An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology

Alexa Hepburn

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446222881
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Social Psychology

?this book provides an excellent introduction to contemporary Critical Social Psychology, which anyone exploring the field would do well to read.?

- Psychology in Society

?a very accessible introduction... lively and engaging.... Discussion questions are uncharacteristicaly thought-provoking, while practical exercises also seem better considered than one comes to expect from similar primers, suggesting a successful future as a core text in social psychology courses?

- The Psychologist

?Erudition, sagacity, patience and scholarship radiate from this book. This is an excellent introduction to the various strands of critical thinking to emanate primarily from England, and, to some extent, from continental Europe. Anyone interested in learning more about the discursive side of critical psychology will find in this book an excellent guide. I recommend this book to all psychologists interested in critical perspectives?

- Journal of Community and Applied Psychology

A critical approach depends on a range of often-implicit theories of society, knowledge, as well as the subject. This book shows the crucial role of these theories for directing critique at different parts of society, suggesting alternative ways of doing research, and effecting social change. It includes chapters from the perspectives of social cognition, Marxism, psychoanalysis, discourse and rhetoric, feminism, subjectivity and postmodernism. In each case, the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective are highlighted, the ideas are linked to real world issues by a range of practical exercises, and guidance is given to further reading.These chapters will cover the work of diverse thinkers from within social psychology, such as Billig, Gergen, Kitzinger, Parker, Potter, Shotter, Walkerdine and Wetherell, and from outside, such as Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Haraway, Lyotard, Marx and Rose.

An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology provides a systematic, integrated and accessible introduction to social psychology as a critical discipline. Consequently, it will be key reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying Critical Social Psychology, and useful additional reading for postgraduates studying theoretical psychology and qualitative methods.

Chapter 1

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The Critical Context

What is critical social psychology? If this were an easy question there would be no need for a whole book to try to answer it. After all, virtually any piece of social psychology is critical of something, even if it is just another piece of research or another researcher. What is distinctive about critical social psychology is the breadth of its critical concerns. For critical social psychology, research is locked in with issues of politics, morality and social change. It starts from fundamental concerns with oppression, exploitation and human well-being. These are precisely the issues that bring many people into psychology, and particularly social psychology, in the first place; but they often seem a long way away from the everyday reality of social psychology research.

So critical social psychology is critical of society or at least some basic elements of its institutions, organizations or practices. But critical social psychology (sometimes shortened to CSP) is critical in another basic sense: it is critical of psychology itself. It asks questions about its assumptions, its practices and its broader influences. For many critical social psychologists the discipline of social psychology itself is one of the biggest problems to be addressed, and in the course of this book we will explore a range of attacks on psychology and suggestions for its transformation, or even, in its extreme forms, for its wholesale closure.

This dual task of criticizing society and criticizing the discipline will be a theme that reappears throughout the book. These two features often seem to work against one another; yet, far from being a problem, the tension between the two directions of criticism has been productive, and has provided critical social psychology with much of its current character. If at times it seems to be an approach chasing its own tail while shooting at its own feet, it is all the more lively and vigorous for it.

What is critical social psychology criticizing?

In the course of this book we will see the way critical social psychology has drawn on broad systems for understanding the nature of the person and the nature of society. In the past, the most important of these have been Marxism and psychoanalysis, which have both provided resources for fundamental criticism. But more recently these systems have been supplemented and sometimes replaced by postmodernism, feminism, social constructionism and discursive psychology. Each of these systems of ideas provides a purchase on the issues of how the person and society can be made sense of, and each system therefore provides a way of understanding what the object of criticism is.

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BOX 1.1 Who are the readers?

Books are written for readers. The most obvious way this is the case is that they are written in a particular language. They also presuppose a particular linguistic competence and a particular vocabulary. More than that, literary theorists suggest that books ‘imply’ particular readers. That is to say, they implicitly speak to persons with particular characteristics – knowledge of the world, views of morality, social backgrounds, and so on. Some of these things may be rather obvious – a critical social psychologist reading the editorial of a right-wing newspaper such as the Daily Telegraph is likely to feel deeply queasy at being addressed as someone who takes for granted the importance of tradition, the fecklessness of the working class, and the unjustified hysteria of feminists. But others are much more subtle. The use of certain categories and the enrolment of teachers into a ‘we’ that takes certain things for granted can be almost unnoticed. I will use ‘we’ a lot in this book, but as Michael Billig shows in his work on nationalism (1995), little words like this are far from innocent; their very banality allows them to carry an unnoticed politics with them.

