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Communicating Identity in Intercultural Communication 417

1.1. Modern patchwork identities
If the construction of identity, as described above, is a lifelong process, this dy-
namism and changeability simultaneously pose the danger of an inconsistent
identity. Our modern world is marked by accelerated processes of change,
greater geographic and social mobility, freedom to form attachments, the plural-
ization of life forms and worldviews, and progressive individualization. Thereby
each individual’s possible identity spectrum has considerably increased: “While
earlier the development of identity was much more strongly marked by the posi-
tion into which one was born, modern man is forced to choose among many
possibilities, and this struggle of youth with the required choice of a self-defini-
tion is […] referred to as an identity crisis” (Oerter and Dreher 1995: 348; Bau-
meister 1986; Luckmann et al. 1981).
A key term in the contemporary process of finding an identity is ‘possibility
of choice’: “modernity confronts the individual with a complex diversity of
choices and … at the same time offers little help as to which options should be
selected” (Giddens 1991: 80, emphasis added). Where previously there was
little possibility of choice, today individuals face a life-world variety of experi-
ences that on the one side frees them, but on the other side leaves them deeply
insecure and partly overtaxed. Schäfers (2001: 92) points out that identity
problems only arise in social systems like the present ones. Giddens (1991: 81)
aptly describes this situation with the insight: “[W]e have no choice but to
choose.”
Certain basic, self-evident aspects of our society are being put in question
and shaken by new alternatives. Today there are, e.g., various models of the
most important social group upon which society is based: the family. The eman-
cipation movement brought about the possibility for the classical role models of
the devoted mother and housewife and the father as family breadwinner to be
challenged and revised. Certainly there are still a large number of families with
traditional role assignments, but besides this, today there are also some families
where the wife ‘brings home the bacon’ while the husband takes a parental leave
of absence. In addition, there are single mothers and fathers, commuter families,
homosexual couples with children, so-called ‘patchwork families’ that result
from the founding of families after respectively terminated partnerships, etc.
Family relationships are today anything but clearly defined and therefore no
longer serve to the same degree as previously as stable references for identity.
The family is only one area of societal life that has lost stability in the course of
socio-cultural change; besides it one can name class membership, nation, pro-
fessional world, religion, gender and generational relationships, sexuality and
many others. Keupp et al. (2002: 87) therefore speak of the “dissolution of guar-
antees of coherency” and affirm that “even the core stocks of our identity con-
structions – national and ethnic identity, gender and body identity [have lost]
their quasi-‘natural’ quality as guarantors of identity.”