Critical Comments on Experimental,Discursive, and General Social Psychology

The historical background of the contrasting traditions of experimental and discursive social psychologies is outlined, and two illustrative experimental and discursive studies are described in detail and critically scrutinised. Among the major weaknesses of the experimental approach is an increasing tendency towards an a‐social computer‐mediated procedure and a decontextualised setting. While experimental methods and results are clearly set out, the discursive research presents only small and highly selected fragments of masses of data. Hence the actual ways in which findings are arrived at remain largely obscure. Experimental, and to a lesser extent discursive social psychology, make implicit and unjustified claims for universality. The scientific pretensions of mainstream social psychology texts are also questioned in a brief discussion of the implications of these critiques for social psychology at large.     

The implications of dialogicality for ‘giving voice’ in social representations research

Social representations research is often undertaken by scholars who seek to ‘give voice’ to knowledge(s) that are held by socially disenfranchised individuals and groups. However, this endeavour poses a number of problems in practice, not least because it assumes that the ‘voices’ voiced by individuals and/or groups in social research will be unambiguous and uniform, and unchanged by the research encounter. Despite the growth of attention to the critical potential of social representations theory, there remains a lack of scholarship on the relationship between the theory's emphasis on the relational, or dialogical, nature of social life (the Ego‐Alter‐Object relation) and the implications of this for critical research. In this article, I argue that the dialogical epistemology from which social representations research must depart incites reflection upon (i) the design of empirical studies, which must equally attend to both ‘Ego’ and ‘Alter’, and (ii) the researcher‐researched relationship, which may itself be best viewed as an Ego‐Alter interaction. I make the case for adopting dialogical epistemology in critical social psychology, and argue that this is essential to undertaking ethical social research. I conclude by suggesting that claims to ‘giving voice’ have little place in critical social psychology in general, and social representations scholarship in particular.     

Culture‐Inclusive Theories of Self and Social Interaction: The Approach of Multiple Philosophical Paradigms

In view of the fact that culture‐inclusive psychology has been eluded or relatively ignored by mainstream psychology, the movement of indigenous psychology is destined to develop a new model of man that incorporates both causal psychology and intentional psychology as suggested by Vygotsky (1927). Following the principle of cultural psychology: “one mind, many mentalities” (Shweder et al., 1998), the Mandala Model of Self (Hwang, 2011a,b) and Face and Favor Model (Hwang, 1987, 2012) were constructed to represent the universal mechanisms of self and social interaction that can be applied to any culture; both models can be used as conceptual frameworks for analyzing mentalities of people in any given culture. Taking research works from Foundations of Chinese Psychology: Confucian Social Relation as exemplars (Hwang, 2012), this article illustrates how to construct culture‐inclusive theories of Confucianism by multiple philosophical paradigms. The mechanism of culture‐inclusive theory can be applied to explain qualitative research findings on lifeworld events of people in a particular society. It can also be utilized to predict results of quantitative research conducted to verify theoretical propositions in the scientific microworld by empirical methods.     

Social Action Research and the Commission on Community Interrelations

The Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI) was officially launched in 1945 by the American Jewish Congress (AJC) with Kurt Lewin as its chief consultant. Its intent was to bring research to bear on religious and racial discrimination. Espousing the ideals of democratic social engineering, CCI's action research projects aimed for scientific credibility and social utility. This article examines CCI's development from 1944 to 1952. By the early 1950s, changes within the AJC and in local communities and increased legal and mass protest strategies for racial justice as well as changes within social psychology as a subdiscipline challenged the viability of CCI's action research programs.     

Social psychology and neoliberalism: A critical commentary on McDonald,Gough, Wearing,and Deville (2017)

McDonald, Gough, Wearing, and Deville (2017) call for the discipline of social psychology to investigate issues of neoliberalism, consumption and self‐identity more seriously. We make two contributions in relation to their analysis. First, we highlight some current issues associated with neoliberalism as a concept that leave us in doubt regarding the analytical usefulness of the term. Due to its imprecision and over‐extension, predominant association with the left who use it pejoratively, and altered economic circumstances, we are increasingly skeptical of neoliberalism's analytical validity to social psychology. Second, we also stress the importance of interdisciplinarity, but suggest that empirical insights from mainstream social psychology have much to offer social scientists concerned with how current economic developments impact upon self‐identity and social behaviour. We conclude by pointing out that a greater openness to heterodoxy within and between critical and mainstream strands and the wider social sciences are required if social psychologists are going to make more persuasive impacts to the study and resistance of market logic.     