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This introductory chapter aims to provide insights into the book as a whole. The following three sections aspire to do this in different ways. This may make the chapter seem rather repetitive, but I hope that this will assist its clarity: part of the difficulty many people have with critical social psychology is in seeing the big picture – how does it all hang together? By discussing the contents of different chapters, both here and in a more developed and in-depth way in Chapter 9, I hope to make things more accessible.

1. Section one aims to read critical social psychology through the newspapers. Surely if the discipline is to have any merit it must be able to tell us something about everyday life?
2. Section two takes a different route, aiming to lay out three broad sets of assumptions about the nature of society, subjectivity and knowledge often relied on by critical work, but seldom specified explicitly.
3. Section three aims to describe more explicitly the contents of the book, providing both a rationale for the two-part structure and a discussion of the contents of each chapter.

So let’s imagine that we are sitting down to breakfast on Wednesday 31 May 2000. This is a day like any other. The new millennium is still pretty new and the papergirl has delivered (oh no!) The Times instead of the Guardian. It would be a little bit like getting the National Enquirer instead of the New York Times. Can we read critical social psychology through the papers?

Stories of class and privilege

Our aim is to track the relevance of perspectives like Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, discursive psychology and postmodernism. We do not have to look far to see the significance of Marxism, as The Times leads with a story about class and inequality and higher education. An Oxford college has turned down a gifted comprehensive school student from a northern city where she wanted to read Medicine. Members of the (slightly) left-of-centre government criticize the college, and the paper describes ministerial criticisms as preparing the public for a policy change whereby students from middle class backgrounds would be charged more to take degrees on the grounds that such degrees allow them access to highly paid and rewarding jobs.

Not all discussions of social class are Marxist, but the broad framework for conceptualizing society in terms of competing classes with different interests has had a profound impact on most thinking of this kind. This framework will be introduced in Chapter 3. What else may be relevant to critical social psychologists here? From a more traditional perspective we may be interested in how prejudices might come into play in situations such as interviews. When the student was rejected the interviewers wrote in their notes that she was ‘low in confidence, as with other comprehensive school pupils’. Does this display a prejudice against comprehensive pupils? Or does it record faithfully an actual lack of confidence? And, if so, where does that lack of confidence come from? Are there systematic inequalities of expectation that are stratified through different classes? How are such inequalities perpetuated? Some of these issues will be discussed in Chapter 2, on social cognition.

Alternatively, could it be that the interaction itself generated an apparent confidence deficit? Being faced by the arrogance and accent of the Oxford interviewers the girl froze in a way that a private-school pupil, who would have found it more familiar, would not. Again, this is an issue for critical research into language, power and interaction. Some of these issues will be discussed in Chapter 7, on discursive critics.

These questions are important, but by no means the only ones that critical social psychologists ask. This is a story about a girl pupil. That is, it is not just a matter of class, but is also about gender. And it is not just any course – Medicine is a degree that has been notoriously hard for female pupils to get into. Perhaps the prejudice was as much rooted in sexism, and perhaps the crucial aspects of the interaction that caused her problems were about gender. This will be the focus of Chapter 5. Issues of class, gender and interaction have been understood in very different ways in critical psychology. Psychoanalysis provides an individualized perspective that some feminists and other social theorists find useful, and will be discussed in Chapter 4. Here the pupil’s subjective states would be the focus of attention, a move that many critical social psychologists would reject outright. The debates and theories that go with using features of subjectivity in explanatory ways will be the focus of Chapter 6.

There is a very different perspective available for understanding this story. Rather than investigate the events as they are depicted, or the inner subjective features of the pupil, we can ask how these things are constructed and what they are constructed to do. Stories can be assembled in different ways, using different sorts of description, and stories are used to make points, to offer moral tales, to criticize and celebrate. In this case the girl’s headmaster, perhaps to put pressure on the Oxford college and other elite institutions to accept more of his pupils, released the story to a local newspaper. The story was widely publicized by the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, as an example of the kind of elite privilege the Labour Party was concerned to do away with. The theme here is how the world is manufactured to make arguments – how it is fashioned for rhetorical purposes. Issues of the construction of versions and their involvement in practices will be the topic of Chapter 7 on discourse.

