Chapter 4: Students “At Risk”: Exploring Identity From A Sociocultural Perspective

Dominant beliefs and social practices established in Western culture have tended to place responsibilities associated with success on individuals. The discourse of individualism—enacted through social practices, language, and speech—presumes that comparable opportunities exist and have existed for some time so that any resulting differences between individuals are assumed to derive from more or less effort, accrued experience, and ability. Our culture assumes success is associated with individual worth, while many of the historical and social constraints that mediate individual agency are largely ignored. The cult of individualism has both immediate everyday consequences, as well as long term effects, in particular when it is embedded in social science disciplines such as psychology. The latter has traditionally assumed both an individualistic and an objectivist stance with respect to various developmental outcomes.