Interdisciplinary research

Recherche interdisciplinaire

W ILLEM DOISE

Structuralhomologies,
sociology and
experimental social *
psychology

Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1, a bi-monthly journal edited by

Pierre Bourdieu and published by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
in Paris, is now in its second year. The first volume is a very substantial
production: more than six hundred pages have been published, a third more
than the number promised in the first issue. Moreover, a certain conception
of social science is consistently expressed through a large number of contri-
butions dealing with very diverse questions. This conception will be briefly
set out and illustrated. I shall then consider its significance for a discipline
which is at present contested experimental social psychology, for which,
-

at first sight, the undertaking of Bourdieu and his fellow contributors equally
seems to leave little room.
Bourdieu’s project is a call to sacrilege: in the first issue (p. 3)2 a &dquo;decon-
is announced, because &dquo;The only way of really giving
secrating operation&dquo;
access to knowledge of the objects which are generally invested with all the
values of the sacred, is to furnish the weapons for sacrilege: short of believing
in the intrinsic might of the true idea, it is impossible to break the spell of
belief except by setting symbolic violence against symbolic violence, and,
when necessary, by using the weapons of polemics in the service of the truths
won by the polemics of scientific reason&dquo;. So polemics will be sought,
and sometimes in surprising ways, as when in issue no. 5-6 (pp. 65-79), in
a sort of strip cartoon, the Marx of The German ideology gives his views on
Iltienne Balibar’s &dquo;Quelques remarques critiques a propos de Lire le Capital&dquo;.
But Actes does more than challenge, sometimes through parody, the tra-
ditional style of scientific reports. It seeks to promote a way of practising
the social sciences which goes beyond the more positivistic recording of facts
and the tracing of excessively localized links, even when the latter spring
from a structuralist analysis. Bourdieu also takes up arms against the always
possible return of a philosophical domination, as well as that of the &dquo;mate-
rialists without matter or materials&dquo; whom &dquo;we would like to remind of
truths which they might have found out for themselves if they had once car-

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929-
930

ried out a scientific analysis instead of enunciating magisterial precepts and

verdicts&dquo; (5-6, p. 123, note 59).
What then, defined positively, is the conception of the social sciences put
forward by this new journal? To find it I have gone to the articles by Bour-
dieu and Boltanski, who together or separately, signed one third of the arti-
cles published in the first volume. We may thus consider that these represent
the most characteristic aspects of the journal’s approach. Furthermore,
this set of articles seem to me to pose most clearly the problem of the links
between sociology and social psychology.
A key notion for both authors is that of the field. A field is an ensemble
of social objects with relations of hierarchy and opposition between them
which structure the distribution, among these objects, of a specific capital
of social value. Parisian haute couture, strip cartoons, automobiles, the
educational system with its production of qualifications, the use of language -

these are all fields. Within these fields, the hierarchy of values is the object
of struggles; the oppositions which characterize a field are homologous with
those between the classes or class fractions of a society. From this stems
an important notion -

that of structural homology, which signifies that the

relationships within a specific field are of the same nature as the relationships
within other fields and, in particular, of the same nature as the relationships
between the classes in the relations of production. Class positions or class-
fraction positions are expressed, generally in a censored, misrecognized
(nijcotitiu) way, through the positions which the agents in a given field defend
while obeying the specific laws governing the distribution of the values in
their field. Since these laws are recognized by the agents in a field, one
can speak of recognition-misrecognitioll: for a field to function, the laws which
determine the distribution of the values within the field must be known and
accepted by the actors in the field, but their connexions with the class struggle,
i.e. their expressive interest, are masked.
Social science takes as the object of its study the structure of a field,
the homology and connexions of its relations with those in the larger
field of the relations of production. I shall illustrate this by briefly
presenting the studies of some fields by Bourdieu and Boltanski.
Numerous oppositions organize the field of Parisian haute couture around
two poles: the couturiers’ establishment on the right or left bank of the Seine,
the austerity or daring of their designs, their conservation of a capital of
prestige or their strategy of bluff, their rich and middle-aged or less rich and
younger clientele. To the two poles of the fashion field correspond, in the
field of power and of class relations, the old bourgeoisie, appealing to inhe-
ritance, and the new bourgeoisie, appealing to the excellence of its nature.
There is unconscious collusion between those couturiers (and also doctors
and dieticians) who put forward a new image of the body and the new bour-
geoisie worshipping the natural body (Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1, pp. 7-36).
A few years ago the strip cartoon was still in a dominated position within

