Strategies of Identity Management

This chapter discusses some aspects of the relationship between social conditions on the one hand and the strategies of identity management to which individual group members resort on the other hand. It starts the discussion of socio-structural conditions and some of their psychological consequences with an early study of how the prospect of social mobility affects an individual’s satisfaction, together with some of the initial theorizing aimed at explaining it. The chapter presents social identity theory, in which the significance of group status is emphasized. Social identity theory covers a much wider range of psychological and behavioral phenomena associated with group membership, status of the group and individual prospects for upward mobility. The chapter assumes that an analysis from the point of view of social identity theory will provide a more systematic account of how group members act upon variations in socio-structural conditions. Social identity theory further assumes that people strive for a positively valued social identity.