John Hewitt has argued that because American culture sees individualism and collectivism as two valued but opposed alternatives, it encourages Americans to construct their identities pragmatically. This study examines the specific forms that pragmatic strategy takes in a collectivist context: membership on a basketball team. Using a semiotic conception of self, the author analyzes team members' use of personal pronouns. Taking “I” to indicate an independent, autonomous self and “we” to indicate an interdependent, contextually defined self, these basketball players' discourse reveals four patterns of managing the two selves: (1) one pronoun replaces the other, (2) “we” transforms “I” into a generic individual, (3) both selves coexist, and (4) one self speaks through the other. The author concludes that the concept of the pragmatic strategy of self-construction is too broad of a label to be useful and argues for far greater attention to more specific patterns of self-construction.
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