Read summary of project findings
(online 7 March 2005)

An indication of the saliency of national identity is the extent to which it impacts upon and becomes implicated in personal identity. Studies of the relationship between personal and national identities show that individuals construct and interpret the nation and the meanings to them of national identity in widely differing ways. The nation is mediated through the self.

Just what the meanings of the nation may be, as invested and expressed in its symbolism and iconicity, and how they vary with social differentiation, is difficult to establish sensitively. This element of the research programme will examine ethnographically the significance of national identity to individuals by looking at circumstances -- the work environment, organisational membership -- in which it might otherwise be regarded as incidental. We are comparing the experience of national identity among individuals in two different complex organisations. We focus on the organisation as a structural level intermediate between person and nation; and as a context in which are rehearsed and reinforced long-term commitments to particular identities, such as those of individuals as 'Scottish'. We are attempting to see how national identity (or 'personal nationalism') intrudes into organisational and corporate cultures, and into the identities and sentiments associated with the discrete segments, functions and strata of the complex whole. We examine these concrete contexts of everyday behaviour in order to understand how people's actual senses of their own national identity are regularly called into play, and re-shaped, in practical and mundane ways.

The research is conducted through two case studies: of a bank, and of a multidisciplinary and high-profile teaching hospital. The Scottish banking sector is particularly apt for this research, since it is at once highly modernised and integrated into European and international financial networks, and yet also a distinctive carrier of Scottish national identity. This research focuses on a major Scottish bank, which has its head office in the central belt of Scotland. Our general interest in the effect of Scottish political and constitutional change is also applied to the multiple and diverse identities which individuals deploy in a modern hospital. As a major medical institution in Scotland, and given both its NHS and University status, the hospital provides a particularly apposite site in which to study the ways in which different institutional and Scottish identities interact. The institution has also to absorb and reconcile the different institutional mechanisms, priorities and philosophies of its partners ('caring' /therapeutic and educational), and this complexity, and its resolution in the context of heightened national consciousness, provides a further dimension to the study.

Ostensibly these organisations deliver services which may be regarded as standard to modern life in the West, but do so within a specifically Scottish context. We hope to reveal the ways in which generic aspects of life in the modern state take on specific national and cultural valences. By conducting focused ethnographic research in these mid-level organisations, we expect to gain a detailed picture of the ways in which macro-level institutional changes in government and the constitution affect the lives and concerns of individuals. Similarly, we expect to achieve a better understanding of how these constitutional changes and the ways they are perceived and acted upon by individuals are mediated and refracted through the dense networks of institutions, organisations, and associations that make up complex societies.

The following are among the issues which will inform both of the case studies :

• What do individuals mean by Scottishness? How do its meanings change in substance and intensity as the process of constitutional change unfolds?

• How do their perceptions and understanding of their 'Britishness' change accordingly?

• What is the significance to individuals of their Scottishness alongside the other, and possibly competing and/or conflicting identity claims which they make and to which they are subject, some of which are presumed to be embedded in their work organisations?

• How do personal identities -- and, specifically, their national dimensions -- penetrate organisational boundaries and inform the character and process of organisations?

Study 1 | Study 2a | Study 2b | Study 4 | Study 5 | Study 6

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Nations and Regions research programme
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Last modified: 7 March 2005
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