Introduction to social representation theory - Essay Example

INDEX Introduction to Social Representation Theory. Origin of theory Importance of theory Impact of the theory Main features of the theory Advantages of the theory Limitations Sources Social representation theory introduction ABSTRACT This assignment contains introduction to social represntations theory which include origin of the theory and main features of the social representations theory. The paper contains the importance of theory as it highlights the relationship between science, public communication and common sense knowledge and impacts upon the public understanding of science and the study of beliefs pertaining and relating to health, politics and economical problems. it also contains social representations theory and its role in the analysis. relationship between human behaviour towards health and approaches to social representations theory and similaritites and advantages and disadvantages over other theories, limitations and how it is used by sociologist. SOCIAL REPRESENTATION THEORY INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL REPRESENTATION THEORY Social representation theories are referred to as system of ideas, values and practices with a two fold function, to establish an order which will enable individuals to orientate themselves in their material and social world and to master it, and secondly to enable communication to take place among the members of a community by providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and group history. Social Representation Theory is a body of theory within social psychology and in particular within sociological social psychology. It has parallels in sociological theorizing such as symbolic interactionism and social constructionism, and is similar in some ways to mass consensus and Discursive psychology.social psychology deals with the apporach to the field focuses on the individual, and attempts to explain how the thoughts behaviour and feelings of a person is influenced by the other people. Psychological sociology is a specialty area of sociology that relates macrosocial phenomena as social class to the attitudes and behavior of individuals.It is closely aligned with the study of symbolicinteractionism Much of the work in this area could be described as sociological miniaturism, that is, the attempt to understand how large-scale societies work by the careful study of behavior in groups.Of special concern to psychological sociologists is how to explain a variety of demographic, social, and cultural facts in terms of human social interaction. Some of the major topics in this field are social inequality, group dynamics, social change, socialization, and social identity.Symbolic interactionism is a social constructionist approach to understanding social life that focuses on how reality is constructed by active and creative actors through their interactions with others.Interactionism is micro-sociological and believes that meaning is produced through the interactions of individuals.The social interaction is a face-to-face process consisting of actions, reactions, and mutual adaptation between two or more individuals. The interaction includes all language including body language and mannerisms. The goal of the social interaction is to communicate with others. If the interaction is in danger of ending before one intends it to, it can be conserved by conforming to the others' expectations, by ignoring certain incidents or by solving apparent problems. A social representation theory involves anchoring and objectification. anchoring involves the ascribing of meaning to new phenomena - objects, relations, experiences, practices, etc - by means of integrating the object being represented into existing worldviews. In this way, the threat that the strange and unfamiliar object poses is being erased. In the process of objectification something abstract is turned into something almost concrete. It produces a domestication of the unfamiliar in a way that is far more active than anchoring because objectification saturates the idea of unfamiliarity with reality, turns it into the very essence of reality.It is important to note, therefore, that social representations are depicted as both the process and the result of social construction. In the socio-cognitive activity of representation that produces representations, social representations are constantly converted into a social reality while continuously being re-interpreted, re-thought, re-presented. A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process reality is reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it.Discursive psychology conducts studies of naturally-occurring human interaction that offer new ways of understanding topics in social and cognitive psychology such as memory and attitudes.discursive psychology subscribes to a different view of human mentality than is advanced by mainstream psychology. Discursive psychological studies highlight the way people construct versions of 'mental', 'social' and 'material' events and processes as parts of particular practices. Social representation theory originates from french social psycology and it particular the work of serge moscovici.he was intrested in the dessimination of psychoanalytical ides of 1950's society,and was individualistic and cognitve approaches which dominated english language social psychology from the 1960's to the mid of 1980's.he set out to introduce a theory that would revive "the social" in social psychology by focussing on shared and collective processes."social representation theory is essential a theory of knowledge where knowledge is defined as not only as factual information but shared beliefs systems and taken for granted social practices.its main focus is on circulation of meanings and understandings in late modern society charecterised by diversity and an explosion of mass medis and communications