Social Representations And Identity

Drawing on the non-individualistic perspective of social representations theory, this book presents an alternative view of social identity by articulating the inseparable dynamic relationships that exist between content, process and power relations when social identity is embedded in social knowledge.

This is the first comprehensive text on social psychological approaches to communication, providing an excellent introduction to theoretical perspectives, special topics, and applied areas and practice in communication. Bringing together scholars of international reputation, this book provides a unique contribution to the field.

This Handbook provides the requisite theoretical and methodological guidelines for undertaking social research addressing relevant contemporary social issues.

A long-awaited and critical review of a key topic, this book shows how different empirical approaches to the study of social representations are viable and can be complementary. Empirical examples of the analysis of particular social representations - from museums to new technology - are included. The ten chapters in the first half of the book present the key arguments concerning the relationship between the theory and methods. The second half looks at a wide variety of research topics. Of central concern to all the topics are the circumstances under which one can be certain of having described a social representation. The answer lies in the use of multivariate statistical analysis, the use of which is clearly explained.

This book raises for the first time developmental issues in relation to the theory of social representations, which Duveen and Lloyd introduced to account for the influence of social life on psychological processes. He describes a society's values, ideas, beliefs and practices as social representations which function both as rule systems structuring social life and as codes facilitating communication. The editors' introduction identifies the need to expand the theory of social representations to consider developmental changes in social beliefs, in individual understanding, and in the process of communication. Individual chapters examine aspects of such processes in the domains of nursery-school life, of gender, of social divisions in society, of images of childhood, of emotion, of intelligence and of psychology. In the final chapter Moscovici considers the contribution which these developmental perspectives make to the theory. The book will interest specialists and students in the human and social sciences, including developmental and social psychology, sociology, and communication studies.

This comprehensive text presents key theoretical issues and extensive empirical research using different theoretical and methodological approaches to consider the value of social representation theory when social representations are examined not only in isolation, but also in context.

This book provides an analysis of the social representations of leading self-help genres, including neurolinguistic programming, cognitive self-help therapy, mindfulness, self-management, self-esteem, self-leadership and self-control. Exploring the globalised therapeutic culture of today, the book argues that psychology as ‘science’ is often abandoned to aid the individual pursuit for self-realization and self-optimization. Opposing the view that self-help culture is external to psychology, Madsen argues that it is firmly embedded within psychology, playing an important role in people’s lives. Each chapter traces and critically interprets a range of self-help philosophies and techniques, examining the claims of self-help literature to represent the most innovative psychological, medical or neurobiological research. Discussing each genre in turn, chapters examine key research alongside self-help literature to explore the effectiveness and impact of leading self-help genres in various social contexts and environments. The book offers a contemporary critical overview of issues concerning self-help, combining critical psychology with the theory of social representation to provide a broad perspective on self-help as a valid psychology. Optimizing the Self will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social representation, critical and cultural psychology and theory, clinical psychology, and the sociology of culture and science. The book will also be of use to critical and cultural psychologists and theorists, as well as clinical psychologists.

Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations provides a multidirectional approach for understanding the role of media in constructing cultural identities in a newly globalized media environment. The contributors cover a wide range of topics from different geopolitical areas, historical periods, and media genres. Case studies examined include the shift from print to Internet, local representations of modern world cinema and glo/cal television, narrative strategies in transnational literature, and cultural economics of the mediation of world music in India, China, Algeria, Israel, Europe, and the United States. This case study approach allows for deeper insights into the complexity of each cultural subsystem as part of the whole media culture system. This book exemplifies a transcultural and transdisciplinary dialogue that maps out new—relocalized—territories and borders for mediated cultural identities and also reveals the complexity and connectedness of all of these discourses.