Self, Identity, and Social Institutions

This book shows how the individual constructs a self from the thousands of colloquial identities provided by a society’s culture, and reveals how the individual actualizes and sustains an integrated and stable self while navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of everyday institutional life. MacKinnon and Heise identify a cultural theory of people that is implicit in the semantics of identity-nouns and outline how that theory functions in everyday life and the development of the self; the book identifies major social institutions through network analysis of identity semantics, and it develops a cybernetic model of self-process wherein individuals re-confirm their self-sentiments after participating in disconfirming institutional roles, balancing one inauthenticity with another.