The Generality of Theory and the Specificity of Social Behavior: Contrasting Experimental and Hermeneutic Social Science

Since its inception, experimental social psychology has arguably been of two minds about the nature and role of theory. Contemporary social psychology's experimental approach has been strongly informed by the “nomological‐deductive” approach of Carl Hempel in tandem with the “hypothetico‐deducive” approach of Karl Popper. Social psychology's commitment to this hybrid model of science has produced at least two serious obstacles to more fruitful theorizing about human experience: (1) the problem of situational specificity, and (2) the manifest impossibility of formulating meaningful general laws of human social behavior. It is argued that a social psychology based on the search for this kind of lawfulness, under the auspices of either a strict or loose interpretation of the largely Hempelian model, is ultimately unworkable. An alternative approach to social psychology that is attentive both to the need for understanding individual situations and behaviors and to the need for generalized understanding of actual human behaviors is offered. This approach is grounded in the hermeneutic tradition.     

New Perspectives on the Study of the Authority Relationship: Integrating Individual and Societal Level Research

The concept of authority crosses many social sciences, but there is a lack of common taxonomy and definitions on this topic. The aims of this review are: (1) to define the basic characteristics of the authority relationship, reaching a definition suitable for the different domains of social psychology and social sciences; (2) to bridge the gap between individual and societal levels of explanation concerning the authority relationship, by proposing an interpretation within the framework of social representations. The authority relationship can be conceived as a negotiation of meanings and it is closely linked to shared value orientation and the attribution of meanings negotiated within a society. We assume that the authority relationship is socially constructed and represents both a shared representation of society and a normative principle of social life. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted, crossing definitions and studies provided in sociology, political science, law and social psychology.     

The Siren Song of Substantivalism

The defence of a process philosophy as the metaphysics for the foundation of social psychology is part of a general defence of scientific realism. Realists, be they classical or neo critical realists hope to construct a dual level science—a phenomenal level resting on a transcendent level required to account for the order and stability to be found in the unfolding of the phenomena. Also required is a driving force or agency. Discursive psychologists argue for a social ontology in which meanings are created and managed by people engaged in projects, made orderly by shared social representations. Concepts like “social structure” are convenient metaphors to describe clusters of discursive practices but should not be interpreted ontologically. Causal powers are revealed in dispositions, which as a matter of logic, must be ascribed to entities self‐identical over time. Only persons meet this condition. Discursive social psychology is quasi social in that Vygotsky wise it looks for a social origin for social representations, and quasi personal in that persons are the naturally active beings that drive the patterns of life forward. A defence of neo‐critical realism against Professor Ratner's criticisms can only be a more careful statement of the position since his specific criticisms do not address the position I have been advocating.     

Piaget's Social Psychology

Piaget's social psychology is not widely discussed among psychologists, partly because much of it is still contained in untranslated French works. In this article I summarize the main lines of Piaget's social psychology and briefly indicate its relation to current theories in social psychology. Rejecting both Durkheim's sociological holism and Tarde's individualism, Piaget advances a sociological relativism (relationalism) in which all social facts are reducible to social relations and these, in turn, are reducible to rules, values and signs. Piaget's theory of social values takes the form of a social exchange theory characterized in an abstract logical way. Piaget claims social exchange requires normative principles of reciprocity and that individual social development results in such an equilibrium because rationality itself is social and based upon social cooperation. These views, in turn, derive from Piaget's orthogenetic views concerning the course of evolution: development can be characterized as an increase in equilibrium manifested both in individual action and in social interaction.     

