Social categories both order the world and define the self’s place in it

Evidence

Social categorizations are conceived here as cognitive tools that segment, classify, and order the social environment, and thus enable the individual to undertake many forms of social action. But they do not merely systematize the social world; they also provide a system of orientation for self-reference: they create and define the individual’s place in society. Social groups, understood in this sense, provide their members with an identification of themselves in social terms. These identifications are to a very large extent relational and comparative: they define the individual as similar to or different from, as “better” or “worse” than, members of other groups. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2716 (#expands, via linked claim)

The second principle challenges another widely circulating view of identity, that it is simply a collection of broad social categories. This perspective is found most often in the quantitative social sciences, which correlate social behavior with macro identity categories such as age, gender, and social class. Within sociocultural linguistics, the concern with identities as broader social structures is particularly characteristic of early variationist sociolinguistics (e.g. Labov, 1966) and the sociology of language (see Fishman, 1971, among others). The traditional forms of these approaches have been valuable for documenting largescale sociolinguistic trends; they are often less effective in capturing the more nuanced and flexible kinds of identity relations that arise in local contexts (but see, e.g. Labov, 1963). This analytic gap points to the importance of ethnography. Linguistic ethnographers have repeatedly demonstrated that language users often orient to local identity categories rather than to the analyst’s sociological categories and that the former frequently provide a better empirical account of linguistic practice. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction, 35 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The world’s perceived order always implies a center that we are yet cannot objectify — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 855; Multiple modes of relating define the world simultaneously, not as guises but identities; Social category definitions both reflect context and actively remake social relations — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 79 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Social categories function as cognitive tools that position the self comparatively #expands (0.93) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2716
• Macro social categories poorly capture the identity relations that matter locally #complicates (0.74) — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction, 35