SOCIAL IDENTITY CONTROVERSIES

SOCIAL IDENTITY CONTROVERSIES

In the above discussion we have tried to outline and contextualize the key ideas that inform social identity work and to clarify both the rationale for those developments and their relationship to alternative approaches from which social identity work is distinguished. This is important because, although researchers who work with social identity concepts usually indicate how their hypotheses are derived from theory, as a rule these empirical accounts do not afford them much scope for elaborating upon the broader theoretical framework from which specific ideas originate. Therefore, es- pecially for those who work on concrete work-related issues or organizational problems, it can be difficult to make sense of the social identity framework and to keep abreast of relevant theoretical developments. As a result, specific ideas tend to be examined at some distance from the theoretical context in which they were developed and can come to be seen as quite detached from the broader perspective in which they make sense.

A number of factors are responsible for this. These include the fact that social identity ideas were developed mainly by social psychologists working outside of the US (most notably in Europe, Canada, and Australia), implying

55 that they are not only inspired by different societal phenomena, but also that

S OCIAL I DENTITY IN I NDUSTRIAL AND O RGANIZATIONAL P SYCHOLOGY

they are informed by a different metatheory from that which characterizes ‘mainstream’ social and organizational psychology (see Turner & Oakes, 1986, 1997). However, in the context of the recent explosion of interest in this work, the lack of detailed information about the theoretical underpin- nings of the social identity approach has contributed to a range of confusions and misunderstandings about the nature of the theory and the contributions that it is—or is not—in a position to make (e.g., see McGarty, 2001; Turner, 1999; Turner & Haslam, 2001). Before we can consider how social-identity- theorizing can further our understanding of problems in industrial and organizational psychology, there is therefore some value in first trying to clarify and resolve these controversies.

Beyond Piecemeal Empiricism

Social identity theory can be characterized as a ‘grand theory’. That is, in contrast to theoretical approaches that focus on a particular mechanism or process, or approaches that apply to a specific set of variables, social identity theory tries to capture the dynamic interplay of situational and individual characteristics in order to understand how these might affect a broad range of relevant processes in a variety of social and organizational contexts. Further- more, many (but not all) researchers working in the social identity tradition have seen their work as providing the opportunity to refine and extend initial formulations of the theory, rather than presenting it as the basis of a novel or alternative perspective. As a result, Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) original insights have been considerably elaborated on the basis of empirical knowl- edge that has accumulated over the last 25 years. While the contributions of Tajfel and Turner (1979, 1986) and of Turner et al. (1987) continue to be regarded as seminal statements of social identity and self-categorization ideas, respectively, efforts have been made to provide periodic updates or further theoretical developments based on this empirical progress (e.g., Oakes et al., 1994; Turner et al., 1994; Turner & Reynolds, 2001).

These efforts to incorporate more complex predictions into a single over- arching framework have made it possible to identify important moderating variables that determine which processes are likely to have a bearing on behavior in any given situation. This more sophisticated understanding has made it clear that straightforward one-to-one predictions—e.g., that similar- ity enhances group commitment and thereby improves group performance (Chattopadhyay, 1999; Polzer et al., 2002)—do not capture the essence of the complex processes to which key variables relate. These complexities also need to be taken on board in order to provide appropriate advice about how to optimize work processes and organizational performance. For example, whether intragroup similarity facilitates or inhibits commitment