Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Self, Identity, and Social Movements (Social movements, protest & contention),
Ed. Sheldon Stryker, Timothy J Owens and Robert W White, University of Minnesota Press, 2000,
Chapter 2 "Identity Work Processes in the Context of Social Movements" (pp. 41-67), page 50

The second of Snow and McAdam's four possible identity construction processes is 'identity consolidation', which:

refers to the adoption of an identity that combines two prior identities that appear to be incompatible because they are typically associated with strikingly different subcultures or traditions, be they political or religious.

An example here might be when a Hell's Angel biker come to faith in Yeshua and after a period of settling down in church decides called to be an evangelist to his former biking fraternity, so gets his motor bike and leathers out again and takes to the road to share the gospel with his old mates. Snow and McAdam explain:

In such cases, the new identities are not based on the jettisoning of past identities or even the elevation of a previously marginal identity. Rather, they represent the blending of a past or current salient identity with a new but previously foreign identity.