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416 Janet Spreckels and Helga Kotthoff

nent of identity worked out by Mead develops through the growth of the indi-
vidual into his socio-cultural surroundings and is derived from identification
with various social collectivities, such as, e.g., a family, sport association or
peer group of which the individual understands himself to be a part. Social iden-
tity is thus a part of the self worked out in the socio-cultural life context. Per-
sonal identity, to the contrary, refers to the uniqueness of the individual in con-
nection with his unmistakable life history (Hillmann 1994: 350–53) and is
“something like the continuity of the I” (Habermas 1968). Krappmann (1978:
39) summarizes this dichotomy as follows:
Obviously, identity is both simultaneously: the anticipated expectations of the other
and the individual’s own answers. G.H. Mead took this dual aspect of identity into
account in his concept of the self, which contains a “me” that is the adopted attitudes
of the other, and an “I,” the individual’s answer to the expectations of the others.
Although most authors usually speak of ‘identity’ in the singular, “each social
identity is just one among many […] which each individual possesses” (Schwit-
alla & Streeck 1989: 237), because “the uniqueness of individuals lies in their
blend of multiple social and personal identities” (Meyerhoff 1996: 215). We all
take various roles in everyday life (as daughter, girlfriend, member of a sport
club, etc.), affiliate with various social groups and thereby mark out a variety of
social identities. Individuals construct their social identities on the basis of vari-
ous socially and culturally relevant parameters, such as nationality, gender, age,
profession, lifestyle, etc. (Duszak 2002: 2 and Keupp et al. 2002: 68). The con-
cept of social identity must therefore be understood as multi-sided and very dy-
namic.
Today it is commonplace in social psychology to think of identity as the pro-
cessual and never-ending task of each person (see Brabant, Watson and Gallois
in this volume), but this was not always the case. In the older literature there
were occasionally static concepts which portrayed biography and identity “as
something stable, permanent and unchangeable” (Keupp et al. 2002: 22). Such
approaches, which portray identity as a sort of goal to be achieved, can however
not be upheld in view of empirical studies and an increasingly multi-facetted so-
ciety. Already Mead (1934) pointed in his interactionist approach to the con-
structive and negotiated character of social identity and emphasized that iden-
tity is by no means a quantity that is set once and for all, but rather is constantly
being negotiated in interaction. More recently, this important aspect has often
been emphasized, thus, e.g., Duszak (2002: 2) has written, “social identities
tend to be indeterminate, situational rather than permanent, dynamic and inter-
actively constructed.”