Ivana Marková

Theory and method of social representations

This paper gives an overview of social representation theory, definitions of the key terms and of the social processes leading to a representation and to social identity. Six empirical studies are presented and details of their methods and findings are given to illustrate this social psychological approach. These studies are about the ontogenesis of gender, the public sphere in Brazil, madness on British television, images of androgyny in Switzerland, individualism and democracy in post-communist Europe and metaphorical thinking about conception. The methods are ethnography, interviews, focus-groups, content analysis of media, statistical analysis of word associations, questionnaires and experiments. Finally, social representation theory is compared to theories of attitudes, schemata and social cognition.

Presenting Social Representations: A Conversation:

Serge Moscovicis theoretical system of social representations is by now nearly 40 years old; yet, today, various social psychological activities surrounding this field seem to flourish more than ever; much research into social representations is being carried out all over Europe and on other continents; there is a European PhD programme on social representations and communication; there is an association and a network on social representations; and a journal on social representations is in the pipeline. At the same time the theory has its critics; some of them argue that the theory is too loose; others, that it is too cognitive; that it is not clear how the concept of social representation differs from other concepts, say, from attitudes, social cognition, beliefs, stereotypes, and so on; still others would like to marry the theory either to discourse analysis or to social constructivism(s) and constructionism-or to both of them at the same time. Readers of French, in addition, are familiar with Moscovicis work in the history and philosophy of science, human invention and technology, the psychology of resistance and dissidence, and, most recently, with his magnificent autobiographical recit Chronique des annees egarees (Chronicle of Stray Years) (Moscovici, 1997). Although based permanently in Paris, Serge Moscovici has worked at a number of American Universities, has been invited to lecture all over the world, and has received a number of honorary doctorates at various European Universities. Since this Special Issue in Culture & Psychology is devoted to the concept of collective and social representation, we shall be concerned, in this dialogue, primarily with the origin of Moscovicis own ideas on the concept of social representations and how these ideas have developed into a broad programme of research.

Social representations of the individual: a post-Communist perspective

Social representations of the individual are examined in three post-Communist Central European nations, i.e. the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, and in three West European nations, i.e. Scotland, England and France. All six nations share a common European history since the Renaissance and Humanism, based on such values as freedom, agency, individual rights and individual responsibility. Many of these values were rejected by the Communist regimes in which people lived for 40 years. Extreme forms of individualism developed in certain West European nations during the same period. In view of these historical events we have asked the following questions: Do people in the post-Communist countries of Central Europe, after 40 years of totalitarian collectivism, still adhere to the values of the common European heritage? What is the meaning of ‘the individual’ today, in Western democracies and in Central European post-Communist nations? Which issues are important for the well-being of the individual and how do they relate to the political and economic circumstances of those individuals? The results show that the values of the common European heritage in Central Europe have not been destroyed and that factors relating to the well-being of the individual differ between the two parts of Europe. These data are discussed in terms of the political and economic situations in Central and Western Europe, the relationship between language and social representations and the structure of social representations.

Augmentative and alternative communication systems used by people with cerebral palsy in Scotland: Demographic survey

The present survey shows that in 1991–1992 there were 72 children, 37 adolescents, and 107 adults with cerebral palsy in Scotland who used some form of an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system. Among these, 61% were males and 39% were females. There has been a substantial increase in the use of AAC systems over the last 3 years and, indeed, over 50% of users have had their AAC systems no longer than 1 year. The AAC systems identified in this study were broadly divided into low-technology and high-technology systems. Although the data show a tremendous increase in the use of high-technology systems, the low-technology systems still accounted for more than 50% of all AAC systems used at present. There were a variety of methods of access both with low- and high-technology systems, indicating that a considerable proportion of users must rely on methods of access other than hand pointing. The majority of high-technology systems had voice output and all of the low-technology systems required l...

