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Communicating Identity in Intercultural Communication 425

research strand arise concepts such as “identity-in-interaction” (Antaki & Wid-
dicombe 1998), which, in the frame of linguistic research on social identity, has
proved to be an extremely fruitful instrument.
“The student of identity must necessarily be deeply interested in interaction
for it is in, and because of, face-to-face interaction that so much appraisal – of
self and others – occurs,” writes Anselm Strauss (already in 1969: 44). If one
wishes to study a complex phenomenon like identity with the aid of conver-
sation analysis as an interactively produced phenomenon, identity must be con-
ceptualized differently than was for a long time the case in social psychology.
Deppermann and Schmidt point out that earlier social scientific concepts of
identity cause great problems for the empirical study of identity in conver-
sations, because they often refer to “abstracting constitutional dimensions of
identity which can not or can only in a highly rudimentary form be drawn into
the study of everyday action episodes” (2003: 27). “The current concepts of
identity thus seem to have too many assumptions, to be too macroscopic and too
much weighted with empirically irredeemable implications to offer a foun-
dation appropriate for the subject-matter to use in the study of everyday inter-
actions” (2003: 28).
For this reason, ethnomethodological conversation analysis and discursive
psychology (Edwards and Potter 1992; Potter and Wetherell 1987) developed an
interactionist concept of identity that can be much better grasped empirically.
Stuart Hall points out that identities are positions that interactants take in dis-
course (1996: 6). Identities are accordingly understood as everyday world re-
sources with the help of which individuals can better position themselves. Al-
ready in 1990 Davies and Harré introduced the concept of “positioning” as a
more dynamic representation of identities in conversation. They define “posi-
tioning” as “the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations
as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story
lines” (1990: 48). In conversations we assign various positions to ourselves and
to others, and from them we observe and evaluate the world. “Position” appears
to the authors as “the appropriate expression to talk about the discursive produc-
tion of a diversity of selves” (1990: 47) and they therefore propose this term as
an alternative to more static models such as that of the ‘role’, or Goffman’s con-
cepts of “frames” and “footing” (Goffman 1974, 1981).
Like Davies and Harré, the social psychologists Antaki and Widdicombe
(1998) emphasize in their concept of ‘identity-in-interaction’ the importance of
discourse or respectively interaction in doing research on identities. Already the
title of their collection Identities in Talk, which gives an overview of various
constructivist theories of identity, points to the discursive negotiation of iden-
tity. Widdicombe summarizes, “the important analytic question is not […]
whether someone can be described in a particular way, but to show that and how
this identity is made relevant or ascribed to self or others” (1998: 191). Thus it is