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 931

the field of the mass media. It has now set itself up as an autonomous field
with its left wing and its right, its challengers and its veterans, its avant-garde
expressing the political and cultural subversion of new fractions of the middle
classes and its academicism corresponding to the traditional middle classes’
respect for culture (Boltanski, I, pp. 37-59).
Ideological discourses rank automobile accidents within the natural order,
resorting to ethology or psychoanalysis, or within the technocratic order,
resorting to models in which everyone is interchangeable. This is to forget
that a collision is also the product of a determinate, momentary relationship
between socially qualified agents. The characteristics of the cars, the acqui-
sition of driving skill and the relation to bodily risk and to competition,
in fact vary with the drivers’ positions in the larger field of the social classes.
Hence there are numerous links between traffic accidents and the class struggle
(Soltanski, 2, pp. 25-49).
The educational system produces qualifications (titres) which must ensure
their possessors material and symbolic profits; the apparatus of production
defines posts. Qualifications and posts are two systems of hierarchical clas-
sification related by homology and interaction. But time-lags between
the two systems are produced, due in particular to the autonomy the educa-
tional system has been able to wm vis-a-vis a production apparatus which
precisely requires a long and intensive cultural investment. The production
apparatus nonetheless strives to control the production of qualifications
more directly through the links it maintains with the &dquo;grandes 6coles&dquo; and
various forms of private education (Bourdieu and Boltanski, 2, pp. 95-107).
To the division of the educational system into hierarchized sectors correspond
the mental structures of its agents and especially the professorial taxonomies,
the categories teachers use to judge their pupils and peers. What is involved
is a process of social classification tending to reproduce the objective struc-
tures of a society, in a misrecognized way, of course, since it invokes only
the specific, recognized logic of the university and school field (Bourdieu and
Saint-Martin, 3, pp. 68-93).
Writers, grammarians and teachers work towards the unification of the
linguistic market by devising norms accepted by everyone but which not
everyone can conform to. Structured systems of linguistic differences be-
tween social groups, stemming from the inequality of the distribution of the
competences required in order to speak the legitimate language, are related
to equally structured systems of social differences. This gives rise to a dis-
tinction effect enabling those who are freed from the urgencies and necessities
of practice to produce a discourse &dquo;of general interest&dquo; without reference
to a practical situation (Bourdieu and Boltanski, 4, pp. 2-32).
Common to all the previous examples is the fact that the structured differ-
ences of a specific field are linked to the differences between the social classes.
It is not a question of judging here the solidity of the links which Bourdieu
and Boltanski think it possible to establish. The aim of Actes is not so much

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932

to publish finished products as to illustrate a research practice which is neces-

sarily based on initial, provisional verifications before envisaging further,
more conclusive ones. I wished simply to illustrate the characteristic pro-
cedure of the journal’s two main authors, which consists in relating the differ-
ences and oppositions in a specific field to those between the groups or classes
in a society.
Three articles, however, stand apart from those already mentioned. They
analyze more directly the trajectories accomplished by certain individuals
within a field or within the area of overlap between different fields. In a
sense these are studies in the articulation between the individual and the
collective. Already when Bourdieu and Saint-Martin study the categories
of teachers’ judgments, a homology is traced between &dquo;the structures of the
educational system (the hierarchy of disciplines and departments, etc.) and the
agents’ mental structures (teachers’ taxonomies)&dquo; (3, p. 77). Through their
classificatory system the agents of the school system precisely bring about
the correspondence between scholastic positions and the social properties
of those who enter the system. Thus: &dquo;Educational taxonomies objective -

structures which have become mental structures in the course of a learning

process accomplished m a universe organized in accordance with these struc-
tures and subject to sanctions expressed in a language equally structured
in accordance with the same oppositions classify in accordance with the
-

