity and confusion of practical experiences. Social members do craft their own stories of personal identities, and they do use formula stories as a resource to do this. However, creating stories of the self is difcult, often a struggle, and success is a real accomplishment (Polkinghorne 1991). THE REFLEXIVITY OF NARRATIVE IDENTITY Although my goal is to argue for the importance of examining relationships between and among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity, I constructed my presentation in a way both distinguishing among types of narrative identity as well as privileging culture over institution, institution over organization, and organization over person. That format allowed me to review what is known about these various types of narrative identity. Now I will explore both the direction of inuences and the difculty of empirically distinguishing between types of narrative identity. First, by beginning with cultural narratives of identity and ending with narratives of personal identity, my presentation implied, and sometimes explicitly asserted, the primacy of the cultural identity. While there is much evidence supporting this argument, it is just as clear that narratives of personal identity inform narratives of organizational, institutional, and cultural identity. Indeed, there are good reasons why it would be
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sensible to begin with narratives of personal identity and trace how these inuence other types of narratives. This would be in keeping with modern, Western sensibilities privileging the importance of the individual. Clearly, personal identity narratives are an omnipresent feature in public life. From the ever popular Oprah show to People Magazine, stories of individual people are a staple of popular culture. So, too, social problems formula stories of all types with their stock characters of pure victims and evil villains are characterized by the prevalence of personal stories (Loseke 2003). American media also tend to rely on the narrative convention of personalization which draws on individual proles and anecdotes (Mishler 1995; Meyers 2004). Personal stories likewise are an important part of the policymaking process (Nolan 2002), and politicians often pepper their speeches with unique narrative characters such as the 22-year old I spoke with who is worried about the future of social security. Hence, while I pursued the story of how organizational narratives of clients inform service provision in places seeking to repair identities dened as troubled, it is just as sensible to explore how organizational narratives of identity are informed by the personal stories told by program clients. Workers hear clients unique stories and these can spawn local cultures, which are systems of understandings based on, and therefore sensitive to, unique personal stories (see Holstein and Gubrium 2000 for a review). Organizational narratives of identity therefore can be continually challenged and modied by the unique stories of individual clients. What requires examination is where, how, and under what circumstances organizational narratives of identity continue to be embraced by workers; where, how, and under what circumstances personal narratives told by individual clients challenge and modify organizational narratives; and where, how, and under what circumstances organizational narratives areor are not embraced by clients. In addition, while individual social actors can use their understandings of cultural narratives as resources to craft their own stories of the self, these personal identity narratives are critical in shaping institutional and cultural narratives. After all, before there were socially circulating formula stories of rape or wife abuse, there were individual women telling their unique stories of hardship and pain. Some of these unique stories coalesced into well-known formula stories; some of these unique stories informed social policy; some of these unique stories are embedded in organizational narratives informing service provision in rape crisis centers, shelters, programs of victim advocacy, and so on. This raises questions such as: What types of personal stories inform the public policy process? What types of personal stories become exemplar stories in cultural narratives of identity? Furthermore, our heterogeneous social order is composed of countless thought communities (Zerubavel 1996) or local cultures (Holstein and Gubrium 2000), so there can be large variations in how particular stories are evaluated: Which audience members evaluate which personal narratives as believable and important? What types of personal narratives appeal to what types of audiences? Such studies might do more than conrm the general understanding that stories told by powerful people are privileged, while stories told by disadvantaged people are silenced (Collins 1989). The study of how particular audiences evaluate narratives of personal identity
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could yield rich data about the meanings and values held by particular segments of the general population. This always is an important question given social inequalities; it is an increasingly important question given debates about immigration and assimilation. My rst point is that it is important to empirically examine how different types of narrative identity inuence one another in the ongoing social world. My second point, though, is that any questions about directions of inuence at least implicitly assume that the cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal sites of narrative construction are relatively distinct. This distinctness is far more analytical than practical. That is, cultural narratives of identity are created and promoted by policymakers, organizational workers, and individuals; organizational workers testify in public policy hearings; individuals develop communities, and those communities compose new narratives that may become widely known; organizational narratives reect policy as well as practical experience with unique clients, and so on. This leads to questions such as how, under what circumstances, and in what ways do particular narratives migrate from one realm of social life to another? How, under what circumstances, and in what ways are particular narratives transported relatively unchanged from one realm of social life to another or modied from one realm of social life to another? In brief, analytic clarity can be achieved by distinguishing among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal sites of narrative production as well as by bracketing questions about relationships between and among various types of identity narratives. The resulting analytic clarity, however, is achieved by ignoring the difcult and complex questions about what, at times, might be fully reexive relationships among these narratives. SOME THOUGHTS ON EXPLORING NARRATIVE IDENTITY My interest in relationships among different types of narrative identity led me to examine a literature characterized by its fragmentation. Actually, it is a misnomer to characterize this as a literature: I pieced together my comments from several literatures that most often are unconnected. This fragmentation is to be expected because the study of narrative identity has been embraced by scholars in several disciplines and because scholars tend to dene their topics narrowly and therefore be uninformed by, or perhaps even uninterested in, understandings generated by those pursuing even slightly different theoretical or empirical agendas (Benford 1997; Best 2003). While insularity and narrow theoretical and empirical agendas tend to be a characteristic of academic scholarship in general, there are costs. In the case at hand, ignoring or minimizing the importance of cultural, institutional, and organizational narrative identity yields an erroneous image of social actors as free agents who can construct any story of their selves that they wish. Conversely, ignoring or minimizing the importance of personal experience and individual sensemaking incorrectly portrays actors as cultural robots who blindly apply formula stories to their own lives (Schudson 1989; Peacock and Holland 1993). Relationships among different types of narrative identity should be assumed; the characteristics of these relationships are empirical questions.