channels.the strength of the theory lies within its ability to conceptualize both the agecies of power of society and individuals and to capture the ways how thye interact.with discursive psychology and social identity theory,the theory of social representations forms part of a significant shift towards more social approaches within contemporary English language social Psychology.the main features of the social representations theories relevant are as folows:- Social representations theories are the common sense theories of the world.or branches of knowledge such as environment, illness, women AIDS or science.social represenations theory are more than a cognitive representations which exist in peoples head.they are more often described as 'floating' in society. This theory exist at both collective level and individual level covering all aspects of our social life and our society.they can be detected in all actions and talks of the individuals and also at broader level in the society.example can be taken as. In the media, in government policies or in a organisation of a social institutions such as schools or health services. Social representations theory is a multilevel theory which attempts to integrate individual and interpersonal domains of analysis into soci-cultural levels of understandingstudies usually draws on a range of methods which offer different range of perspectives needed for multi-levelled ananlysis.such as interviews with individuals, group discussion and analysis of media output.it is through social representation theory that people, groups and societies make sense of the world in which they live.social representations aid communication,allowing to agree what a person is talking for example science, when a person do not agree on specifc issues such as government funding on scientific issues.social representations are lived out in social interactions.such as those who holds a social representation on AIDS which involves that it is a predominant in one particular sub group of society which may avoid close contact with those whome they suspect as the carries of HIV virus, such as young and gay men. Social representations systems can be thought of as a broad belief system that underpin attitudes.when compared to theories of attitudes, social representations theory attempts to provied a mopre social understanding peoples beliefs based on a social constructionism but they are united by a basic assumptions that rather than there beign an objective reality.individuals and societies play an active part in constructing the world in which we live.our understanding of any phenomenon in our social world i.e, mental illness, the royal family, andolescence. Even the sense of self is constructed through communication and language,cultural beliefs and social practices and social institutions as media, the education system and the law.it is precisely because meanings are socially constructed that social representations of phenomenon, such as gender, change over time and vary from one society to another.the theory of social representations consider the beliefs of individuals to be importantly shaped by social, cultural and historical factors.one consequence of this apprroach is that social represenattions theory cannot provide universable or generizable understandings,because social representations develop within a specific social, historical and cultural context unique to a particular society to a particular point in time, the findings of social representations cannot be generalized to other societies,this applies to many other approaches in modern social psychology.however this is not to say that such non universal research is of no value,if social psychologist are intrested our selves, the social representations theory and research provides a very rich in understanding aspects of this. Social theory are generated and transformed in activities of daily social life for example, in the conversations people have over lunch, in the ways people interact with each other, in the reporting of the news events on channels and in the newspapers. in modern society media plays a crucial role in circulations of ideas in the development of social representations. it transforms novel, unfamiliar or abstract concepts such that they make sense in terms of the existing stock of lay knowledge. many of us rely on the media to inform us about topics of which we have no direct personal experience as genetic engineering or something related to developing world. analyzing media output is thus one of the many possible ways of detecting the social representations that circulate in our society. social representations are both produced and reflected by the media. there is a complex and a continuous interplay between the ideas presented in the media and how they are taken on board, rejected, translated and negotiated by real people that makes sense for them. it is active interaction between media output and its audience that makes the media a valid and important object of study for social psychology. an example of dynamic interaction between the media its audience and social institutions are the development of social representations of AIDS. when AIDS was identified in mid of 1980's,medical understanding of the disease was limited and confusing. in such conditions media played an important role in shaping lay knowledge and beliefs about what AIDS was and how it was transmitted from one person to another. It was considered as a gay plague. however medical knowledge developed and AIDS was identified in heterosexual communities and as gay men reacted to stigmatization, media representations changed. health campaigners and spread of the illness into other social groups all played in transforming social representations of AIDS as the 'gay plague' into representations which conceptualized AIDS as a disease that could affect anybody if they practice certain high risk activities. As it is prefer to define