One can have a strong consciousness of belonging to a certain group, who has specific material and non-material common interests as well as characteristic way of developing strategies, organizing and acting. But this is not always the case, since it is the result of personal, generational, collective experience.
Usually, the researcher take existing groups and then look at how they react to events and issues. But one can take the other way round and look how social identities arise from conflict and confrontation with "strangers". It's when you are under attack from "somebody" that you look at possible helpers - people on the same part of the barricades. A recognized leadership and an organizational hierarchy help a lot in transforming a latent identity into a co-ordinated multi-agent force.
In more "peaceful" situations, an individual may belong to more than one group and the axis - along which he feels to be defined - can be changed by mass media pressure as well as by specific events.
In a macro-perspective, "totalizing identities" as ethnicity, language, religion can reduce the subjective importance of other social boundaries.
In a micro-perspective, the consciousness of collective identity can arise from current participation to social activities and events, especially when they have a characteristic mass dimension: large factories, manifestations, church rites, stadiums, music concerts.
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