2. Objective
• To get you think about your own ‘authentic
identity’ as a community development worker
• To get you to ‘imagine inside’ your roleplayed
MI client, and the processes that led you to
select that persons ‘identity’
• To see ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about
identity, that form the basis of ‘prejudice’
4. Who am I?
• How do ‘I’ get
constituted, on a daily
basis?
• What is the ‘I’ that I
refer to?
• When am I being ‘me’?
• Who are ‘you’?
• Which you am I
perceiving?
5. Mead: The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’
• ‘I’ is the spontaneous unpredictable element of the self
• 'I' memory is a store of creativity, adaptability and novelty in
the social process.
• Where our most important values are located
• Constitutes the realisation of the self - i.e. reveals a definite
personality
• Seen as an evolutionary process
• 'Me' is the conformist aspect of the self, and the
reflexive, organised aspect of the self (Mead 1934: 197).
6. Erving Goffman
• Stigma (1963) Interaction Ritual (1967), Forms of Talk (1981)
• Presentation of the Self in Everyday life (1956),
• Dramaturgy - with human social behaviour seen as more or
less well scripted and with humans as role-taking actors.
– Role-taking is a key mechanism of interaction > reflexive awareness of
self and others
– Role-making a key mechanism of interaction in unaccustomed
situations
• improvisational quality of roles, with human social behaviour
seen as poorly scripted and with humans as role-making
improvisers.
7. Blumer ‘meaning’
• meaning states that humans act toward
people and things based upon the meanings
that they have given to those people or things.
• Language gives humans a means by which to
negotiate meaning through symbols.
• Thought, based on language, is a mental
conversation or dialogue that requires role
taking, or imagining different points of view
8. “Minding”
• Minding is the two-second delay where individuals
rehearse the next move and anticipate how others
will react.
George Herbert Mead
13. Learning/socialisation
• From a period of imitation without meaning for
infants, through the play-acting world of children
• Through such play, one develops and internalizes a
group of perspective on the self that Mead termed the
"generalized other.“ (society? community? policy?)
• the "inner voice" of the generalize other continues to
whisper the complex requirements of being "human.“
• (links to Foucault’s panopticism)
14. Michel Foucault Panopticism
• Surveillance & Spectacle
• The silent power of editing what you do
because you are being watched, or think you
are being surveilled.
15. Deviance & labelling
• Howard Becker
• Outsiders: Studies in the
sociology of
deviance(1969)
• Studies of group values
among ‘delinquents’ and
emergence of shared
codes, values contra
‘mainstream’ values
16. Becker, labelling
• Becker and labelling – ‘social groups create
(socially construct) deviance by making the
rules whose infraction constitutes
deviance, and by applying those rules to
particular people and labelling them as
outsiders.
• From this point of view, deviance is not a
quality, of the act the person commits,
• but rather a consequence of the
application by others of rules and
sanctions to an ‘offender’.
• The deviant is one to whom that label has
successfully been applied; deviant
behaviour is behaviour that people so
label.
17. Taking the Role of the Other
• This is seeing the world through another’s
eyes.
• Walking in someone else’s shoes
• Grown up version of having imaginary friends
and talking to yourself.