logic of the structures of which they are the product&dquo; (3, p. 80). It is impor-
tant to note that this conclusion is drawn from a study of one teacher’s judg-
ments on his pupils. This empirical base might well be considered too narrow
if one were unaware of Bourdieu’s previous work and of the rest of the article,
which shows how one and the same &dquo;ideological machine&dquo; functions in the
judgments which several former students of the Ecole Normale Sup6rieure
pass on their deceased colleagues. The real problem is nonetheless that of
the possibility of sociological analysis of an individual case: it is clear from
their studies of L’,~tiiicatioti sentimentale, Amiel’s Journal and Heidegger’s
ontology, that Bourdieu and Boltanski do indeed intend to undertake such
analyses. I shall therefore describe these studies in rather more detail.
The &dquo;artist’s life&dquo; as lived by Flaubert and described by him in L’tdit-
cation sentimentale, and as analyzed by Bourdieu (&dquo;La vie de I’artiste&dquo;, 2,
pp. 67-93), is inspired by &dquo;the desire to break attachments and roots, to set
oneself above class conflicts and, by the same token, above those who, in
the intellectual field, implicitly or explicitly take part in those conflicts&dquo; (2,
p. 89). Such a conclusion could, it is true, result from the application of
a schematic framework to a complex phenomenon. With Bourdieu, how-
ever, it stems from detailed analyses of which I can here give only an outline.
The dilettantism of the bourgeois student is in reality only a refusal of social
determinations by someone who, by his origins, was &dquo;determined for inde-
terminacy&dquo;, that is, had to choose between several interchangeable positions
which in the end, after excessively long hesitations, are all equally inaccessible.
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 933

Thus the Fr6d6ric of the novel is a law student but also paints and enjoys
literature; he frequents the salon of a man in the art world and that of a man
in the world of finance without being able to make up his mind whether to
invest part of his inheritance in a review or in coal mining; the accidents
of his love life set his mistresses against each other and both of them against
the woman who was the object of his pure love. &dquo;Reckless love is the art
for art’s sake of love. Placed between the woman who buys love and the
woman who sells it [...] Frederic asserts a pure love, irreducible to money and
to all the objects of bourgeois interest, love given for nothing and achieving
nothing&dquo; (2, p. 88). Indeed, Flaubert himself wrote to a friend (quoted
in 2, p. 90): &dquo;It is necessary to divide one’s existence in two: to live as a bour-
geois and think as a demi-god.&dquo; It also emerges that L’,-F~ducation sentimen-
tale is not so much a novel about love as a novel about &dquo;social neutralism&dquo; :
&dquo;Flaubert sought all his life, like Fr6d6r]c, to keep himself in that indeter-
minate social position, that neutral point from which one can look down
on class struggles and the internal conflicts of the dominant class, both those
which divide the different sorts of intellectuals and artists and those which
oppose them to the different types of ’proprietors’ [...] But did Flaubert really
succeed where Fr6d6ric failed ?&dquo; (2, p. 89). The most concise answer comes
in the post-script to Bourdieu’s article (2, p. 9l): &dquo;Flaubert awards himself
through his writing the gift of social ubiquity, an unreal realization of the
ambition of living all lives, which is itself only the inversion of the impossibi-
lity or refusal of living any of the lives really offered.&dquo;
According to this analysis, it is clear that the artist, a la Flaubert, is fated
to belong to the dominated fraction of the dominant class. In his research
on a group of Brazilian authors, Sergio Miceli puts forward the same thesis

(5-6, pp. 162-182), as does Boltanski (5-6, pp. 80-108) in his study of the Gene-
van professor Amiel.
Amiel too was determined for indeterminacy, hesitating whether to invest
in literature or criticism, unable to choose between the erudition and serious-
ness of the German university and the brio of the French one, a stranger to
the Genevan haute bourgeoisie reigning over the university, but rejected by
the radicals to whom he owed his professorship, calculating to the point of
impotence the pros and cons of a possible love affair and inventing the solu-
tion of the monumental &dquo;Private diary&dquo;, his Journal intitne, to be published
after his death, from which it emerges that he achieved neither his intellectual
project nor his sexual project. An accident in his biological maturation, the
death of his father which caused the young Amiel to end up at his uncle’s sur-
rounded by sexless women, certainly favoured the displacement of his sexual
interest into the intellectual terrain. But his trajectory is nonetheless that of
a member of the middle bourgeoisie who underestimates his endowments,

is scared of making bad investments and finally remains in the dominated

position of the eternal student.
Heidegger, of whom Bourdieu (5-6, pp. 109-156) presents the &dquo;political onto-
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934

