Identity and Control (Harrison White) is off to a rough start. The author has the ambitious goal of describing how personal identity functions at several different levels during social encounters and is determined to do so with exhaustive exactness. My issue is the repurposing of common words to fit the internal needs of jargon in the field - it massively slows down understanding unless one constructs a look-up table to serve as temporary dictionary (i.e. when White says network, they really mean...) and actively promotes misunderstanding by increasing blurring the lines between local definition and common definition.
That said, there are two aspects that compel me to continue.
First, there is the promise of a multifaceted analysis that operates on multiple levels and multiple axes. White wants to show how individuals arrive at decisions and also how pairs of individuals generate a dynamic between their decisions and also how networks of people transmit information and also how switching individuals switching between networks generate still larger networks - the scope is wide.
Second, there is my personal interest in the questions of how humans in general choose rules for actions and how local information constraints serve to produce decisions that would not occur given a sufficiently broad view. The latter strikes me as a perfectly good reason for seemingly incoherent actions from individuals, "they make sense in the context in which they occur". By analyzing the process of making rules for making rules and the process of condensing the rule making processes into something that can be executed against dynamic situations on short time scales, I hope to produce that greater coherency for myself across the many roles I choose to play.
But perhaps you want some actual content from the book to help make up your own mind. Let me describe what I've gleaned from the first two chapters for you though I am quite certain that my understanding contains departures from the intended theory and can only hope to correct my understanding as I continue.
White tells us to explore five different senses of the word "identity". In the first sense, an Identity is a function of a given person that takes in a combination of a given domain (i.e. stage) and a given network (i.e. actors) and spits out a function that accepts perturbations of the status quo as input and outputs suggested action. Mathematically, it might look something like I_p((d,n))(e) = r. There's a lot more verbiage to the definitions in play in the book proper - for example, White makes it clear that a network is not simply a set of people but also contains the relations of emotional intensity between them (more of an edge-weighted digraph) and that a domain is a place and time and also the physical props in play in a given scenario. I insist that the output must be a suggested action because identity provides rules to follow, it cannot itself determine outcomes since our individual ability to translate rule into reality in a given scenario is at least partially dependent on chance. A given domain/network combo is presumed stable enough for an identity to play out several actions over time and White tells us that we might drop a particular identity when we leave that context only to resume it later upon returning. "Supportive sibling" is one example of an identity that one might play in networks that involve relatives.
In the second sense, a person's Identity is the bundle of different identities that they are capable of holding. Mathematically, it resembles the set {I_p((d,n)) | for all d, n}. This strikes past the role one is currently presenting and attempts to hit a deeper level of personal responsibility - the person who would want to follow these particular rule sets. There are some roles that one would not attempt and only looking at the full set illustrates one's full capabilities.
In the third sense, we pass to the dual of the second and analyze instead how a person switches between identities. If you are capable of assuming two identities then you are choosing to use one rather than the other in a given situation and that itself describes something about you. Mathematically, perhaps we get {{(d,n) | I_p((d,n)) = f} | for all f in B} where B is the type two identity bundle defined above. This forms a partition of the (d,n) possibility space that arises from those choices. Perhaps one is more comfortable holding one identity in most contexts but carves out a portion of their life for another. Another person might invert that relationship. Just examining the second sense does not give us the ability to determine the range of comfort one has with a first sense identity.
In the fourth sense, there is the actual historical record of the identities that one has held. Mathematically, the sequence (I_0, I_1, I_2, ...) that is formed by advancing time. This lends each first sense identity a sense of weight and gives more nuance than the third sense of identity by showing how much practice one actually has in the roles. It moves us from the realm of theoretical actions a person might take in various situations and grounds the analysis in the actual actions that the person has taken. Here, your Identity is who you have been - which corresponds much more closely with my internal sense of the intention of the term.
The fifth sense is left as a tease and won't be discussed until later in the book.