Minding the Gap: Positivism, Psychology, and the Politics of Qualitative Methods

This article explores the politics and practices of qualitative research, in particular by interrogating the "gap" between qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. Two main claims are elaborated: first, that despite being recommended on grounds of ethical superiority (such as of nonmanipulation and instrumentality), qualitative research is not immune from such problems and may indeed harbor its own practices of exploitation; second, and correspondingly, that the moral high ground associated with qualitative research arises from the ways it is used rather than from any intrinsic features of the methodology. The argument is made that it is important to maintain this distinction in order to counter the tendency toward methodological fetishism so prevalent in scientistic (i.e., aspiring to "natural" scientific status) disciplines such as psychology. After framing these issues with some comments on the current popularity of qualitative methods, the article illustrates these claims by exploring 5 key ways that the positivist agenda of the discovery and control of a natural world can return in qualitative research, especially when this is mistakenly evaluated according to criteria formulated for quantitative analyses. The article concludes with a consideration of the epistemological and political status of attempts either to bridge or exacerbate the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches.     

Materialism, Agnosticism and God

The longstanding philosophical debate between idealism and materialism has recently entered the ontological terrain of critical realism (CR) and dialectical critical realism (DCR). This has been initiated by Roy Bhaskar’s most recent book, From East to West, which attempts an ambitious synthesis of philosophy, social theory and theology. On the one hand, Bhaskar’s attempt to root his philosophy and social theory in a ‘realist theory of God’ has found an echo within the CR and DCR research camp, some of whose members would urge us to take seriously the possibility of a ‘religious sociology’. On the other hand, Bhaskar’s abrupt ‘idealist turn’ has left many critical realists flabbergasted and horrified, particularly those working at the interface between realist philosophy and Marxist social science, especially since Bhaskar’s new philosophical trajec‐tory is radically at odds with the ‘synchronic emergent powers materialism’ outlined in his The Possibility of Naturalism. In response to this ‘split’ within the CR and DCR camp, the spectre of ‘realist agnosticism’ has been raised and defended by Mervyn Hartwig in this journal. Since neither science nor philosophy can settle the issue of what kind of stuff constitutes ‘rock bottom reality’, it is rational to be agnostic on the ‘ultimate question’, to deny positively affirming the claims of either one side or the other. Now this is the move that is resisted in this paper. My argument is that ontolog‐ical idealism is disputable on a number of grounds‐philosophical, scientific, ethical and political. In particular, I argue that objective idealism is unsupported by rational knowledge, is riddled with conceptual and logical defects, is contrary to the logic of scientific discovery, and is an obstacle to eudaimonia (human emancipation). Further, since realist agnosticism rests its case on the myth of infallible knowledge, and obviously stands or falls with the defensibility or other‐wise of objective idealism, this gives us ‘good enough’ reasons for accepting a thoroughgoing materialism as the ontological foundation of social theory.     

Single Case Probabilities and the Social World: The Application of Popper's Propensity Interpretation

This paper is a re-examination of Popper's propensity interpretation of probability in respect of its potential methodological value in social science. A long standing problem for the (standard) frequency interpretation of probability is that whilst it is able to treat both aggregate and individual phenomena as having measurable properties, it cannot explain the ontological relationship between such concrete individual cases and aggregates. Popper's interpretation treats single cases as both real, but also as realisations of a propensity to occur. The frequency and propensity interpretations are compared and whilst some common objections raised must be upheld, they do not devalue the importance of the propensity interpretation as at least a metaphysical basis for probabilistic claims in social science. However the value of the approach may also lie in its methodological potential. Here I sugest that single case probabilities must be analysed in terms of the anterior probabilities of prior constituent events. In this I move beyond Popper's own programme, but suggest that such a move is theoretically compatible with recent complexity approaches in social science and goes some way toward meeting anti-naturalist concerns about intentionality.     

How I am Constructing Culture‐inclusive Theories of Social‐psychological Process in our Age of Globalization

Accepting Cole's the premise that, “cultural‐inclusive psychology has been … an elusive goal” (1996, pp. 7–8) but one worth striving to attain, I first set out to identify my domain of interest and competence as an intellectual. Deciding it to be social interaction between individuals, I then searched out theoretical approaches to this domain that encompassed as many approaches to this trans‐historical concern that have emerged from cultural traditions bequeathing us their legacies. Doing this search comprehensively required me to move outside my Judeo‐Christian, Greco‐Roman, Renaissance heritage and its international diffusion via the European Empires since the 1500's, embodied most recently the American dominance of intellectual discourse since the Second World War. In my case, this journey has taken me in to Chinese culture and psychology where I have worked towards integrating the Chinese worldview and its psychological measures into the discipline of social psychology. Striving for a more inclusive culture‐view, I am now using multi‐cultural data bases to transcend this two‐cultural focus and incorporate wider measures of cultural variation into our theorizing and empirical validation of universal models for social interaction. This paper describes my current procedures for such culture‐mapping.     

