SOCI 230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Assertiveness, Gordon Allport, Group Dynamics
3 May 2018
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Lecture 9: Ethnicity Boundaries and Identities (continued 2)
February 1st, 2018
! Comprehensiveness and assertion
•!Under constructionism
•!2 important aspects of the constructionism framework: comprehensiveness and assertion
•!Along the y axis, is the comprehensiveness dimension
o!Thick or thin identity
o!Thick: ethnic identity organizes all of your social life
o!Thin: ethnic identity has very little significant and impact
on your social life
•!Along the x axis, we have the assertion dimension
o!Asserted and assigned
o!Asserted: ethnic identity is explained by ethnic or racial
group members
o!Assigned: identity is ascribed to individuals by members
of an outside group
! Comprehensiveness of ethnic identities
•!Refers to the extent of how much does ethnicity organize social life & collective action?
•!Collective action: mobilization around a group’s shared interests and objectives
o!Social life: all the things/relations that impact individuals
"!Interpersonal relationships
"!Intergroup relations
"!Social institutions (schools, religious institutions…)
"!Access to resources
"!Individual life chances
•!Thick/thin identity= pervasiveness of identity in individuals’ & groups’ life
•!NOT about individual/group attachment! Thick identity is not a strong attachment to a group,
it’s about the fact that your membership to that group organizes pretty much all of your social
life
o!You can have an identity that’s quite strong, but it’s not necessarily pervasive (it’s not
thick)
o!In other words, the actual attachment you have to your ethnic group may or may not
have any consequences on the individual but the but the pervasiveness of the identity
has big consequences
o!You want to be able to make these 2 (^) distinctions
! Assertiveness of ethnic/racial identities
•!Assignment or assertion of meaning
o!Assignment: positive and/or negative meanings that both insiders and outsides have
assigned to membership of that particular ethnic category
"!The meanings themselves will change in response to new circumstances
and to the different group activities that we engage in
o!Assertion: +/- meanings by insiders
•!Meanings change in response to new circumstances and group activities
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•!Most identities products of both assignment & assertion
•!An identity is going to be more likely to be the product of assignment when there’s
substantial power to select the boundary markers
o!When you have a strong outsider group who has the power to define others, then
assignment will be much more likely
! Cornell and Hartmann’s 4 examples of ethnic and racial identities
•!They map on to these different quadrants
•!The green = assigned identities
•!Orange = asserted identities
•!Both Black South and Afrikaner are quite thick identities, whereas the Hmong and the Italian
American identities are thin
•!Why did the authors say that these 2 green groups represent a form of assigned identities, yet
one of them is thin and the other is thick?
•!1) Black South African identity
o!Numeric majority but yet they hold very little power in
South African society
o!Assigned identity but yet thick
"!They’re in that quadrant because of the power
relations that exist.
"!The fact that the Afrikaner group institutionalizes
laws, policies, and programs that disenfranchise
South Africans and preclude them from accessing
societal resources, that is about the
comprehensiveness identity.
"!How much does the identity organize social life?
how much does it influence one’s access to societal resources? How much
does it influence things like where you can live/where do you go to school?
All of this is about comprehensiveness
"!Thick – it’s thick because Black south Afrikaners have very little political
power to reach any power dynamics – it was all dictated by the small minority
ethnic group
"!Assigned – they have little choice in terms of membership. It’s the South
Afrikaners who had the power to dictate who is part of a group and excluded
from a group – the assigned/asserted dimension is about whether the
identity/group membership is voluntary or something that is ascribed to you
•!2) Afrikaner identity
o!White dominant group in South Africa
o!Numeric minority but they hold the line share of power in South Africa due to the
downfall of the Apartheid
o!Asserted and thick
"!Asserted – once in south Africa, the decision to identity as Afrikaner or not is
entirely voluntary – they don’t have somebody else imposing that onto them –
they get to call their own shots
"!Thick – they do that because they’re the ones holding the line share of power
and the gatekeepers of societal resources. It’s to their benefit to monitor the
