Introduction to Jan Stets

Abstract

It is an honor and pleasure to introduce Jan Stets, the 2020 recipient of the Cooley-Mead Award, given in recognition of her full career of distinguished scholarship in social psychology. Of course, Jan Stets needs no actual introduction to the serious scholar. She has a prolific record of widely cited articles on identity theory, published not only in the flagship journal of sociological social psychology, Social Psychology Quarterly, where she has no fewer than 15 articles, but also in broader journals like the American Sociological Review. Then, there are her many influential books on emotions and identity. Here I want to highlight the characteristics of Jan Stets and her work that make her contributions to sociological social psychology so impressive and she so deserving of this award. The great project of sociological social psychology has always been to understand the reciprocal relations between social structure and individual action. Working in the distinctively sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism, Jan Stets’s scholarly contributions have intervened at a key juncture in this intellectual project. She has focused her research on identity processes as a central mechanism that links the behavior and motives of individuals to a society’s social structure. If our current climate of identitydriven politics and social divisions have taught us anything, it is that identity processes play a powerful role in social order and social change. By directing her research toward such a critical set of questions, Jan Stets set the foundation for the lasting value of her scholarly contributions. Jan Stets has built on this foundation in a distinctively valuable way by working to formulate, develop, systematically test, and extend Identity Theory. Largely through her research, Jan Stets has personally carried the project of structural symbolic interaction through to the present and given it modern, systematic specificity and prominence in sociology. She has taken Identity Theory forward by developing it within, testing and refining its core arguments, and without, by extending it to explain important social problems. These twin processes of internal development of the theory and its external application to significant social issues have always worked in tandem in her research. In some of her earliest work, for instance, Jan Stets examined the social identity of gender and how it shapes interaction among spouses in ongoing marriages, an important social issue if there ever was one. These applied studies provided early demonstrations of the selfverification principle by which identity standards motivate behavior in relationships, including efforts to control the partner, a central argument of identity theory. Out of this work on social identities like gender that are defined by social roles