Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (2013): http://ecp.blog.yorku.

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SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS (Prepublication copy)

Gordon Sammut and Caroline Howarth

Introduction

In the last 50 years Social Representations [SR] has become an established field
within social, cultural and political psychology and has attracted extensive numbers
of students and scholars from around the world (with particular clusters in Europe,
South America and Australasia). Developing Durkheim’s collective and individual
representations, the concept of social representations was presented by Serge
Moscovici in 1961 in his study of the different understandings of psychoanalysis in
different social groups in France. Research has gone on to examine the ways in
which knowledge and social practices develop from any socially significant issues
(see the list of applications below) in different public spheres (Jovchelovitch, 2007).
As a whole, this research demonstrates that social representations are systems of
communication and social influence that constitute the social realities of different
groups in society. They serve as the principal means for establishing and extending
the shared knowledge, common practices and affiliations that bind social members
together (Duveen, 2001, 2008) and thereby act to support systems of identity,
community, inclusion and exclusion.

Definition
In the most common definition, Moscovici (1972) explains that social
representations are “a system of values, ideas and practices”, that serve (a) to
establish a social order that enables individuals to orientate themselves and master
the material and social world they live in, and (b) to enable communication among
members of a community through a shared code for social exchange and for naming
and classifying various aspects of the social world including their individual and
group history (p.xiii).

This highlights the primary function of social representations: the purpose of making
“something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar” (Moscovici, 1984, p. 24), as is
evident in Moscovici’s study on psychoanalysis (1961), Jodelet’s classic study on
social representations of madness (1991) and more recent studies on the public
understanding of science (Bauer, Durant and Gaskell, 2002).

Social representations thus enable the achievement of a shared social reality; they
are ways of world-making (Moscovici, 1998). On the one hand, they are created to
conventionalise objects, persons and events by placing them in a familiar context.
On the other hand, once established, they serve to influence social behaviour and
the negotiation of social identities, imposing themselves in social interaction and
limiting socio-cognitive activities.
SR theory allows for the co-existence of competing and contradictory forms of
knowledge in one and the same community, culture and individual (Wagner,
Duveen, Verma & Themel, 2000). Cognitive polyphasia implies that different and
potentially incompatible systems of knowledge can co-exist within one social group
and can be employed by one and the same individual. In these knowledge
encounters, social representations are created and transformed through processes
of anchoring and objectification. Anchoring is a process of classification which
locates the strange or foreign within the familiar. Objectification is a process of
externalization by which representations are projected outwards into the world
through images or propositions (Moscovici, 1984).

Through anchoring and objectification we take on particular ‘presentations’ of

socially significant objects and re-interpret them to fit with what we know ‘already’.
That is, we take on ‘presentations’ and re-present them. In this process the social
representation may be reinforced or perhaps re-articulated or re-enacted in various
ways. These processes are dynamic - existing only in the relational encounter, in the
in between space re-created in dialogue and social encounters. Representations are
not simply templates that relate to cognitive schemas. As Jodelet (1991) argues, a
representation can be “used for acting in the world and on others” (p. 44), as well as
for re-acting, rejecting or re-forming a presentation of the world that conflicts with
one’s stake, position and identity.

Keywords
Social knowledge, social identity, inter-objectivity, cognitive polyphasia, anchoring,
objectification.

Traditional Debates
An important debate within SR research concerns the relationship between
knowledge and practice or action (Marková, 2000). Social representations define
what possible responses to certain events within a particular context are seen to be
reasonable by different communities (Wagner, Duveen, Verma & Themel, 2000).
They describe how a particular response chosen by a particular individual to a
particular stimulus is sensible in the conditions in which it has been generated.
Hence rationality is contextually determined.

Another debate concerns the extent to which representations are collectively

shared. The theory has been critiqued on the basis of the presumption that every
mind needs to be infiltrated with the same images and explanations to develop a
consensual view of reality. Rose et al. (1995) argue that social representations are
shared but not consensual, meaning that a level of sharedness is involved in a
common code for communication, but that social interaction is none-the-less
characterized by fragmentation and contradiction (Chryssides et al., 2009).

Increasingly there is significant interest on the relationship between representations,

identities, social positioning and intergroup relations (Sammut & Gaskell, 2010).
Different representations relate to, defend or challenge different social identities
(Howarth, 2002), and are institutionalized in social and cultural practices
(Jovchelovitch, 2007). Hence representations are consequential: they have social
effects, support (unequal) social relations and maintain ideological discourses.
However there is always room for representations to be contested and transformed
(Duveen, 2001).

Finally, Moscovici (1961) distinguished between reified (scientific knowledge) and

consensual (common-sense) universes. Howarth (2006) argues that science itself is
not asocial, and that the difference between the consensual and the reified points to
a process of reification that privilege certain social representations as ‘expert
knowledge’.

Practice relevance and applications

Social representations research has been applied to many different practical areas,
such as the public understanding of science (Bauer, Durant & Gaskell, 2002), legal
innovation (Batel & Castro, 2009), citizenship (Andreouli & Howarth, 2011), gender
(Duveen & Lloyd, 1986), religion (Wagner, Sen, Wagner, Permanadeli and Howarth,
2012), participation (Campbell & Jovchelovitch, 2000), intelligence (Carugati, Selleri,
& Scappini, 1994), HIV/AIDS (Joffe, 1995), acculturation (Sammut, Sartawi, Giannini
& Labate), and human rights (Staerklé, Clémence, Doise, 1999)

Critical Debates
Howarth (2006) has argued that SR theory should be understood as a critical theory
that is fundamentally about the “battle of ideas” (Moscovici, 1998), the ways in
which particular representations defend certain interests and protect certain
identities as well as the possibilities for agency, contestation and transformation.
Hence it is important to consider the ways in which representations are
consequential (in determining how realities are constructed and regulated) as well as
contestory (in social psychological mechanisms for critical debate, critique and social
change). Elcheroth, Doise and Reicher (2011) demonstrate the ways in which SR
research is valuable for political psychology and addresses questions of inter-group
conflict, contested ideologies and political agency. As Moscovici asserted it is vitally
important to address the politics inherent within social representations as otherwise
social researchers will be guilty of the claim that we “calmly ignore social
inequalities, political violence, wars, underdevelopment or racial conflict”
(Moscovici, 1972, p. 21).

References

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Online Resources

Papers on Social Representations: www.psych.lse.ac.uk/psr/

European PhD programme on Social Representations: www.europhd.eu