Another book on identity needs some justification. After all, there has been an explosion of talk around the topic in the last 25 years in just about all areas of the human and social sciences. So much talk, in fact, that for many observers, contemporary questions of politics, gender, personal relationships and culture now quickly distil down to issues of identity. Identity is the lens through which contemporary social analysis sees the world, which means that everyone has something to say about it. There is a glut of perspectives and proliferation of definitions. What makes things more complicated is not only that different theoretical approaches generate different understandings of identity, but that these tend to compete with our own folk theories of the self. So while we may refer to our sense of identity as a guiding reference in our lives, the concept is increasingly problematised and disputed among social scientists.

In our everyday lives identity is something that can be stolen, filed away, improved and marketed, and it is widely seen as far more malleable and open to choice today than in the past. Self-help articles, TV make-over shows, advertising campaigns and a burgeoning counselling industry are part of a Zeitgeist which encourages us towards a pick-and-mix view of identity: to believe that we can elect who we want to be through therapy, meditation, appearance or consumption. It is a presumption of modern life that our purchases and possessions express who we are so that exposure to international media and communications technologies mean that we can shop for our identities at a global ‘cultural supermarket’ (Mathews, 2000) which make available a range of identities to be put on and dropped as we like. The mass marketing of lifestyles and of a culture of possibilities persuade us that the self is not a fixed entity but is actively constructed, through consumption and display so that we can all aspire to a more attractive self.

In more exalted domains of talk, social theory itself divides over giving precedence to notions of identity as either the active shaping of a self by creative individuals or its regulation by social and institutional forces, and the more academics debate the issue the more complex it seems to be.