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The Structure of Group Identification

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Abstract

The concept of group identification has been widely discussed in the fields of social psychology and social ontology. The debate has been somewhat unbalanced, however. The structure, nature, and experiential status of groups have been assessed widely and from several perspectives. Instead, the concept of identification as received considerably less attention. This is why the ongoing debate threatens to be misled by various conceptual ambiguities. These ambiguities concern first and foremost the target, structure, and temporal nature of identification. The present article offers a philosophical analysis of the concept and clarifies the conceptual ambiguities haunting the debate.

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Notes

  1. Here some might insist that also groups and collectives could identify themselves with other groups, societies or collectives; but this possibility will not be examined in the present context.

  2. By the objective fact of membership I do not mean to presuppose an explicit agreement, contract, or public documentation of membership. There are, for instance, “ideological” groups which are defined by the shared attitudes of their “members”—e.g., liberals, conservatives, or supporters of a football team—and “situational” groups in which membership is defined by shared experiences—e.g., losing a loved one or surviving a natural disaster. In my use, “objective membership” thus also applies to such “unofficial” groups.

  3. People join forces for various reasons and the motives for group identification are multifarious. These include primal emotional needs, safety measures, common threat, discrimination, attachment and affiliation needs, conflicts between individual and collective interests, discrimination by the mainstream, calculative-utilitarian “payoff”, and intellectual-strategic deliberations (see, e.g., Fisher and Wakefield 1998; Jetten et al. 2001a).

  4. In methodological terms, Tuomela defines individualism as a “social ontology consist[ing] solely of the activities and properties (including mental activities and properties) and interactions (including mental interactions and relations) between individuals” (Tuomela 2016, p. 10).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Henrik Enckell, Donnchadh O’Conaill, Joel Krueger, Jussi Saarinen, Alessandro Salice, Thomas Szanto, and Dan Zahavi for their valuable comments to earlier drafts of the article. I also want to thank everyone who participated in the discussion when I presented the main argument of the article in 2016, first at the seminar organized by the Subjectivity, Historicity, Communality research network at the University of Helsinki in September and, then, at the conference “Empathy in and with Groups” at the Center for Subjectivity Research (University of Copenhagen) in December. Finally, I am grateful to my two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments and suggestions significantly improved the article.

Funding

This research has been generously funded by the Kone Foundation (Finland).

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Correspondence to Joona Taipale.

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Taipale, J. The Structure of Group Identification. Topoi 38, 229–237 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9463-y

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