Self, Identity, and Social Institutions

This book shows how the individual constructs a self from the thousands of colloquial identities provided by a society’s culture, and reveals how the individual actualizes and sustains an integrated and stable self while navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of everyday institutional life. MacKinnon and Heise identify a cultural theory of people that is implicit in the semantics of identity-nouns and outline how that theory functions in everyday life and the development of the self; the book identifies major social institutions through network analysis of identity semantics, and it develops a cybernetic model of self-process wherein individuals re-confirm their self-sentiments after participating in disconfirming institutional roles, balancing one inauthenticity with another.

This book shows how the individual constructs a self from the thousands of colloquial identities provided by a society’s culture, and reveals how the individual actualizes and sustains an integrated and stable self while navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of everyday institutional life. MacKinnon and Heise identify a cultural theory of people that is implicit in the semantics of identity-nouns and outline how that theory functions in everyday life and the development of the self; the book identifies major social institutions through network analysis of identity semantics, and it develops a cybernetic model of self-process wherein individuals re-confirm their self-sentiments after participating in disconfirming institutional roles, balancing one inauthenticity with another.

Neil J. MacKinnon is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of Guelph in Canada, and an adjunct member of the graduate faculty at the University of Waterloo. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has awarded him a series of grants, funding his research over a period of decades. He has also been a fellow of the Canada Council. His book, Symbolic Interactionism as Affect Control (1994), is an authoritative presentation on affect control theory. He has published numerous articles in sociological journals, and he has served two terms on the editorial board of Social Psychology Quarterly.

David R. Heise is Rudy Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at Indiana University. During the 1970s and 1980s, he published a number of books on statistics and sociology, and edited two methodology periodicals. He has also served on the editorial boards of five journals, including Social Psychology Quarterly. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Research Fellow with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and a recipient of Distinguished Career awards in three sections of the American Sociological Association. His book, Expressive Order, was published in 2007, and his book entitled Surveying Cultures was published in 2010.