ABSTRACT
Ideal type is a term originating in Max Weber’s sociology. It is a term that is easily misunderstood. For Weber, an ideal type was an abstract model, usually of some social institution or process. The ideal type therefore attempts to identify and isolate the key characteristics of the social institution. It will guide empirical enquiry, drawing attention to the sort of features which the social scientist should be looking for and documenting, and may be modified in the light of empirical research. (See bureaucracy, for an example of a Weberian ideal type.) The ideal type is therefore ‘ideal’ in the sense of being an abstraction. Not all the features of the ideal type will necessarily be manifest in every (or any) empirical manifestation of the type. Crucially, the ideal type is not ‘ideal’ in the sense of being an account of the perfect or desirable form of the social institution. [AE]
The issue of identity is central to cultural studies, in so far as cultural studies examines the contexts within which and through which both individuals and groups construct, negotiate and defend their identity or self-understanding. Cultural studies draws heavily on those approaches to the problem of identity that question what may be called orthodox accounts of identity. Orthodoxy assumes that the self is something autonomous (being stable and independent of all external influences). Cultural studies draws on those approaches that hold that identity is a response to something external and different from it (an other).