logy&dquo;, seems, unlike Flaubert and Amiel, to have chosen his camp. At least,
his speech on the 27th May 1933, on &dquo;The defence of the university&dquo;, would
lead one to think so. As Bourdieu reminds us, the celebrated philosopher
was for Adorno &dquo;... the expression of a group of intellectuals overtaken by
industrial society, lacking independence and economic power&dquo; (5-6, p. 139).
This must not stop us from trying to &dquo;grasp the determining mediation that
is represented by the oppositions constituting the field of production and by
their relationship with the oppositions of the philosophical system...&dquo; (5-6,
p. 139). Detecting the links between the two systems of oppositions is diflz-
cult because &dquo;... Heidegger’s philosophy may well be no more than the phi-
losophical sublimation, imposed by the specific censure of the field of phi-
losophical production, of the political (or ethical) principles which determined
his (temporary) adhesion to Nazism&dquo; (5-6, p. 140). In the field of philosophy
too, recognition of the specific demands of the field goes hand in hand with
misrecognition of the other interests expressed there. The task therefore
is to demonstrate the workings of &dquo;the philosophical transfiguration of ethico-
political positions [...] which, through the intermediary of the (more or less
consciously felt) homology between the structure of philosophical positions
and the structure of overtly political positions, delimits, for a given thinker,
the very narrow range of philosophical positions compatible with his ethico-
political positions&dquo; (5-6, p. 141). And Bourdieu describes how Heidegger’s
ontology is characterized by the use of everyday words whose full meaning
does not come from scientific discourse, several of which constitute a subli-
mation of the primary opposition between &dquo;distinguished&dquo; and &dquo;vulgar&dquo;.
Again the oppositions between words are connected to the oppositions be-
tween groups which the sense of distinction proper to petty-bourgeois aris-
tocratism separates hierarchically. They recall the ideological oppositions
of the &dquo;v6lklsch&dquo; discourse (culture/civilisation, Germany/France, people/
mass, forest/factory) of .funger, an author whom Heidegger approved of and
whose oppositions he retranslates into philosophical discourse, &dquo;rethinking&dquo;
his way into Nazism by producing a philosophical variant of conservative
revolutionism through an interpretative re-reading of Kant and Heraclitus
against Marxism and the neo-Kantianism of the liberals. In this way a poli-
tical position finds expression, producing its specifically symbolic violence
&dquo;... which can be exerted by the person who exerts it, and undergone by the
person who undergoes it, only in a form such that it is misrecognized for
what it is, i.e. recognized as legitimate&dquo; (5-6, p. 110).

An analysis which uses the same concepts to study fashion designers and Hei-
degger’s philosophy, Amiel’s Journal and car driving, is certainly an inno-
vation in the social sciences. It moves into domains traditionally within the
scope only of sociology or of psychology in order to articulate them in a single
explanation. So I wish to return to the problem of the articulation of psy-
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 935

chological and sociological explanations, whichI raised recently (Doise,

1976). What is in question is the scientific status of social psychology.
The articles by Bourdieu and Boltanski show how the sociologist is led
to construct hypotheses about the functioning of the individuals through
whom the sociological dynamic unfolds (cf. the example of teachers’ taxo-
nomies), and how the study of the individual, traditionally reserved for cli-
nical psychologists, cannot be done without analyzing his insertion into society
(cf. the example of Amiel). Sociological and psychological explanations
thus often draw on each other, in Actes as elsewhere. Generally the reciprocal
borrowings are not made explicit; they are implicit conjectures, devised ad
hoc and considered of doubtful legitimacy by the representatives of the other
camp. The inevitable tensions between neighbouring academic disciplines,
which are moreover often the expression of different ideological interests,
certainly do not facilitate the legitimation of these hybrid products. Fur-
thermore, the few efforts tending to connect systematically the two types of
explanation are situated at a level of generality which remains protected from
any confrontation with empirical data. Here too the studies by Bourdieu
and Boltanski constitute an innovation.
There exists a new way of approaching the problem of the psychosocio-
logical articulation. It is the one mapped out by certain experimental psy-
chosociologists.I shall therefore set out my conception of psychosociological
experimentation. It has been built up mainly in order to give a theoretical
perspective to an experimental research project on intergroup relations (see
Doise, forthcoming), and it starts from the postulate that an experimental situa-
tion, like any other social situation, never unfolds in a sociological vacuum.
&dquo;An experimental situation is brought about within and in relation to a social
formation: the experimental subjects remain citizens, they bring to the expe-
rimental situation a set of ideas, norms, representations and evaluations. The
researcher therefore has to organize the experimental situation in such a way
as to be reasonably sure that certam imported elements will intervene rather
than other, less pertinent ones&dquo; (Doise, 1976, p. l55). For each experiment
the researcher must therefore study the links between the system of experi-
mentally produced relations and the system of pre-existing relations in order
to define the situation experimentally. Those readers familiar with writings
in social psychology will know that such a definition of the experimental
situation has often been neglected. It is precisely this gap which we have
tried to fill in our research on the intergroup.
But why set up experimental situations? Is it not sufficient to follow the
example of Bourdieu and Boltanski and study the individuals’ trajectories
in a given field in order to articulate the psychological with the sociological ?
Such work is certainly indispensable; but the experimenter is able to provide
a better understanding of the processes which intervene in the transformation

