Crossing Divides: Personal, Organizational, Political, and Cultural Constructions of Narrative

Identities in the Postmodern Era

Donileen R. Loseke
University of South Florida
Abstract
Observers identifying themselves as sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians
and political scientists increasingly have been drawn to myriad issues of identity. Whether
primarily interested in the personal understandings of selves, characteristics of social interactions
within postmodern environments, new social movements, the organizational processing of clients, or
the construction of symbolic and social boundaries, these observers have been examining how
narratives of identity are a critical aspect of the postmodern. While interest in the narrative
construction and understanding of identity therefore ranges from the most micro-level questions
about individual self-understandings to the most macro-level issues of political and economic power,
this literature is fragmented. There is little attention to questions about relationships among
individual, social, organizational, and political levels of identity; observers interested in one level
rarely are informed by what is known by others working on a different level. I have two goals for
this paper. First, I will summarize why the concept of narrative identity is important at all levels of
social life. Second, I will argue that what now are somewhat distinct literatures should be brought
together for a more complete understanding of identity in the postmodern era.

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Crossing Divides: Personal, Organizational, Political, and Cultural Constructions of Narrative

Identities in the Postmodern Era
Donileen R. Loseke
University of South Florida
During the mid-twentieth century in the United States, scholarly interest in identity
centered primarily on how individuals interactionally achieve and manage identities in face-to-face
interactions (for example, Strauss, 1969; Goffman, 1963). By the 1980s, identity became

conceptualized as interactional--it was what peopleGR rather than what people DUH(West and
Fenstermaker, 1995). By the 1990s, social constructionist scholars were examining how our very
notions of identity are socially constructed. My interest is in developing a social constructionist
perspective on identity that conceptualizes identity as personal, collective, organizational, political,
and culturalQDUUDWLYHV. Constructing narratives of identity, categorizing the self and others as
members of a particular identity group, and advocating political and cultural change for identity
group members is a form of what I will call identity work (Loseke, 2001). I want to explore how
examining the multiple levels of identity as socially constructed narratives makes visible important
characteristics of relationships between self and society. This approach might serve to bridge the
ever-nagging divides between microinteractional and macropolitical social processes.
Narrative as Object of Study
There are multiple ways that humans discursively construct the world. For example, there
are scientific/causal arguments, expressive pleas, charts, graphs, lists. My interest is in a
particular form of discursive production, narratives--the stories people tell. Others have noted
narratives are present at all times, in all places and in all societies; they are the most common way
to make intelligible what is strange and disturbing (Polletta, 1998). While observers note that
examining the plots and characters in commonly told narratives is a way to explore complex
questions about human meaning (Polkinghorne, 1988), scholars in the past identifying themselves as
social scientists shunned the study of narratives because the messiness and indeterminancy of

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stories did not seem compatible with achieving the scientific authority associated in the
Enlightenment era with deductive logic and quantitative measurement (Somers, 1994). Yet, in the
past decade or so the study of narratives has been revived in a spectrum of disciplines such as
Sociology, Psychology, Political Science, Communications, Medicine and Gender Studies. Scholars
have begun to appreciate how social life itself is storied, that narrative is a condition of that life
(Somers, 1994), and that the often criticized subjective and contextualized nature of the
narrative form are its precise strengths in examining multiple questions of how humans create and
sustain meaning (Ewick and Silbey, 1995).
While narratives can be the individual, unique stories social actors tell about themselves and
others, the sociologically important form of narrative are called public narratives (Somers, 1994),
formula stories (Berger, 1997), or cultural stories (Richardson, 1990). These are stories about
types of experiences, they feature distinctive types of characters. These are formula, public or
cultural stories because they involve characters who engage in predictable actions within typical
plot structures; they are public and social narratives because they are shared--sometimes within a
local culture (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000), sometimes within culture writ large.
Because these formula stories are historically and socially situated, the characteristics of a
culturally acceptable story also are situated. For example, a story of witchcraft and an identity
of witch were sensible in the United States in the 1600s but now such stories are not heard as
sensible and rather typically are replaced by a story of mental illness and an identity of mentally
ill (Conrad and Schneider, 1980). In the same way, the identity ofN\RLNXPDPD (education mother)
was socially prized in the late 1900s in Japan (Yamazaki, 1994), but a narrative of a woman so
dedicated to the education of her children makes little sense to American college student women.
As a final example, the public narrative of children and pornography in the United States often
features the government in the role of rescuer; the same story in Japan does not include
government in that role (Suzuki, 2001).
There are historical, cultural, and sometimes local variations in acceptable story themes and
characters. Any given era and place will have expectations about the proper unfolding and expected