communication as the process of symbolic interaction in which the possibility of transferring the messages occurs on the basis of signs according to socially and culturally rules that is according to codes conventionally. the social context refers to conditions and context were conditions emerge to communication by which they circulate and to the functions they serve. the process of communication and interactions plays a important role in the building up of social representations and of course in transmission and diffusion. they are so interdependent that any consideration of social representation also means the consideration of communication social representation originate in they are manifested in it and they influence it. Social representations are generated and diffused through multiple communication systems. the purpose of social representation approach to study common sense knowledge about abstract objects or theories. the development of common knowledge starts when these objects or theories become a problem in the social context. Approaches to social representation's theory The recent approaches of social representations theory and discursive psychology attend to two different ideas: the central idea of social representation theory is that people come to understand their social world by images or social representations which are shared by members of the social group. these act like a map which makes a novel and baffling terrain familiar passable and in the process of making terrain familiar, also evolves evaluations which indicate which area is good and which is bad. social representations researches retain the concept of attitudes, but consider attitudes as secondary phenomenon which are underpinned by social representations. social representations theory is notable for its attempt to specify precisely which is collective about groups and to provide historical account of peoples understanding of the world. the central idea of discursive psychology is that the main business of the social life is found in interactions whether it is a couple arguing about the failure of their relationship, a minister speaking to the party conference or a defense lawyer examining a rape victim in court. it emphasizes the practical dimensions of the social life. Social representation theory is scrutinized for its capacity to ask new questions and to give new answers to social psychological problems. Its social constructionist implications and relationship to brute facts is investigated. It is shown that social representations result from collective symbolic coping with 'brute' facts. Consequently representations create the domesticated world of social objects which implies considering activity as part of a representation. Culture change in modern societies is shown to produce cognitive polyphasia by adding alternative representations to existing ones instead of replacing them. Social representations theory insist on the shared collective, symbolic qualities of social categories. the structural approach to the social representations is the direct extension of the theory. what constitutes the point of departure of this theory is the abandonment of the classical distinctions one strongly developed in behaviorist approaches in particular between the subject and the object. representations theory assumes infact that there is no break between the exterior universe and the interior universe of the individual or the group. as this theory is considered within the social psychology which is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all of the psychological variables that are measurable in a human being. The statement that others may be imagined or implied suggests that the humans are prone to social influence even when no other people are present, such as. when watching television, or following internalized cultural norms. The study of attitudes is a core topic in social psychology. Attitudes are involved in virtually every other area of the discipline, including conformity, interpersonal attraction, social perception, and prejudice. In social psychology, attitudes are defined as learned, global evaluations of a person, object, place, or issue that influence thought and action. To put it more simple, attitudes are basic expressions of approval or disapproval, favorability or unfavorability,likes and dislikes.social representations theory on mental ill health also play a major role as society's practical experts on mental ill-health, mental health professionals work at the interface between politics, expert theories of mental illness and their lay equivalents in common sense. This also includes research conducted from the perspective of social representations theory exploring the basic understanding of mental ill-health amongst communities of mental health practitioners in the UK and France and many other countries. Professionals construct notions of mental ill-health articulated around three central themes of difference, distress and disruption, and adopt social rather than medical models of their work. Despite their expert status, professionals, representations are fraught with uncertainties that are lived out in eclectic treatment strategies. These research highlights the role of interactions between politics, professional practitioners and lay representations in contemporary societal constructions of mental ill-health. Analysis of social representations theories:- Works on social representations are often criticized for adhering to a consensual view of social reality. a simple inspection of the literature shows that many researchers use automatic data analysis methods to study social representations. these methods such as traditional factors analysis or correspondence analysis these all aim to elucidate organizing principles of differences between individual responses. these analytical techniques enable to illustrate and clarify various dynamics of social representations empirically. the