Basil Bernstein's talk this week at AERA dealt with this issue explicitly--he
put up a framework for a typology of identities afforded by modern
post-industrial capitalist Britain. The details are ones I'm still trying to
understand, but the interesting point here is that social practices
(particularly changing ones of the 1990s) afford particular identity-types
that are responses to macro-social and macro-economic changes in contemporary
societies. These identity-types are organized about differential valuings of
these changes and about typical forms of life that embody these values.
This seems an important level to examine with regard to identity formation
and the kinds of trnasformations in identity formation that have much more to
do with social practices than with unique individual choices.
Bill Penuel
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