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moralities of acceptable stories. For example, reflecting Enlightenment belief in rationality and
causality, acceptable stories in the United States typically contain events connected to the story
theme and display a sense of temporality and causality (Bruner, 1987; Gergen, 1994; Linde, 1993).
Also, reflecting extreme individualism, common stories in the United States typically promote
individual cause of life experiences and the morality of individual responsibility (Loseke, 1999). In
contrast, acceptable stories in Belize are characterized by a resignation to fate and hardship
(McClusky, 2001); Bedouin love poetry can be read as reflecting changing systems of social
hierarchy (Abu-Lughod, 1990), and so on.
Because these socially circulating stories are constructed, they speak to Michel Foucaults
(1980:97) interest in the constitution of subjects. This, in turn, relates to questions of identity
because story construction is an example of the social process of making up people (Hacking,
1986). While narratives of all kinds hold the potential to create new types of people, most
scholarly attention is on the creation of new forms of deviance and deviance (what Gubrium and
Holstein, 2001 call troubled selves). For example, according to Hacking (1986), before the end of
the nineteenth century there was no notion linking various forms of behaviors (deviance) with
particular types of people (deviants). Clearly, there were people who behaved in odd or even
condemned ways, but perversion, as a disease, and the pervert, as a diseased person, were created
in the late nineteenth century (1986:222). Hence, until the end of the 1860s there were acts or
behaviors known--and often condemned--as homosexual but there was no notion of a homosexual as
a distinct type of person (Plummer 1995). Another example of how types of people are produced
might begin with noting how the historical record indicates that some children in all eras have been
subjected to cruel treatment; yet the type of story known as child abuse and the narrative
characters of the abusive parent and the abused child did not exist in the United States until
the late 1960s (Loseke, 1999). This work of creating formula stories is identity work, the work of
creating types of people with types of experiences.
Identity as Narrative
When identity is conceptualized as narrative we are led to examining relationships among

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culturally circulating formula stories and the stories people tell about themselves and others. This
involves four levels of identity: personal, organizational, political, and cultural.
Personal Identity
In the past, individual identities tended to be securely located in religion, community, and
family, the post-modern era is one in which personal identities no longer are necessarily
experienced as fixed and unchangeable (Gergen 1994), and where individuals may perceive a lack of
institutional support for identity construction (Irving 1999). When identities no longer are
experienced as fixed and when social members are surrounded by unknown others, a sense of
personal identity must be created; when personal biography is characterized by disjunctures, rapid
change, and is lived in multiple settings, a personal sense of identity must be continually recreated.
As stated by Holstein and Gubrium (2000:2):
These are trying times for the personal self. We are constantly besieged by
questions of who and what we are as we move through the myriad settings of
everyday life. Our identities often seem uncertain and unstable.
Publicly circulating stories can be understood as schemes of interpretation (Schutz, 1970),
collective representations (Durkheim, 1961) or a members resource (Garfinkel, 1967) to help
individuals create a sense of the personal self. Indeed, Gergen (1994: 186) argues [w]e can
scarcely underestimate the importance of stories in our lives and the extent to which they serve as
vehicles for rendering ourselves intelligible. These stories circulating in the social world are
available for social actors to use as a narrative model (Bruner 1987); stories can furnish moral
identity roles (Sarbin 1995) and can be a significant resource for creating a private sense of self
(Linde 1993). As summarized by Somers (1994: 614):
[S]tories guide action...people construct identities (however multiple and changing)
by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted
stories....[P]eople are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of
the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but
ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives.

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One specific type of personal identity is aFROOHFWLYHLGHQWLW\. Collective identity is defined

