Abstract
Identities are important for what they do to maintain society when they are activated. In this paper, the concepts of prominence, salience, and commitment are reinterpreted as characteristics of identities that arise out of the perceptual control processes that maintain identity verification. Prominence can be better understood as the number of meanings one identity shares with other identities than as some internal judgment of importance. When meanings are shared across identities, many identities are affected by verification of the shared meanings, leading one both to work harder to verify the more prominent identity and to be more upset by its nonverification. Salience may be better understood as the proportion of time an identity is activated and doing its job—a probability that the identity is activated. Salience itself is not a motivator but is tied to prominence and commitment which are motivators. Finally, commitment, as ties to role partners, can be seen to develop from mutual verification processes in which role partners verify each other while carrying out their identities. These new ways of conceptualizing the three main characteristics of identities do not change our understanding of the concepts but does make clear the unity of the two strands of identity theory (perceptual and structural) and help advance identity theory and research.
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Notes
- 1.
A fuller and more detailed description of the identity model, including its hierarchical structure, is available in (Burke & Stets, 2023).
- 2.
This assumes that the meaning, which is shared across identities, for example caring, is held at the same level in each of the identities. This makes sense if it is the meaning that is controlled, not the identity. The activation of an identity focuses our attention to the meanings that need to be controlled.
- 3.
Linville’s terminology was different than that of identity theory. Rather than “identities” she used the term “aspects of the self,” but her examples were very much in the tradition of identities (Linville, 1985, p. 96). Additionally, rather than “shared meanings,” she discussed the “degree of relatedness” of the identities. Again, her examples were much akin to shared meanings (Linville, 1985, pp. 98–99).
- 4.
Stryker’s original discussion of this (1968, p. 560) does not always involve a person choosing among identities as a function of the salience of the identities. He also suggests the relative salience of an identity allows the researcher to predict a higher probability that one rather than another identity will be invoked without referring to any motivation on the part of the actor.
- 5.
- 6.
Different numbers would be obtained if one used the week as a unit of analysis. In that case, a person who works a 40-hour week, their salience for the worker identity would be about 24 rather than 33. Choosing the proper unit of time for the baseline in measurement is important. If the timeframe is too long, the salience of the identity may change during the time. If it is too short, we may not have an accurate measurement for the saliences of all the identities a person holds.
- 7.
This is not to say that people do not select others with whom to associate based on their person identity meanings. For example, highly moral people may choose to associate with others who are also highly moral (Stets et al., 2021). Stets and her colleagues argue that homophilous relationships emerge when people share identity meanings on the same (or complementary) location of meaning. They also argue that person identities such as moral meanings may have a greater influence on homophily than role or group identities. Further, they maintain that identity verification increases homophily and strengthens the prominence and salience of identities. Of course, if relationships based on shared meanings of person identities, such as being moral, move to a friendship, then commitment would be a characteristic of the friend role identity that may have been initiated because of a shared sense of morality.
- 8.
There is another distinction that should be made among the persons to whom one is connected through an identity. On the one hand, there are the persons one interacts with in carrying out the identity. For a student, this may be the professor, other students, etc. On the other hand, there are persons who know one is a student but who do not interact with the student as a student. These latter persons have no stake in the student identity or dependence on the student identity. In measuring commitment as the number of ties, such persons should not be counted.
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Burke, P.J. (2023). Conceptualizing Identity Prominence, Salience, and Commitment. In: Stets, J.E., Reichelmann, A.V., Kiecolt, K.J. (eds) Advancing Identity Theory, Measurement, and Research. Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32986-9_2
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