Page 440 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

418 Janet Spreckels and Helga Kotthoff

In the 1960s James Marcia, a student of Erikson, developed the identity
model of his teacher, by constructing a differentiated model with four different
identity states, the “identity status model” (Marcia 1966). He distinguishes
among a) “achievement,” i.e., an earned or developed identity, b) the “mora-
torium,” a currently ongoing struggle with various value questions, c) “foreclos-
ure,” the adopted identity, mostly through the adoption of the value conceptions
of the parents, and finally d) “identity diffusion,” a state in which individuals
have not yet reached a firm position on values. In order to grasp a person’s cur-
rent identity status, Marcia posed youthful subjects a series of questions in
the frame of an “identity status interview” (concerning professions, religion,
politics, etc.). His empirical studies (Marcia 1989) showed that the share of
youth with diffuse identities had increased after ca. 1984 from 20% to ca. 40%.
Marcia thereby offered an early proof that youth are becoming less inclined to
“commit themselves to stable, binding and obligating – and in this sense iden-
tity-giving – relationships, orientations and values.” (Keupp et al. 2002: 81).
This tendency has increased in recent years. In the so-called ‘fun society’ of
today hedonistic, media-, experience- and consumer-oriented values play a com-
manding role, which simultaneously entails a large number of new possible
identifications. Penelope Eckert (2000: 14) describes the situation of youth in
modern times as a “marketplace of identities,” and Baacke (1987) describes the
life worlds of youths as “surfing between various experiential worlds.” The result
of these expanded possibilities of choice are modern identities that Elkind (1990)
refers to as “patchwork identities.” Such an identity is, as the metaphorical con-
cept reveals, pieced together from individual “patches,” namely partial-identities,
and possesses no unified identity core. Oerter and Dreher (1995: 354) point out
that persons with patchwork identities can be very successful, but no longer fulfill
“the ‘classical’ criteria of a worked-out, integrated identity.” In a patchwork-self,
“value attitudes and customs are juxtaposed with no ties and in part contradict
each other.” (ibid.) The classical question of identity research, namely of how the
individual succeeds in achieving a consistent identity from a variety of possibil-
ities and thereby experiences herself, despite all the differences, as not torn, but
rather coherent, thus is becoming increasingly important in modern times. Keupp
and other psychologists take up Elkind’s concept in a study entitled The Patch-
work of Identities in Late Modernity and come to the conclusion that in many situ-
ations individuals by no means achieve a unified self (2002: 196). This is, how-
ever, neither possible nor necessary, since, “the constancy of the self does not
consist in resolving all differences, but rather in enduring the resulting tensions
and mastering constantly recurring crises.” Modern identities are thus, on the one
side, marked by more possibilities, to which the virtual communities of the inter-
net have made a not inessential contribution, and, on the other side, however, also
by more uncertainties. The construction of identity in youth can therefore take the
form of an “open and often chaotic process of search.” (Eckert et al. 2000: 17).