orderly generalized others (Katovich & Reese, 1993, p. 394). Instead, they
highlighted the contested, asymmetrical aspects of social collectivities and
the contingent nature of the self, pointing to its superficiality and ephemer-
alityhow it shifted according to the institutions and roles in which it was
deposited.
At the same time that Becker and Goffman were bringing the messiness
ofcollective life and the superficiality of the self to light, moreover, scholars
like Strauss were revealing how institutional stability did not necessarily
translate into stable identity. Much like the novelist John Updike, whose
writing illuminated the tumult of demotic experience,Strauss (1959)under-
scoredhow “a quiet progression of institutionalized statuses from cradle to
grave hardly insures an unchanging identity” (p. 142). His classicMirrors
and Masks, which was written well before post-modernization, was in fact
predicated upon the “perpetual indeterminacy of identities in constantly
changing social contexts” (p. 11). Rather than conveying a facile, automatic
process of identity formation amid institutional stability, he illuminated the
way in which individuals were forced to enact cultural work in order to
establish “islands of stability” amid the drift that occurred over time and
across changing environments (p. 141).
Recent scholarship challenging postmodern theories of the nonself has
followed from Strauss’ lead. Rather than casting postmodern individuals as
passive and hapless victims of macro-level social changes (e.g.,Baudrillard,
1983 ; Gergen, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Jameson, 1984), meso-level analyses of
the self, grounded in a symbolic interactionist acknowledgment of social
process, have emphasized the role that active cultural work plays in
responding to postmodern flux (Gubrium & Holstein, 2000). Our under-
standing of how identity responds to post-modernization, however, remains
under-theorized.
Most contemporary empirical research remains fixated oncategorical
questions regarding the depth of postmodern identity (e.g.,Adler & Adler,
1999 ; Gubrium & Holstein, 2000; Muggleton, 2000). Few scholars, on the
other hand, have explored theprocessesof postmodern identity formation.
In other words, while researchers have largely debunked the notion that
post-modernization undermines the capacity to develop a meaningful iden-
tity, they have not illuminated the processes through which social actors
manage to successfully construct one in light of reflexive doubt and social
saturation.
While a small literature regarding the processes of postmodern identity
formation has emerged, it tends to focus on the discursive cultural strategies
that social actors utilize in order to mitigate centrifugal pressures.^3 Giddens
166 PHILIP LEWIN