by scholars of social movements as the shared definition of a group that derives from members
common interests, experiences, and solidarity (Taylor and Whittier, 1992:105); it is an individual
sense of affiliation and connection to others (Friedman and McAdam, 1992: 157). A personal
identity can become a collective identity when an individual sees her/himself as sharing a
characteristic with others, where this characteristic is defined as important, where the identity is
not valued in the dominant social order, and where the individual believes change is necessary
(Taylor and Whittier, 1992). Hence, collective identity is a possibility--not all elderly people in
Germany identify with other elderly people; even those who do identify might not support social
change (Simon, et. al., 1998). Collective identity links personal and political.
Formula stories are members resources but that certainly does not mean that the process
of appropriating a particular story as ones own story is automatic or easy. First, at any one time
there are multiple stories circulating in the social world. Cultural stories that condemn categories
of people for being deviant, for example, can be contrasted with what Richardson (1990) calls
collective stories: stories constructed by social movements emphasizing the goodness of these
people. So, for example, , the gay as deviant story competes with the glad to be gay story
(Plummer, 1995); the prostitute as villain story competes with the prostitute as victim story
(Jenness, 1993). A characteristic of our current era, therefore, is the proliferation of stories to
be available to make sense of the self and others. If, by chance, an individual seeks out a cultural
story to use as a model of identity, as do gays and lesbians (Plummer, 1995), there will be multiple
stories from which to choose.
Second, we cannot simply assume that appropriating a story as ones own story is easy is
because socially circulating stories are about types of people in types of situations with types
of experiences. Such stories never can encompass the heterogeneity of lived experiences or
individual understandings of biography (Schutz, 1970). Appropriating a particular story as ones own
story is identity work, the work of deciding which--if any--culturally circulating story can be
appropriated as a story of the self; the work of deciding how much of the story should be

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appropriated. Appropriating a story as ones own involves the complex, situated process of
composing a narrative hearable by self and others as coherent (see Gubrium and Holstein, 2000:
especially Part II).
Organizational Identity
Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein (2001) talk of an institutional self, an image of a type
of self created by, and in the service of, an organization. These institutional selves are ever
increasing in our post-modern era. They include narratives produced by self-help and therapy
groups such as those for co-dependents (Irvine 1999), transgendered (Gagne, et. al., 1997), or
transsexual people (Mason-Schrock, 1996), sexually marginalized Catholics (Loseke and
Cavendish, 2001), or battered women (Loseke 2001). They also include narratives produced by
organizations offering services to people in need such as those for dysfunctional families
(Gubrium 1992). In the United States, narratives likewise are produced through television talk
shows and construct a range of stories involving cultural outsiders such as sexual minorities
(Gamson, 1998) and immoral sinners (Lowney, 1999).
Social movements also must be understood as organizations producing identity narratives.
Formula stories are produced by social movements on behalf of cultural outsiders. What these
movements do is explicitly work to produce new identities challenging discredited identities
circulating in the social order (Polletta, 1998). Hence, Catholic feminists in the United States
worked explicitly and diligently to reinterpret the traditional story of the Catholic Church and
women which relegated women to a peripheral place in the Church (Katzenstein, 1998). Likewise,
gays, lesbians, and women in the United States have formed new stories about their selves and
their experiences (Plummer, 1995).
Narratives of an organizational self are powerful. For social movements, constructing a
story encouraging individuals to identify with the movement and support movement goals is critical
because collective identification precedes movement membership and involvement (Simon, et. al.,
1998; Taylor and Whittier, 1992). Narratives of organizational selves also are powerful in places
offering social services because narrative expectations are embedded in social service

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organizational rules, procedures, and methods. For example, rules about client intake, expectations
for client behavior, and goals for service provision at a shelter for battered women explicitly

were justified by workers as good and necessary for that W\SHof person (Loseke, 1992). In the
same way, the particular services offered to the blind depend on the agencys image of the
characteristics of a type of narrative character called the blind (Scott, 1985).
Classifying individual clients as instances of types of people for whom the organization or
group is organized is identity work done by service providers. Identity work of social service
providers also is accomplished when workers reconstruct clients stories so that individual stories
will conform to narratives informing services such as the cultural story of battered women
(Emerson, 1994; Loseke, 2000), wife abusers (McKendy, 1992), transgendered (Gagne, et. al.,
1997) or transsexual people (Mason-Schrock, 1996). Finally, identity work in organizations
includes that of agency clients, such as men requesting services from an organization for the
homeless, who present themselves to agency workers as the type of person for whom is agency is
designed in hopes of receiving agency services (Spencer, 2001).
In brief, social service agencies and social support groups of all types are sites of
considerable identity work. Groups or organizations are formed in the first place to assist
particular types of narrative characters, workers and clients work to transform the complexity and
indeterminancy of individual stories into stories that more-or-less are hearable as those of a
particular type of narrative character. Yet just as we cannot assume that individuals automatically
or even easily embrace a particular narrative as their own story, organizational identity work is no
less fraught with trouble: Potential clients might be seen by workers as not instances of the
narrative character for whom the organization was designed; individual clients might refuse to make
sense of their own lives in terms of the organizationally preferred narrative. These are common
reality-definition contests which are disagreements about which of the myriad possible narratives
is the best way for workers to make sense of clients, for clients to make sense of their selves.
Narrative as identity can be understood as a critical component of social service
organizations and self-help groups; they are an important component of social movements

