particular, but not only there. Individualization worked against class solidarity
and debilitated the power of trade unions. Commitments to work and family
alike are weakening. With accelerating business cycles, jobs are becoming less
permanent, while in OECD countries the population share of those who have
always been single and will never marry has risen to an all-time high. The
country that has been at the forefront of a labour culture of hire-and-fire, the US,
not only has an extremely low unionization rate (e.g. Sweden 82 per cent of the
labour force, US 13 per cent), but also the highest divorce rate. This is not
coincidental. Both statistics are indicative of the progressing dissolution of social
bonds.
From ‘identity’ to ‘identifying with’
We can speak of the identity of aristocrats and of members of other feudal
estates or of the identity of the European bourgeoisie in the 19th century. There
is nothing wrong with that; but when using such terminology one must be aware
that it represents an anachronistic perspective imposed on the object of
investigation from our point of view, which is informed by the current obsession
with the concept. At the beginning of the industrial age, social identity was not
an issue, much less so in feudalism. In the early days of sociology, in the late
19th century, identity was not an important category, in society or analytically.
Émile Durkheim contemplated shared moral goals as a prerequisite of collective
identity, but other than that, references to identity in early sociological writing
were few.
Today, however, we are living in a society of identities. Influential sociologists
such as Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Jenkins take the position that socialization
and the working of society cannot be explained without reference to collective
identities based on shared qualities, however fuzzy, real or imagined. To have a
social existence, these identities require difference, counterparts that they are not
and from which they set themselves apart. Thus, in contemporary sociology
‘identity’ is a relational concept that derives from the tension between self-
sameness and other-difference, both of which, however, need not be that forever,
but, being relational, are constantly under construction and renegotiation.
Ironically, the shift, dissolution, redrawing, and blurring of social categories, the
hybridization of jobs, the creolization of ethnicities, the mixing of cultures in
multicultural settings have not led to the abandonment of identity as a