When categories collide: A discursive psychology approach to the elasticity of multiple identities

This dissertation presents an alternative approach to investigate how actors construct social identities/identifications, multiple organizational identities, and legitimacy as occasioned, situated accomplishments with political implications. The concept of elasticity is introduced to facilitate the exploration of how members discursively accomplish the inclusion or exclusion of varying categories of multiple organizational identities, and with what consequences. The study examines the discursive social practices of key organizational representatives and decision-makers in the context of a controversial period in the history of the Episcopal Church USA following the consent of its General Convention to the election of its first openly gay bishop in August, 2003. I base my research on the assumptions and methods of discursive psychology, an alternative approach to social psychology that focuses upon everyday language use as the unit of analysis instead of assuming that such discourse is simply a representation of generalized cognitive schema. The research focuses upon how human subjects are both producers and products of discourse, and how social realities are both constitutive of and constituted by discursive social practices.