of behavioural norms, representations and evaluations. The specific interac-

tion set up by the experimenter may coincide with, reinforce or go against
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936

the habitual relations between individuals and groups and thus inflect norms,
representations and evaluations. It is by transforming these social realities
that one is better able to understand the processes in their functioning.
This presupposes that there are processes which articulate the individual
and the collective. Rather than entering into discussion of the notion of
processes and of the possibility of formalizing them, I shall give an account
of the experimental study of a process that of category differentiation, which
-

does seem to be a process articulating the individual and the collective, psy-
chological explanation and sociological explanation. The process is indeed
a psychological one: the gestaltists and Tajfel (1959) have studied it at the

level of the organization of the perception of physical stimuli ; Eiser and Stroebe
(1972) show how it also intervenes at the level of the judgments individual
pass on opinions and attitudes. Category differentiation is also a sociolo-
gical process: it accounts for the way in which social classes and groups differ-
entiate themselves or come closer to one another particularly as a function
of relations of work and interest which exist between them and are histori-
cally determined. I have no hesitation in considering many of the texts pu-
blished in Actes as sociological studies in category differentiation.
Without thereby implying any sort of priority for the psychological side
of the process, of category differentiation, I shall start by describing it as pro-
duced in perceptual judgments. It consists in an accentuation of the simi-
larities between stimuli belonging to the same category and an accentuation
of the differences between stimuli belonging to different categories. Accen-
tuation of similarities and differences is not produced for each and every cha-
racteristic : it is produced for characteristics connected with membership of
the two different categories. Let me briefly describe an experiment by Tajfel
and Wilkes (1963). The stimuli presented several times are eight lines of
unequal length. For subjects in a first experimental condition, the four shor-
test lines are always accompanied by a letter A and the four longest by a letter
B. Thus there is a perfect correspondence between membership in the two
classes and the length of the lines. In two other conditions, this correspon-
dence no longer exists: in one case the letters A and B are attributed at random
to the different lines and in the other case there are no letters. In the first
condition, as expected, the subjects overestimate the differences between lines
belonging to categories A and B and tend to overestimate the similarities bet-
ween lines in the same category. This does not happen for the subjects taking
part in the experiment in the other two conditions. These differentiation
phenomena have since been verified by several other researchers. Moreover,
Marchand (1970) has shown that this overestimation of the differences be-
tween categories is further intensified when a value dimension is added to the
size dimension of the stimuli. Several experiments have shown subsequently
that this process equally accounts for certain characteristics of social stereo-
types (Tajfel, Sheikh and Gardner, 1964; Doise, Deschamps and Meyer,
forthcoming). The stereotype is in fact, by definition, the true or false per-
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 937

ception of a correspondence between membership in a group and the posses-

sion of a certain characteristic. The process thus intervenes in the indivi-
dual’s psychological organization of certain aspects of his social environment.
The differentiation process is not only &dquo;categorical&dquo;, in that it constitutes,
in the Kantian sense, a fundamental mode of the understanding of the
phy-
sical and social world; it also accounts for the differentiations produced be-
tween social classes and groups. It is thus also, and perhaps primarily, a pro-
cess through which the collective structures itself, differentiating and shaping
individuals. Three levels may be distinguished in the relationships between
social groups and categories: the level of behaviour, the level of evaluations,
and the level of representations. These levels are closely interrelated. All
behaviour is accompanied by evaluative or more objective judgments. On
the other hand, an intergroup judgment is itself a behaviour: it is always the
taking up of a position vis-A-vis a group and often a justification or an anti-
cipation of an act towards it. The thesis I am putting forward is that diner-
entiation at the level of cognitive representations, evaluative discrimination,
and behavioural discrimination, are interrelated and that it is sufficient to
introduce a change at one of these levels in order to bring about a change
at the other two levels. Just as, in perceptual judgments, the introduction
of category memberships may accentuate the differences between stimuli,
so membership in different social categories leads, in certain conditions, which
can also be studied experimentally, to behavioural and evaluative discrimina-
tions. Thus it can be shown experimentally that the introduction of a diver-
gence at the behavioural level, creating a conflict between members of two
groups, is accompanied by an accentuation of differences at the evaluative
level and that the introduction of a convergence at the behavioural level reduces
discrimination at the level of judgments. Sherif and his co-workers (1961)
have already shown this in their celebrated research on group competition
and cooperation.