The impossibility of sociology as a science; arguments from within the discipline

This paper addresses a key moment in the development of sociology when its status as a science was criticised from within by ethnomethodologists (Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel), post‐Althusserian Marxists (Barry Hindess) and Michel Foucault. These criticisms seemed to come from different sides, but they converged in arguing their positions from the point of view of a proper conception of science through which mainstream sociology was found wanting. Neither secured its own position and each had a similar legacy of a form of interpretivism hostile both to scientific sociology and its critical project. The paper situates this moment and its legacy where both correspondence and coherence criteria for sociological knowledge claims come to be undermined.     

Social work research: the state of the art (or science)

This paper provides a critical review of current trends within social work research methodology. The paper identifies three influential contemporary perspectives in social work research: empirical practice, pragmatism and participatory/critical research. It identifies the different approaches taken by each perspective to what should be researched, how it should be researched, and how truth claims should be evaluated. By exploring the linkages between methodology, social work and wider social and political changes, the paper argues that research is an intensely political rather than a neutral activity.     

What are the Links Between Theory of Mind and Social Relations? Review,Reflections and New Directions for Studies of Typical and Atypical Development

Twenty years after research on children's ‘theory of mind’ began, this field continues to be a leading influence in the study of developmental psychology and psychopathology. In this review we examine the contribution of research on children's theories of mind to our understanding of children's developing social relationships. Evidence shows that for both typical and atypical populations this relationship is neither uniform nor unidirectional. Theory‐of‐mind skills are multifaceted and the nature of the developmental relationship between different aspects is not yet known, and there is evidence that theory‐of‐mind skills both transform and are transformed by interpersonal and family relationships and by language communities. To understand the multifaceted and complex nature of development in this area, we need clearer definitions of the skills under investigation, as well as research designs that capture the transactional nature of the relationship between theory of mind and social relations. Addressing these issues should help to clarify (i) the processes by which children's developing understanding of others is influenced by the social environment, and (ii) issues concerning the specificity of theory‐of‐mind impairments in atypical populations and the processes by which these impairments develop.     

Models of Disability, Work and Welfare in Australia

In discourse around disability there has been a shift away from a ‘medical model’, which perceives disability as an individual problem to be ‘cured’ or contained, towards a ‘social model’. The latter focuses on the relationship between people with disabilities and their social environment, locating the required interventions within the realm of social policy and institutional practice. Drawing upon a small qualitative study conducted in Melbourne, this article argues that recent plans by the Australian government to introduce mutual obligation requirements for recipients of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) sit in tension with this shift from the medical to the social models of disability. Mutual obligation is based on the assumption that income support recipients need to be taught how to be more ‘self‐reliant’, to ‘participate’ in society more fully and to become ‘active’, rather than ‘passive’, citizens. This language appears to overlap with that used to articulate a social model, which places emphasis on participation in the community and attempts a shift away from reliance on the medical profession. However, examples from interviews conducted with current and former DSP recipients demonstrate that, in practice, mutual obligation is likely to reinforce a medical model of disability, frame DSP recipients as ‘conditional’ citizens and ignore the obligations of the state and society regarding access and inclusiveness for people with disabilities.     

Academization of social work in Sweden and China

All professions with claims to status and trustworthiness must build a knowledge base of their own. This article is the product of over 10 years of study of social work research. It explores the academization of Swedish social work according to three phases: the establishment of a social work discipline, the consolidation of the discipline, and the challenges ahead. It also examines the challenges facing doctoral research in the social work discipline in China. The establishment of the discipline depends on stakeholders both within the academic sphere and outside it. Social work is a discipline that must achieve legitimacy in both the academic context and the political/professional context.