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Further research on relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational and personal narrative identities could produce specic benets. I will consider only three of these in my concluding comments. First, many stories and identities in our world are constructed through social problems discourse (Loseke 2003), which often is composed of narratives created by a wide variety of authors for the purpose of convincing publics that morally intolerable conditions exist and must be eliminated. While observers have noted that effective stories resonate with widely shared symbolic codes (Berbrier 1998; Spencer 2000; Williams 2002), too little explicit attention has been given to examining this cultural dimension of effective social problem narratives. Theory about the construction of social problems could be enriched by attending more explicitly to how effective social problem narratives use, challenge and/or modify socially circulating symbolic codes. Simultaneously, social problems discourse creates culture when it leads to social policy and/or when it changes the publics understandings of symbolic codes. Consequently, the sites and activities of social problem construction offer rich empirical data for students of culture interested in how symbolic codes are constructed, elaborated, modied, or discarded. It would be mutually benecial if observers of the construction of social problems and observers of culture would talk more to one another. Second, studies of the myriad organizations, programs, and groups designed to repair identities dened as troubled would benet by more explicit attention to what is known about personal narrative identity. A common empirical nding about such places is that workers, try as they might, are not always successful in transforming their clients stories so that they are more or less similar to those promoted by the organization. Such organizational failures typically are accounted for by referencing clients failures: Because they are troubled, clients do not recognize that organizationally sponsored narratives are better than the stories clients currently embrace. Research might rather begin with what is known about the characteristics of stories social actors nd useful in making sense of the self. This would lead to examining the characteristics of organizational narratives, in general and in specic cases, to explore how they areor are notadequate sensemaking resources. This leads to my nal and somewhat complicated example of insights gained through exploring relationships among various types of narrative identities: How these narratives are implicated in the process of social change. Durable social change requires legislation passed and policies changed, as well as transformations in culture and consciousness, in collective self-denitions, and in the meanings that shape everyday life (Polletta 1997:431). In other words, effective social change must be cultural and institutional and organizational and personal. My claim is that to the extent that different types of narratives are created for different purposes, do different kinds of work, and are evaluated by different standards, it should be expected that any particular narrative evaluated as a good story to accomplish one objective might not be so good to accomplish another. I will use the extended example of woman-as-victim narratives to demonstrate this complexity. The narratives of wife abuse, sexual harassment, and rape are examples of a common genre of story, victim narratives. Melodramatic in form, such stories feature plots of
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extreme harm and victim characters constructed as morally pure and most clearly and certainly not responsible for the harm they experience (Best 1997; Loseke 2003). While these stories have been effective in changing aspects of the symbolic and social worlds, they have not beneted all women experiencing violence. There are indications that some individual women experiencing violence refuse to embrace these stories as their own because they do not evaluate the harm they experienced as the extreme harm contained in the formula story and/or they do not evaluate themselves as instances of pure victims (Wood and Rennie 1994; Loseke 2001). Likewise, at the organizational level, woman-as-victim formula stories have become a standard by which to evaluate the stories told by unique women (Schuller and Vidmar 1992; Mildorf 2002). Not surprisingly, women victims of sexual harassment (Dunn 2001) and wife abuse (Rothenberg 2002, 2003; Picart 2003) sometimes nd their unique stories and selves evaluated by physicians, police, court workers, or social service providers as not meeting the standards of extreme harm and absolute moral purity set in the formula story. These unanticipated practical consequences of woman-as-victim narratives are troublesome to advocates who want to change the formula story plots and characters. Achieving such change will be very difcult given commonly held symbolic codes of both violence and victims. That is, countless advocates for women have authored narratives condemning all forms of violence. While such stories do exist, Americans in general remain concerned primarily with extreme violence (see Cerulo 1998 for an elaboration). Furthermore, many advocates have authored narratives featuring women as victims although they are not obviously morally pure. However, because the socially circulating symbolic code of victim requires evaluations of moral purity and lack of responsibility in creating harm (Lamb 1999), advocates have found that public support is lost if women seem other than absolutely pure victims (Bible, Dasgupta, and Osthoff 2002). In brief, stories featuring graphic violence and pure victims remain the most popular in the public realm (Rothenberg 2002). These prototypical woman-as-victim stories can be read