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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Stratification Economics And Identity Economics, John B. Davis
Stratification Economics And Identity Economics, John B. Davis
Economics Faculty Research and Publications
Stratification economics represents an important new approach devoted to explaining economic inequality in terms of how social groups are separated or stratified along economic lines. This paper combines stratification economics with identity economics to address complications that the phenomenon of intersectionality – people having multiple social group identities – creates for stratification economics. It distinguishes two types of social identities recognized by social psychologists, categorical and relational social identities, and uses this distinction to explain how individuals’ personal identities, understood as ordered sets of social identities, can be seen to be both socially and self-constructed. Individuals order and rank their …
Identity And Individual Economic Agents: A Narrative Approach, John B. Davis
Identity And Individual Economic Agents: A Narrative Approach, John B. Davis
Economics Faculty Research and Publications
This paper offers an account of how individuals act as agents when we employ a narrative approach to explaining their personal identities. It applies Korsgaard's idea of a “reflective structure of consciousness” to provide foundations for a richer account of the individual economic agent, and uses this to explain and distinguish the concepts of personal identity, individual identity, and social identity. The paper argues that individuals’ personal identities may be in conflict with their socially constructed individual identities. Individuals’ social identities are represented as a link between personal identity, and individual identity. The overall framework is proposed as an alternative …
Social Identity Strategies In Recent Economics, John B. Davis
Social Identity Strategies In Recent Economics, John B. Davis
Economics Faculty Research and Publications
This paper reviews three distinct strategies in recent economics for using the concept of social identity in the explanation of individual behavior: Akerlof and Kranton's neoclassical approach, Sen's commitment approach and Kirman et al.'s complexity approach. The primary focus is the multiple selves problem and the difficulties associated with failing to explain social identity and personal identity together. The argument of the paper is that too narrow a scope for reflexivity in individual decision‐making renders the problem intractable, but that enlarging this scope makes it possible to explain personal and social identity together in connection with an individual behavior …
Social Economic Strategies In Recent Economics, John B. Davis
Social Economic Strategies In Recent Economics, John B. Davis
Economics Faculty Research and Publications
This paper reviews three distinct strategies in recent economics for using the concept of social identity in the explanation of individual behavior: Akerlof and Kranton’s neoclassical approach, Sen’s commitment approach, and Kirman et al.’s complexity approach. The primary focus is the multiple selves problem and the difficulties associated with failing to explain social identity and personal identity together. The argument of the paper is that too narrow a scope for reflexivity in individual decisionmaking renders the problem intractable, but that enlarging this scope makes it possible to explain personal and social identity together in connection with an individual behavior …
Identity And Commitment: Sen's Conception Of The Individual, John B. Davis
Identity And Commitment: Sen's Conception Of The Individual, John B. Davis
Economics Faculty Research and Publications
This paper develops a conception of personal identity for Amartya Sen’s capability framework that emphasizes his self-scrutinizing aspect of the self and related concept of commitment, and compares this conception to the collective intentionality-based one advanced in Davis (2003c). The paper also distinguishes personal identity and social identity, and contrasts Sen’s framework with recent standard economics’ explanation of social identity in terms of conformity. Sen’s concept of commitment is examined in two formulations, and the later version is related to Bernard Williams’ thinking about identity-conferring commitments. The paper’s concludes by arguing that explaining personal identity as a special capability and …