CHAPTER 9: Identification and negotiability

By identification, I mean the process through which modes of belonging become constitutive of our identities by creating bonds or distinctions in which we become invested. (191)

The process of identity formation can remain largely transparent because our identities can develop by being engaged in action without being themselves the focus of attention. (193)

...identification depends on the kind of picture of the world and of ourselves we can build. It depends on the connections we can envision across history and across the social landscape. Through these connections, identification expands through time and space, and our identities take on new dimensions. (194)

KEY TERM: identity of participation

aligning our efforts with the styles and discourses of certain institutions, movements, or systems of thought can be a very profound aspect of how we define ourselves. Allegiance to a scientific method, to a political cause, or to a family tradition can become an essential part of our identity. Because alignment affords the ability to invest our energy in terms of broadly defined enterprises, it can make us "larger" by placing our actions in a larger context. (196)

Negotiability refers to the ability, facility, and legitimacy to contribute to, take responsibility for, and shape the meanings that matter within a social configuration. Negotiability allows us to make meanings applicable to new circumstances, to enlist the collaboration of others, to make sense of events, or to assert our membership. (197)

Negotiability is thus shaped by relations of "ownership of meaning" -- that is, the degree to which we can make use of, affect, control, modify, or in general, assert as ours the meanings that we negotiate. (200)

the notion of an economy of meaning implies the plurality of perspectives that are involved in the negotiation of meaning. (201)

Using the term "ownership" to refer to our ability to take responsibility for negotiating meaning, and thus to make some meanings our own, is not new. Teachers talk about students gaining ownership of the curricular material, and by this they refer to their achieving not only perfunctory mastery but personal meaning as well. In the world of work, too, people talk about having or not having ownership of their task or mission. In this sense, the notion of ownership refers both to an experience of holding some meanings as our own and to social relations of ownership with respect to others who might also claim some say in the matter. Ownership involves control over meaning, but the notion of control is not quite appropriate because it is too externalized. What I call ownership of meaning is more intimate; it is deeper than just control. It refers to the ways meanings, and our ability to negotiate them, become part of who we are. (201)

Although mutual engagement can be a vehicle for sharing ownership of meaning, it can also be a vehicle for denying negotiability and can result in non-participation. If production and adoption become consistently separable, the distinction between them becomes an issue of marginality. Members whose contributions are never adopted develop an identity of non-participation that progressively marginalizes them. Their experience becomes irrelevant because it cannot be asserted and recognized as a form of competence. I argued in Coda I that learning requires an interplay of experience and competence. A split between production and adoption of meaning thus compromises learning because it presents it as a choice between experience and competence: you must choose between your own experience as a resource for the production of meaning and your membership in a community where your competence is determined by your adoption of other's proposals for meaning. In other words, learning depends on our ability to contribute to the collective production of meaning because it is by this process that experience and competence pull each other.

When, in a community of practice, the distinction between the production and adoption of meaning reflects enduring patterns of engagement among members--that is, when some always produce and some always adopt--the local economy of meaning yields very uneven ownership of meaning. The situation, when it persists, results in a mutually reinforcing condition of both marginality and inability to learn (203)

Alignment requires the ability to affect the negotiation of meaning over a given social configuration. (205)

Identification without negotiability is powerlessness -- vulnerability, narrowness, marginality. ... Identification gives us material to define our identities; negotiability enables us to use this material to assert our identities as productive of meaning; and we weave these two threads into the social fabric of our identities. (208)