social representation of psychoanalysis moscovici 1961 observed similarities between characteristics of adult thinking and those of infantile thinking. he notice that both adults and children used fragmentary information, draw over general conclusions from specific observations, give greater importance to conclusions than to premises, base arguments of causality on evaluative associations. intrigued by these similarities moscovici found the links between infantile thinking and the cognitive characteristics of social representations. The study of social representations analyzing the regulations carried out by the social metasystem in the cognitive system, as far as their links with specific positions in a set of social relationships are clarified. the organizing principles of the system vary with these positions. these principles may requires strict applications of logical principles in a scientific work or aim primarily defend the cohesion of a group in the event of a conflict with another group. Social representations also organize and structure our perception of social reality. A representation is the "product of processes of mental activity through which an individual or group reconstitutes the reality with which it is confronted and to which it attributes a specific meaning". However, it is more than just a reflection of that reality. It also provides a "meaningful organization" of reality and functions as a "system of interpretation" that governs relationships between individuals and their physical and social environment. As representations determine both behavior and practice, they thereby act as guides for action. Interest in social representations derives from studying the social nature of thinking and the importance of thinking in human life . It also acknowledges an historical dimension to ideas in social life. In other words, social representations are part of a society's collective memory and are the "substratum of images and meanings without which no collectivity can operate". Although they are linked to previous systems, images, and schema, they should not be viewed as permanent or static. They are "social entities with a life of their own communicating between themselves, opposing each other and changing in harmony with the course of life, vanishing only to re-emerge in new guises".The origin of the concept of social representations can be found in the work of Durkheim, specifically, an 1898 article titled "Collective Representations and Individual Representations." This article was written to emphasize the significance of collective representations and to distinguish them from individual representations in social life. An individual representation is a purely psychic phenomenon, not reducible to cerebral activity. A collective representation, similarly, cannot be reduced to the individuals that make up the society because it affirms the primacy of the social over the individual in society. To Durkheim, representations "act as stabilizers for many words or ideas" and include a whole range of intellectual forms: science, religion, and myth, as well as modalities of time and space, and ideas, emotions, and beliefs. Moscovici argued that this definition was too broad and proposed to define social representations as an intermediate stage between concept and perception based in the dimensions of attitude, information, and images contributing to the development of behavior and social communication leading to the processes of objectification, classification and anchoring characterized by a focus on a social relation and a pressure towards inference, and above all elaborated in different modalities of communication: broadcasting, propagation, and propaganda. Similarity to other theories Social representations theorists chose Durkheim (1898) as their intellectual ancestor, but significant similarities to the American school of symbolic interactionism is evident. Both share "a dynamic processual view of human behaviour". Both are concerned with the "implicit" aspects of behavior and put an emphasis on the role of symbolic processes and language in the definition of social reality . Both emphasize discovery based on direct empirical investigation of social phenomena rather than verification and theory testing. Both are concerned with social situations, or "lesser units than total societies or social institutions". To symbolic interactionists, the kind of person one is is less significant than the kind of situation in which one finds oneself in determining how one acts (Deutscher, 1984). In spite of the parallels between the American school of symbolic interactionism and the French school of social representations, there is little evidence of interrelated scholarly writing or research. The social representations perspective provides a framework for understanding the thinking of the practicing professional, but its effectiveness as a tool for analyzing professional practice has not been considered. In this article, the author assesses the methodological implications of the social representations perspective to the study of social work practice in child protection. The perceived advantages of the perspective-that it captures symbolic forms of thought, permits analysis of the social context of practice, and enables thought about action to be organized and analyzed in an integrated way-are partially supported. The author could not identify the interplay between scientific and everyday knowledge but does describe other knowledge forms significant to the practitioner. Researchers make only partial use of the perspective's major ideas. This suggests that a different method is needed to ensure greater application to professional practice. The social construction of knowledge and the social representations perspective also have an evident relationship. Social constructivism and social representations theorists both argue that subjects construct their knowledge of