Identity Goes to Work: "Bringing Coal to Coalville"

At a recent conference in the idyllic countryside of Manchester England— birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the original meeting place of Marx and Engels— I had the pleasure of meeting Nobel Laureate George Akerlof. In an act of true academic courage, the economist presented a paper on identity to an audience of sociologists and social psychologists. Having seen the title of his talk, a colleague and I predicted a reincarnation of the rational choice model of identity. What we witnessed, however, was much more intriguing. Akerlof spent the better part of four years attending graduate courses on symbolic interactionism, ethnography, and immigration at Berkeley. The result is an elegant—if entirely unsubstantiated—model of identity (Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics) that models the “definition of the situation” as a utility function that is not constrained by the assumption of perfect information among agents in a given system. Akerlof and co-author accomplish this by defining the situation as the product of an individual’s conception of all possible definitions—which result from interaction between individuals in a system that can be stratified according to structural dimensions such as inequality, segregation, and the like.

Akerlof humbly rejected much of the uninformed criticism of the audience—many of whom had overlooked the elegance of the model in addressing both the multidimensionality of identity and its situated/nested nature. Over dinner later that night, however, I was able to convince him that his model ignores two important dimensions of boundary-work: 1) the tendency of boundaries—or identity “dimensions” in his terminology—to take on meaning independent of interaction (as with the widespread stigmatization of race as a legitimate source of exclusion since 1945); and 2) the network theory of identity that allows one to model “identity entrepreneurship” in Harrison White’s terminology. Time permitting, I am hoping to write a brief piece with he and his co-author that adds block-modeling to their model based on simulations of “identity mutations.” In the meantime, I remain absolutely impressed by Akerlof’s self-described attempt to “bring coals to coalville,” which I believe may be more useful to those who are quick to dismiss him than they realize.