Page 474 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

452 Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff

(4) Sonia: They’re the most aggressive team we’ve played …
Jo: That girl just knocked you
Sonia: Yeh no they’re really aggressive, they’re playing much more of a
boy’s [game]
(7. 11. 03, 002, 00:50)

(5) Jo: It’s not fucking netball.
(16. 10. 03, 006, 01:30)

Social identities may be perceived or well-established through practices. A lot
of intergroup research has found significant effects based on group member-
ships which have been assigned to people solely for the purposes of the ex-
periment. In the experiments, it is common to provide members of these evan-
escent groups with an externally-imposed, shared goal in order to create
cohesiveness and provide a commonality for the members to focus on. But
this is a convenience for the lab. In real life, a social group may not share a
jointly negotiated goal, other than that of contrasting themselves with other
groups.
Another important difference between social groups and communities of
practice is (again) the nature of engagement between co-members. Much of the
research on intergroup relations has been an attempt to understand (and then in-
tervene in) situations of religious or ethnic prejudice. The groups being con-
sidered in this kind of research (Jews, Whites, Muslims, etc.) are clearly not
ones that require (or even allow) exhaustive mutual engagement. (There are par-
allels here between the often-cited “imagined communities” of nationalism in-
troduced by Anderson 1991.)
Although it is possible for social identities to be circumscribed in such a way
that they can be isomorphic with communities of practice, as we saw with social
networks, the community of practice is necessarily more exclusive. It necess-
arily involves shared practices and activities and necessarily involves interper-
sonal contact among the members.

3.4. Social constructionism and performativity
Social constructionism is a theory that holds that our identities are not part of
our biological make-up, but that they are constructed through the social activ-
ities in which we participate. That is, no identity is pre-cultural, all are highly
cultural constructs. Like social networks, social groups may be compatible with
a social constructionist analysis of interaction. However, the community of
practice inherently falls within the scope of social constructionism. In this sec-
tion we consider how communities of practice articulate with the idea that iden-
tities are created through cultural performances.