IDENTITETSSKAPANDE I STUDENTFÖRENINGEN ULRIKA ... - DiVA

S U M M A R Y
The SAM members construct their ideal identity within the meritocratic
discourse, in which the student is described as society’s future hope and as a
person entitled to be both seen and heard. Student life will provide the qualifications
that are required in order to assert oneself on the labour market, and it
is devoted to activities that may be useful in working life. The involvement in
the society means for example an opportunity to gain important organisational
capital. The SAM members are also striving to raise the quality and status of the
education and thereby the value of the symbolic capital that it provides. They
describe themselves as energetic, committed, self-sacrificing and unselfish society
members. They claim their readiness to work for everybody’s best interests,
and thereby they construct themselves, in accordance with the logic of the
meritocratic discourse, as even more rightful and legitimate holders of future
top positions. Through the work in the society they also get an opportunity to
make contacts for the future, and they try in various ways to increase their
social capital. This also benefits their fellow students to some extent, but the
board members themselves reap the greatest benefits.
The SAM members distinguish themselves above all from the students in science
and technology, whom they describe as negative others. They contrast
their own neat designer clothes to the technologists’ overalls, and see themselves
as intellectuals, while the technologists are associated with manual labour. They
describe their own parties as more cultivated than the ‘boozing’ that the technology
students go in for. With the aid of the negative others, they can construct
themselves as rightful future holders of power.
The SAM members’ representations of the ideal identity may be seen as a manifestation
of (upper) middle-class masculinity. In this perspective it is possible
to understand the ideological dilemmas that arise for the women who try to
represent themselves in accordance with the meritocratic discourse. The female
symbolic gender is associated with a general inability to be rational and to focus
on the right work tasks. Ambitious women also risk being perceived as insufficiently
self-sacrificing and hence even as unpleasant. The women who try to
form themselves as future holders of power contribute, however, to the redefinition
of this identity to some extent. For students with a working-class background,
the ideological dilemmas manifest themselves as general insecurity
about the university environment’s implicit norms and rules and their own
ability to understand and apply these norms correctly, but they do not feel alien
in the SAM society. They also do their best to construct themselves in accordance
with the ideal identity.
The MED members’ ideal identity may also be seen as an activation of the
meritocratic discourse, as the students are prepared to serve society. The MED
members do not describe themselves, however, as the hope of the nation, as
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