the social world through interaction and experience, and that such knowledge is based on a practical, commonsense understanding of the world. The emphasis in the social representations perspective on the communicated character of thought and the role of social groups in the development and continuation of social knowledge coincides with social constructivism. In addition, the social constructivist orientation encourages the view of the subject as a social actor participating in a sociohistoric project who inevitably influences the construction of his own representation.. In this sense, subjects can be viewed creating and re-creating reality through the medium of social representations. Limitations of the theory: social representation theory struggles to rehabilitate lay knowledge and its power to signify, but it also needs to keep an acute awareness if its limitations because no knowledge is completely immune to distortion, to misunderstandings, to barbarities. knowledge's can mislead and reveal and emancipate and oppress and there is a need to distinguish between symbolically structured order and the order referred to as the only condition of the critique. thus it is essential to recognize that not every story can be accepted as history and not every representation is accurate towards its object.conception that defends that everything goes denies the arduous and the painful struggle of so many humans groups to reach a precise knowledge and to overcome the various distortions which entangle it. by saying that truth and falsity are socially constructed does not mean to accept that a person can avoid the idea of truth and even less the idea of falsity. humans have constructed the representations of others which have clear expression of necessity of truth. Although the consequences of these representations are extremely real to all those involved in the set of practices through which they originate. it is the notion of the truth which can put these theories where they belong, which is the realm of falsity. one of the most premises of the fundamentals of the theories of the social representations are that is social context is bound to the social knowledge of its production. example such as discontinuities between collective representations and social representations whereas social representations are bound to knowledge which detraditionalised public speres where novelty plays a crucial role and worldviews compete more or less equal terms in social arena. as there is a difference between social and collective representations in relation to transformed public speres.distinctions between representations and reality needs to be understood and preserved as fundamental to sustain the every idea of critique. development of the mass medias and communication produces a new reflexivity which allows social representations to clash ,to compete, to intermingle and to appropriate new sense. but it also brings the centre of the discussions what happens in those communities which lack the material cognitive and symbolic resources to propose and to defend their representations and the way of life. social knowledge which intend to transcend the limitation imposed by time and space. sometimes it manages to do so and sometimes it does not manages to do so, whereas everyday knowledge such as social representations are always bound to time and space. social representations of women, biotechnology, or healths are always bound to time and context. theory of social representations were born as criticism levels at other theories which were dominant in the human sciences and in social psychology in particular mainly against behaviorism which excluded all intellectuals life or internal experience then against he reduction of social to psychological of society to aggregate of individuals in short against the predominance of individualism in social psychology also against the isolation of micro social phenomenon a small groups etc in relation to macro social phenomenon. and further the tendencies to see social psychology as the science of process totally loosing interest in problems of society and culture. but it true that social is more popular than before. but other tendencies and theories continue to coexist in a renewed form. Social psychologist need a theoretical approach which allows them to study both media output and its relationships to individuals and groups. using the theory of social representation this can be done. thus social representations are widely communicated bodies of knowledge that is shared to a greater or lesser extent in subgroups in society. Social representational theory of attitude change integrating research on social representations and media framing effects is proposed. The theory seeks to explain why some aspects of attitude and opinion are more malleable than others. It is posited that the framing of a given social issue may influence isolated attitudes and cognitions related to specific aspects of that issue (peripheral elements); however, framing should be less likely to influence relevant attitudes to the extent that they are anchored in societal elaborated representations, and hence form strong and coherent evaluative associations with more general concepts and values central or core elements. As an initial test of the theory, proposed changes to a university affirmative action policy were framed using either a traditional remedial action or newly developed New Zealand-specific bicultural partnership frame. References Nicky Hayes. [1993]. Principles of social psychology. Margaret Wetherell [1996]. Identities, groups and social issues Roger Sapsford [2006 ].Theory of social psychology Dorothy Meill, Margaret Wetherell. [1998 ]. Doing social psychology Willem Doise, Fabio Lorenzi Coildi [1993]. Quantitative analysis of social representations Stewart Clegg, Cynthia hardy [1999]. Studying organization Theory and method Note: BOOKS AVAILABLE IN BRITISH LIBRARY Read More