through the symbolic codes of violence and victims, which encourage audience members to evaluate these types of stories as important. Constructing violence as less than horrible or constructing women as less than pure victims seem to reduce perceived story importance. Woman-as-victim narratives have led to another unintended consequence: Individual women experiencing violence sometimes refuse to identify themselves as a victim because they perceive that victim characters are not socially respected. This makes sense given the symbolic code of victim, which is a binary opposite to agent (Picart 2003), a type of character most prized within the symbolic code of individualism. Therefore, there are calls to replace woman-as-victim narratives with stories of women-as-survivors (Dunn 2005). Yet such a change might not be all positive. When read through the symbolic code of individualism, the victim code does create a disempowering identity, yet this very weakness is a mandate for offering assistance (Clark 1997). Conversely, when read through the symbolic code of individualism, the survivor character is very respectable, yet such a strong character is not a justication for offering assistance. What would happen if the woman-as-survivor story replaced the womanThe Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society
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as-victim story at the levels of culture, institutions, organizations, and personal life? Would individual women experiencing violence, rape, or harassment be more likely to identify with this strong survivor character than with the weak victim character? Would stories dramatizing womens strength lead to personal and public respect but no social resources? Is it possible to dramatize the strengths of narrative characters while justifying their need for social assistance? These are empirical questions. While there has been considerable attention to the unintended consequences of woman-as-victim narratives, the complexities and perplexities of social change are not limited to these particular narratives. Consider the similarities between womanas-victim narratives and those of gay youths as at risk. The formula story of gay and lesbian youths as troubled people struggling with their socially stigmatized identity has been effective in that it has justied social services to assist these youths. Yet here too, observers are questioning the unintended consequences of the at risk narrative that frames such youths overwhelmingly in terms of oppression and victimization (Talburt, Rofes, and Louise 2004). This decit model frames sexuality as a personal problem (Quinlivan 2002), it frames nonheterosexual youth as other than normal, and it ignores how social activism to change the environment can be empowering (Mayberry 2006). Here, too, these complaints have led to calls to replace this story with a different one, in this case, a story condemning the normative constructions of heterosexuality woven throughout the social order (Quinlivan 2002). Such a new narrative could have very positive consequences because it would normalize gay youths and focus attention on changing the heterosexist environment that creates the trouble these youths might experience. Yet however good-intentioned such calls for narrative change might be, it remains that heterosexuality is one of the most widely circulating, and widely supported, symbolic codes in the United States today. The gay youths as at risk narrative does not directly challenge this code. Indeed, that narrative could be read as an implicit support for the heterosexual code because it is a story of problems experienced when the heterosexual code is deed. Would members of the dominant (heterosexual) public continue to support agendas and programs justied by narratives forcefully challenging the heterosexual symbolic code? This is an empirical question. These examples of woman-as-victim and gay youth as troubled narratives illustrate the complexities and perplexities of achieving social change. Effective social change occurs at all levels of social life and narratives are implicated at each level. Yet these narratives are authored for different purposes, do different kinds of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. Narratives benecial in encouraging change at one level might not be so benecial at another level. This is a very practical reason to be sensitive to, and to empirically explore, relationships between and among different forms of identity narratives. In conclusion, observers complain that culture often is conceptualized as freeoating, with too little attention paid to the interplay between the analytic and concrete forms of society (Jacobs 1996), and that explorations of personal identities devote too little attention to cultural and historical processes of constructing identity categories (Callero 2003). I reiterate those complaints and extend them. Observers of many types
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now argue that the narrative form is persuasive and pervasive throughout social life. Narratives of identity are about self-understandings, the policies and practices of organizations, social policy, and culture. Exploring relationships among narratives of identity is the examination of theoretical and empirical links among cultural and personal meaning, power, and social structure. All are inextricably related.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Spencer Cahill, Maralee Mayberry and especially Bryce Merrill for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
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The Sociological Quarterly ISSN 0038-0253

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society

The Study of Narrative Identity

The Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007) 661688 2007 Midwest Sociological Society

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