5 - Identity in a pluralistic society: some parting words

Summary

This chapter brings to an end our beginning treatment of identity. An ending is not closure; indeed, an ending may be more of a beginning, and that is the spirit we hope to communicate here. If we are anywhere close to the mark in insisting that identity is a central and characteristic issue in contemporary pluralistic societies, then even our halting, but we think suggestive, development is not only worthwhile, but also an endorsement to thinkers and researchers concerned with identity now and in the future. The best we could hope for our own efforts is that they quickly be superseded by the work of others.

It is in the spirit of making it easier to go beyond our work that we present the three parts of this final chapter. First, we briefly recapitulate the main theoretical and empirical themes. These themes are spun out of the guiding thesis that identity is a socially constructed reality and out of what we see as the underlying paradigm of all sociological psychologists who study identity – namely, social organization structures identity organization. Secondly, assuming the validity of the main arguments, what generic responses are available to individuals and groups in pluralistic societies in which identity issues are characteristic, problematic, and painful? What partial and tantalizing light does a sociological psychological approach to identity throw on the perennial question of authentic human existence and the “true” self? These are the kinds of boundary questions a sociological psychology of identity raises in a compelling and, we think, particularly contemporary cast. Finally, we end the chapter by pointing out further theoretical and empirical directions that seem especially fruitful.