I have tried to study the process of category differentiation in more detail

in a series of experiments (Doise, 1976, Doise, forthcoming). Two of these
experiments analyze representations at the moment of anticipation of differ-
ent types of interactions. In the first of them (Doise et al., 1972), the pro-
cedure used to constitute experimental groups was analogous to that of Tajfel
and his co-workers. Once the subjects were informed of their category mem-
bership, they indicated on evaluative scales, but also on more objective scales
(tall/short, fat/thin, dark/blond, calm/active) how they represented to them-
selves the members of their own category and those of the other category.
Either they anticipated no other interaction (control condition) or they anti-
cipated, in the experimental conditions, a cooperative or a competitive inte-
raction for high or for low stakes. While it was not possible to find statis-
tically signiticant differences between the four experimental conditions, it
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938

was nonetheless verified that discrimination for all the evaluative items,
but also for the four less evaluative items, was significantly greater in the situa-
tion of competition for high stakes than in the control situation. This was
already a first indication that mere anticipation of a divergence at the level
of behaviour projects a greater differentiation at the level of evaluations and re-
presentations. Another experiment was carried out (Doise and Weinberger,
1972-1973) to show how the ideological representations a society produces
to regulate the relations between the groups of which it is made up, may equally
evolve according to the conditions of encounter between members of those
groups. The representations studied are the images boys build up of girls in
three encounter anticipation situations: a cooperative encounter, encounter
on terms of instruction-induced competition, and encounter on terms of spon-
taneous competition. In anticipation of a competitive encounter between
two boys and two girls, the evaluative discrimination the boys make of the
girls is relatively greater than in anticipation of a cooperative encounter. In
the latter condition, the boys also attribute relatively fewer feminine traits
to the girls than in anticipation of competitive encounters. Anticipation of
a conflictual encounter therefore leads to the construction of more differen-
tiated images than anticipation of a cooperative encounter.
Subsequent experiments have confimed the pertinence of the category
differentiation model in accounting for a great variety of intergroup pheno-
mena. In accordance with the properties of the process, the evaluative repre-
sentations which members of two socio-economic groups (apprentices and
secondary school students) make of themselves and of the other group vary
depending on whether or not the other group is mentioned from the outset,
and depending on whether it is an individual or collective encounter (Doise,
1974). As can equally be predicted from the model, the significance of a
situation of diverging interests between members of two regional groups (a
native of Valais and a native of Vaud) varies according to whether their ac-
cents converge (a relatively &dquo;unnatural&dquo; situation) or diverge (a more &dquo;natu-
ral&dquo; situation). Finally, in a more recent experiment (Deschamps and Doise,
forthcoming), we have shown that the overlapping of social category mem-
berships considerably weakens evaluative discrimination between categories.
From the various research projects described it may be concluded that the
process of category differentiation does articulate the individual and the col-
lective, accounting for the aggregation of actions, representations and evalua-
tions as a function of membership in different social categories or groups.
Experimentation thus makes explicit one of the mechanisms which enable
the collective to shape the individual and enable the individual to take part
in a collective dynamic.
Let me conclude by mentioning some other directions in social psychology
research evoked by Actes. Often, in discussion of the middle classes, the
reader familiar with American social psychology thinks of the notion of the
reference group, and more especially of the sociological perspective given to
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 939