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advocating social change on behalf of cultural outsiders. While constructed in a diverse array of
organizations and groups, what these narratives share is the characteristic that each is created by
an ongoing concern that is explicitly in the business of structuring and reconfiguring personal
identity (Gubrium and Holstein 2001:2).
Political Identity

As students of social movements well know, narrative identity is a SROLWLFDOphenomenon

(Plummer 1995:197). Consider, for example, the now highly condemned policy in the United States
during World War II of interning Japanese Americans. How was such an immoral policy justified?
Petonito (1992) examined the discourse of the Tolin Commission Hearings leading to this policy and
argues the justification was accomplished, in part, by constructing a type of narrative character-the Japanese--as disloyal to the United States and as not American. While individual Japanese
citizens of the United States forcefully testified that this narrative did QRW correctly describe
them, their families or many others, the constructed narrative was accepted and justified
involuntary internment. Or, consider what perhaps is most perplexing question of our times: How
was the Holocaust possible? Berger (1993) argues that at least part of the answer to that question
lies in how the Jew was constructed in Nazi Germany. By constructing this narrative character-the Jew--as less than human, the horror and absolute immorality of the Holocaust were rhetorically
neutralized. While, of course, it would be unwise to maintain that narrative political identity is the
only, the most important, or even a very important aspect of social policy, it seems wise to consider
how narrative identity can be part and parcel of political decision making.
Narratives have political use. At any one time, there can be multiple stories circulating in a
given environment. So, for example, one narrative might construct a type of character called a
gay man as sinful, sick, and criminal, while another might construct this type of character as
merely benignly different from a heterosexual man (Smith and Windes, 1997). Such contending
stories should be understood as political contests because the formula story most acceptable to the
most powerful segments of populations will lead social policy (Stone, 1989).
In the United States, for example, the welfare reform debate of the middle 1990s

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featured two contending stories of welfare and the welfare mother narrative character. In one
story, the welfare mother was constructed as a decent and responsible woman who was trapped in
the social-economic problem of poverty. In this story, the woman was constructed as not at fault
for being poor. This particular image of a narrative character was , in common sense, associated
with calls to increase welfare and make the process of receiving it more humane and dignified. Yet
the formula story most believed by the public at large constructed the welfare mother as a lazy
and irresponsible woman who was willing to remain dependent on the state because it was easier
than being employed and earning her own money. This image of a type of narrative character
supported the policy of ending welfare.
In brief, politicians are responsive to the culturally circulating stories that seem to
resonate with politically powerful constituencies. Political observers therefore have noted that

when narrative FKDUDFWHUV are constructed as good people (such as the elderly, children, or people
constructed as pure victims) the DFWXDOSHRSOH sorted into these categories will receive policy

benefits. Conversely, when narrative FKDUDFWHUVare constructed as bad people (such as cultural

outsiders and deviants of all types) the DFWXDOSHRSOH sorted into these categories will receive few
policy benefits while suffering higher costs--such as punishment (Schneider and Ingram, 1993).
Clearly, this is the identity work: socially constructed narratives can be used to achieve political
gain (Bernstein, 1997).
Cultural Identity
While culture is a broad--and often ambiguous--concept, of particular concern here are

broadly circulating cultural evaluations of types of people. Observers of social movements in the
United States and Europe have noted that contemporary social movements have shifted towards a
non-political terrain. The need for self-realization in everyday life challenges the logic of complex
systems on cultural grounds (Melucci, 1989:23). Therefore, the success of social movements no
longer can be measured solely by the extent to which movements increase political rights or change
institutional policies or laws. Indicators of cultural success are in the transformation of culture
and consciousness, in collective self-definition, and in the meanings that shape everyday life

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(Polletta, 1997: 431).