The individual and the community: A post-communist perspective

Individualism, collectivism and communitarianism can only be understood in their historical and cultural contexts. The author discusses a post-communist perspective on the relationship between the individual and the community. Stressing the complementary nature of the two terms, the author reviews the pre-communist history of the idea of community in the countries of Central Europe. She also discusses individualism as an expression of humanism in the writings of Herder, Hegel, Bolzano, Masaryk and Havel. She contrasts the destruction of community by modernity and by collective totalitarianism. The latter is achieved by the obliteration of memory, a fear of ones neighbours and the passivity of silent majorities.

Language and authenticity

It is argued that the analysis of language should play a central role in the study of social psychological phenomenon. For example, there is evidence that habitual inauthenticity in the use of language which was practised in the Eastern and Central European totalitarian systems was partly related to the breakdown of moral principles and to the loss of identity. Using two sentences, ‘Proletarians of the whole world – unite’ and ‘The Bororo are arara’, it is shown that they can carry content which goes beyond their semantic meanings. In the given examples, the former sentence is analysed in terms of an ideology and the latter in terms of a social representation. It is pointed out that subjectivation, which is a pervasive feature of modern individualism, just as totalitarianism, represents a threat to autheniticity in language.

Social Identities and Social Representations

The concepts of “identity” and “representation” have had a long history both in mundane and philosophical thought; over aeons of time, they have both retained some stable characteristics, but they have also changed. Questions like “who am I?” “who are we?” and “who are they?” as well as “what do we know about the world and how do we represent it?” have been everlasting. However, answers to these questions have been continuously changing throughout history.

The Meanings of the Community and of the Individual in Slovakia and in Scotland

The purpose of this paper was to examine meanings of the terms ‘individual’, ‘the community’ and ‘local community’ in Slovakia and Scotland. The social, cultural, political and economic histories of these two small European nations are quite different. Slovakia is one of the post-communist countries in which rapid changes have recently taken place. In contrast, Scotland has enjoyed a relatively stable parliamentary democracy within the UK. Two groups of respondents, 200 from Slovakia and 200 from Scotland, were presented with a word association task which included 38 political and economic terms and with two scales containing the same list of terms. They rated phenomena referring to these terms with respect to their importance for the well-being of the individual and to the well-being of the community. The results suggest that for Scots but not for Slovaks, the term ‘local community’ evokes positive associations and that local community is a meaningful concept. The data suggest that local attachments and loyalties were destroyed in Slovakia during communism. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

Method and Explanation in History and in Social Representations

A commonly held point of view defines a discipline as a science if it uses inductive and/or deductive methods in studying phenomena in question, because these methods, it is believed, will enable generalization of findings. Both history and theory of social representations study unique phenomena and therefore, for these disciplines, induction and deduction are unsuitable methods of exploration. History and theory of social representations treat a historical event and a social psychological phenomenon, respectively, as dynamic, systemic and one of its kind. Using relational epistemologies, these disciplines produce context-dependent and context-specific knowledge. Whilst similarities among historical, as well as among social psychological occurrences do exist, they do not yield themselves to inductive generalization. Studies of unique cases require different kinds of generalization; rather than generalising to populations, they pose questions about generalizability, or transferability, with respect to theories of other historical events or social psychological phenomena.

A Dialogical Perspective of Social Representations of Responsibility

Discourse about responsibility has become a fashionable contemporary subject. Much of it, at least in the social sciences and humanities, is related to claims that in traditional democracies we can observe decreasing demands on taking individual and collective responsibilities. Instead, we witness an increase in, and magnified claims for, more and more rights for individuals and specific groups. Charles Taylor’s (1995) analysis of this phenomenon has become classic, but many others have joined in. “Rights mania” has been viewed as a phenomenon of the twentieth century (e.g. Donahue 1990) continuing well to the present one; rights have become licenses of the media to make caricatures of whatever they like. Strong institutions have the power to judge and misrepresent the positions of their opponents. No wonder that balancing rights and responsibilities (Etzioni 1991, O’Neill 2002) has become an essential requirement of a civil society and democracy.