it by Runciman (1966). If Boltanski is to be believed, should we not see the

effect of a reference group even in the bodywork of certain automobiles,
&dquo;cars [...]designed with an outward appearance which relates them to the
vehicles owned by the members of the upper classes, without having their
mechanical qualities or power...&dquo; (2, p. 38)?
In this journal Tajfel (1974) has developed the notion of social identity:
the individual defines himself, evaluates himself and locates himself in his
social environment through his category memberships. When Bourdieu
analyzes the invention of the artist’s life, and Boltanski deals with Amiel’s
impotence, they both seem to invoke the intervention of processes of social
identity construction, made difficult in both cases by the particular position
of the individuals studied, who find themselves at the intersection of several
categories.
A link can be directly established between the woPk of Lemaine (1974) on
social differentiation and originality and a contribution to Actes by Villette
(4, pp. 98-101), dealing with access to dominant positions in industry. Vil-
lette describes how the offspring of industrial families &dquo;merit&dquo; the positions
they inherit: &dquo;the sons of industrial families [...]are offered, by their father,
their uncle or a friend, an unusual and ’risky’ undertaking in an area where
not much has been happening for some time and where the services are tho-
roughly inadequate. A small team is assembled [...]] They make a trip
abroad [...]they consult specialists and launch a large-scale reform. Soon
people start talking about them [...] ; their amazing successes are widely known
and their few failures are commented on in private. From that moment,
the nub of the problem is solved: social capital has been converted into rare
competence and the most flattering promotions become legitimate...&dquo; (4,
p. 99). Lemaine’s research deals precisely with the incomparability strategies
which various social agents adopt. This work is another example of the
psychosociological method which tests its own truth by studying, in the field,
scientists’ research behaviour, and, in the laboratory, the originality strategies
of experimental subjects.
Many more examples could be given of convergences between a certain
kind of experimental psychosociological research and the work published in
Actes. I have concentrated on those concerned with mechanisms of social
differentiation. However, one ought also to mention Deconchy’s recent
work (1975) on religious orthodoxy, not only because it can be related to a
short article by Bourdieu (5-6, pp. 183-190) on &dquo;Authorized language: A
note on the social conditions of the ef~cacy of ritual discourse&dquo;, but also be-
cause it is another of the still too rare examples of experimental research directly
set in a social context. When Bourdieu concludes: &dquo;... the language of autho-
rity only ever governs with the collaboration of those it governs, that is, with
the assistance of the social mechanisms capable of producing that complicity,
based on misrecognition (méconnaissance), which is at the root of all autho-
rity&dquo; (5-6, p. 187), Deconchy’s experiments make explicit the characteristics
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940

of these social mechanisms which are indeed mechanisms situated at the arti-
culation of the psychological and the sociological.
There is no lack of examples to prove that psychosociological experimen-
tation, by introducing limited and often temporary changes, can inform us
about the functioning of the processes binding individual behaviours into a
social dynamic. I repeat that these processes cannot be studied in a &dquo;social
vacuum&dquo;. Experimental subjects remain citizens occupying determinate
positions in their social formation and bringing their ideas, norms and repre-
sentations with them into the experimental situation. This is the raw material
for the experimenter who transforms it so as to elucidate the processes which
intervene in that transformation.

Psychology and sociology have developed without much knowledge of each

other. Moreover, a social psychology has been constituted with practically
no effort made to integrate the sociological level into its analyses. That
was taking the easy way out: interindividual relationships always unfold
in relation to collective processes of relationships between groups, catego-
ries and classes. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales illustrates in several
important contributions this articulation between the individual and the col-
lective. It thereby invites social psychologists to define further the object
of their investigations and experiments.

Willem Doise (born 1935) is Professor of Experimental Social Psychology at the Universitv
of Geneva, Switzerland. His researcfr interests are in the ar-ea of ititergrolip relations
and of social aspects of cognitive del’elopment. Some recent publications not mentioned
below: &dquo;La structuration cognitive des décisions individuelles et collectives d’adultes et
d’enfants&dquo;, Revue de psychologie et des sciences de I’education, 1973; &dquo;Social interaction
and tlre development of cognitive operations&dquo;, European journal of social psychology,
1975 (with C. Mugny and A.N. Perret-Clermont): &dquo;New theoretical perspectives in the
experimental study of intergrouP relatiorts&dquo;, Italian journal of psychology, 1976 (with
H.-D. Darrn J .

Notes

*
This article was translated from the original version in French by Richard Nice, Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, England.
1. 54, Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris.
2. In the following, we will abbreviate the title of the journal and refer to it as Actes. Ar-
ticles in volume 1 (1975) will be cited by issue and page numbers.

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 941

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