Cultural transformation is achieved by increasing (or decreasing) the social esteem and
worth accorded to types of people. Consider the social evaluations attached to two narratives, both
of which construct a neglectful mother narrative character. In one narrative, such a woman is
constructed as simply too ignorant and uncaring to be a good mother. In the United States, with
its morality of individualism, such a narrative decreases social esteem and moral worth --this
narrative character is responsible for her failure to be a good mother. Conversely, a narrative
focusing on how economic hardship caused by the system of gender/poverty leads a woman to
become a neglectful mother constructs a more highly valued narrative character--she is not to
blame for her failure; she is a victim (Swift, 1995).
Of course, political and cultural consequences of narrative are inextricably related because
there are cultural conventions linking emotions and behavior. Clark (1997), for example, found that
in face-to-face interactions the emotion of sympathy is linked with a behavioral expression of
help: When we feel sympathy for a person we want to help her/him. By extension, it follows that
negative emotions --hatred or condemnation--are linked with a behavioral expression of
punishment. This micro-interactional production of emotions in face-to-face encounters has a
macropolitical counterpart: When publics feel sympathy toward a type of narrative character the
political response will be to help the actual people sorted into that category; when publics feel
hatred toward a type of narrative character the political response will be one of punishing the
actual incumbents of that category. Moral evaluations are cultural evaluations and they are
inextricably linked with political responses (Loseke, 1993).
In summary, when identity is conceptualized as narrative, formula stories can be read as
available resources to make sense of self and others at personal, organizational, political, and
cultural levels. These stories will be judged by social and political actors as believable (or not), and
as worthwhile (or not) depending on the history and the culture in which they are told; they may (or
may not) be used by social members to make sense of self and others.
My presentation so far has been linear. I started with a microlevel question about

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relationships between narrative and identity: How might culturally circulating formula stories serve
as a resource for making sense of the personal self? I proceeded to the level of organizations:
How do narratives of types of selves justify organizational goals, rules, and methods of service
provision? From there I proceeded to the level of politics: How do images of types of characters in
types of situations become political tools? Finally, I considered narratives and culture: How do
narratives influence the social and moral evaluation of types of people? Yet my linear progression
was only for the sake of presentation. Indeed, to assume that narrative understandings move from
personal to cultural would be to miss a critical point about narrative: The narrative production of
self is a fully reflexive process involving personal, collective, organizational, political, and cultural
levels of discursive production.
Narrative Identity as Reflexive
I want to conclude this with emphasizing the importance of examining the reflexive
relationships among these various kinds of narrative identity.

6RFLDOFRQVWUXFWLRQLVWV have done considerable work on two areas of identity: how social

problems claims-makers construct stories and how organizational narratives in social service
provision influence service provision and perhaps clients understandings of their selves. In turn,
scholars of the so-called QHZVRFLDOPRYHPHQWs that focus on issues of cultural change have

explored relationships among collective identities, movement support, and social change. Scholars

of WUDGLWLRQDOVRFLDOPRYHPHQWVseeking political change have explored how collectives of people can

achieve political change, while scholars ofVRFLDOSROLF\ have focused on how stories lead public

policy, and scholars of VRFLDOSV\FKRORJ\ have examined how individuals narrate understandings of
the self.
Yet while much is known, insights from examinations of one level of narrative identity
production do not typically inform studies on other levels. So, some scholars focus on the

PLFURLQWHUDFWLRQDOprocess of the face-to-face production of identity and do not consider where

culturally circulating narratives people use came from, nor do they ask multiple questions about
relationships between personal identities and political power. In comparison, other scholars tend to

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focus on the PDFURSROLWLFDOprocesses of story creation, or the political use of stories, yet
completely ignore or gloss over important issues of relationships among socially constructed stories
and individual sense of selves as well as how stories can become organizationally embedded, and how
organizations might modify or even radically transform the political possibilities of the original
narrative.
I end with a call to examine the reflexive relationships among socially circulating formula
stories as personal, organizational, political, and cultural narratives. For example, we know a great
deal about how individuals go about constructing narratives of the self (Holstein and Gubrium,
2001), but the potential importance of Durkheimian representations (1961)--socially circulating
narratives--fades into the background. Observers most concerned with examining how individuals
shape personal identities might begin to attend more explicitly to the importance of culturallycirculating formula stories in those narratives. To what extent do such stories enter the stories
told by individuals? How do individuals modify culturally circulating stories? What are the political
consequences of embracing one or another formula story?
In contrast, observers most concerned with examining the cultural and political creation and
use of narrative might begin to attend more to how those narratives are actually appropriated by
social members. While some observers assume that narratives constructed by social movements will
liberate those who use them as a guide to understanding the self (Richardson, 1990), some
politically useful formula stories nonetheless can be read as reproducing inequality when used as a
model for the self (Ewick and Silby, 1995); narratives of types of selves generated by social
movements might actually decrease the possibilities that target populations will identify with the
collectivity (Gamson, 1995; Loseke, 1992).
It is through the blending of microinteractional and macropolitical examinations of narrative
that observers can empirically demonstrate relationships among individual social actors,
organizations, politics, and culture. We can combine questions about politics and culture with
questions of individual meaning. Narratives--the stories people construct about themselves and
others--simultaneously speak to issues of individual sense of identity, organizational form and

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function, political power, and culture.

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