12.6 Identity Through Communication

Identity Through Communication describes the theoretical position that personal, social, and collective identities are not pre-given essences that communication subsequently expresses, but ongoing achievements that are produced, maintained, and transformed through communicative practices. Identity, on this account, is constituted through communication rather than communicated from a prior position of stable selfhood. The self, the community, the organization, and the culture are not entities that have identities which they then communicate about; they are entities whose identities emerge from and persist through the communicative acts through which they engage with themselves and their environments.

This position stands in contrast to essentialist accounts of identity, which hold that persons and collectives possess inherent, fixed characteristics that define who or what they are independently of social context and communicative practice. Essentialist identity theory treats communication as a vehicle for expressing or revealing a self that pre-exists the communication. The communication-constitutive view reverses this priority: what appears as a stable, pre-communicative self is understood as the product of communicative processes that have become habitual, naturalized, and taken for granted, creating the appearance of a prior foundation where there is in fact an ongoing accomplishment.

At the level of personal identity, communication constitutes the self through several interlocking processes. Narrative self-constitution is perhaps the most fundamental: individuals produce identity by constructing and narrating stories about themselves — stories that select from the flow of experience those events that can be organized into a coherent temporal sequence with a protagonist who is recognizably the same person across time. These autobiographical narratives do not merely report an independently existing self-history; they construct the self-history by selecting, interpreting, and giving meaning to events, creating the continuity and coherence that constitute personal identity. The self is a story the individual tells, continuously revised and extended with each new experience and each new telling.

This narrative constitution of identity is inherently social and communicative. The stories told about the self are told to audiences — actual or imagined — and are shaped by what those audiences can understand, value, and recognize. The self-narrative incorporates elements of the social and cultural contexts within which the individual lives, drawing on available story forms, character types, and explanatory frameworks that the culture provides. An individual whose culture offers only a narrow range of available self-narratives — only certain kinds of life trajectories that are recognized as meaningful, only certain kinds of identity positions that are acknowledged as legitimate — will have their self-constitution constrained accordingly. Identity is not constructed from nothing; it is assembled from the communicative resources made available within specific social and historical contexts.

Social recognition is a crucial dimension of identity through communication. Identity claims require uptake from others to become stable: a person who claims a particular identity but receives no social recognition of that claim — who is consistently responded to as though their identity were different from what they claim — faces a communicative environment that actively contests their self-constitution. The constitutive relationship between identity and recognition means that identity is always partly a social achievement, dependent on communicative processes that extend beyond the individual's own self-description to include the responses and recognitions of others.

Positioning theory, developed within discursive psychology, offers a systematic account of how identity is enacted through the conversational positions that individuals occupy and assign in everyday communicative interaction. Every conversational turn positions speakers within a social landscape of roles, rights, and responsibilities: who can speak authoritatively on a topic, who owes whom an explanation, who has the right to make decisions, who must defer. These positions are not fixed roles assigned once and held permanently; they are enacted, negotiated, resisted, and transformed through the turn-by-turn dynamics of conversational interaction. Identity is the accumulated pattern of positions enacted across many conversations rather than a stable essence brought into each new exchange.

For communities, groups, and organizations, identity through communication operates through the collective stories, symbols, rituals, and practices through which a collective defines itself and distinguishes itself from other collectives. A community's identity is maintained through the ongoing communicative performance of its distinctiveness — through the stories it tells about its origins, values, and aspirations, through the practices that mark membership and non-membership, and through the interpretive frameworks it uses to understand and respond to events. When these communicative practices change, the community's identity changes. Communities that stop performing their identity through active communication are at risk of dissolution, not because something has happened to a pre-communicative essence, but because the communicative activity that constitutes the community has ceased.

In organizational contexts, identity through communication is closely related to organizational culture. An organization's identity is the product of the communicative practices through which members interpret events, make decisions, relate to each other and to the organization's external environment, and understand what kind of entity they collectively constitute. Leadership communication plays a particularly significant role in organizational identity construction: leaders' narratives about the organization's history, values, and direction shape the collective self-understanding through which organizational members coordinate their behavior and make sense of their work. When leadership communication changes significantly, organizational identity is typically destabilized, requiring a period of communicative rebuilding.

The mutability of identity through communication raises questions about authenticity. If identity is a communicative achievement rather than a natural given, in what sense can any identity be described as authentic rather than performed? The critique of performativity — most famously associated with Judith Butler's account of gender as a communicative performance that produces the effect of a natural original — is that what appears to be the authentic expression of a prior identity is actually the ongoing rehearsal of a performance that produces what it appears to express. Defenders of authenticity within communicative accounts of identity respond that some performances are more continuous with, and more expressive of, an individual's or community's own deepest commitments and relational histories than others, and that this difference — between performances that express and extend a recognized self and performances that deny or contradict it — is what the concept of authenticity usefully tracks, even within a framework that accepts the communicative constitution of identity.