The story of class and privilege is in a newspaper that has traditionally supported right-wing parties at election times. It is also in a newspaper that sells several hundred thousand copies a day to make money directly and through advertising. The story is linked with other stories about education and political problems. Various other stories highlight the way this story has been fashioned, and how it may be motivated; they report what may have been the reasons why the Chancellor used it, and what the headmaster may have got out of it. This ‘intertextual’ weave of stories is one of the characteristics of postmodernism. There is no secure basis, external to stories, from which truth can be assessed in a neutral manner. Right here I am putting together another story about stories to make a point, to highlight the nature of critical social psychology: and this story could itself be studied for how it works and what it is doing. This theme is explored in Chapter 8 on postmodernism.

Finally, critical social psychologists are, inevitably, concerned with social change. To paraphrase Marx, the point of critical social psychology is not merely to describe the world in a disinterested manner, but to change it. How to do this is a far from simple question. Some social psychologists advocate action research, which directly intervenes in settings. For others the aim is to increase people’s understanding so they can change things, or to generate resources for change and criticism. The various perspectives explored in the course of the book understand change in very different ways and each chapter will explore issues of application and practice. The different perspectives on application are systematized and developed in Chapter 9, along with other ideas about future directions of CSP.

Writing a book about critical social psychology is inevitably both a descriptive and a critical exercise. In describing studies and perspectives that make up critical work in social psychology it necessarily makes a series of choices about what counts. Where should the boundaries be drawn between what is critical and what is not? Where does social psychology end and some other social science start? How will perspectives be linked together? Will it suggest a coherent front or emphasize diversity? Will it be inside one of its perspectives? These choices are part of the politics of textbook writing. If the book is doing its job then readers should be able to turn their critical understanding on to the book itself.

Society, knowledge and subjectivity

One of the aims of this book is to highlight the way critical work is dependent on a range of assumptions that are not always made explicit. Three groups of assumptions are most fundamental.

1. The first concerns the nature of society: how it works and how it can be changed.
2. The second concerns knowledge: how it changes, how it is justified, how ‘solid’ it is.
3. The third concerns the person: how personhood and subjectivity are understood.

Let me try and lay out these concerns in a way that will allow us to understand better the material that comes in later chapters.

Writing society

There are many different ways of understanding society, and I will try to indicate some of the things that separate one view from another. However, first it is important to emphasize that the very decision to start with ways of understanding society brings baggage with it. Critical social psychologists need to be on the alert for assumptions that can slip into their work unnoticed, particularly at such a fundamental level. We think of society as an obvious thing, something that we are part of and that exists ‘out there’. But society is a relatively recent term; it is a theorized way of understanding . . . (um, now I am struggling for a more neutral term – and of course there isn’t one) how people collect together. ‘Society’ is connected with an assortment of ideas and practices: social and political institutions, the economy, social groups and classes, political procedures and so on. We can ‘see’ these things with the aid of a developed set of notions from social and political science that have become part of our everyday currency. But we do not want to forget their status as constructions that come out of social science disciplines at particular points in history.

One major alternative we could consider would be culture. This notion, developed from the discipline of anthropology, would emphasize the symbolic and ritual side of . . . human life. (Note the way I am again caught trying to use a neutral word to describe a thing while highlighting the absence of such a neutral word.) For a critical social psychologist the problem with the notion of culture is its organic, timeless connotations. Society, with its associated thesaurus of notions, is a way of constructing . . . er . . . stuff that makes it more malleable, makes it something that can be transformed or overturned.

There are very different ways of theorizing society. Political science, political philosophy and sociology texts cover a range of competing classifications of types of society or ways of understanding society in general. Rather than go into the technicalities of these, and thereby get very far away from our critical topic, I am going to draw a rather simple distinction between three ways of viewing society. The reason for choosing this is that it helps us pick out assumptions in critical work. It provides a simple and convenient way into our topic. The three ways are, roughly, Liberal, Marxist and Postmodern. Let me take them very briefly in turn.

Liberal view of society

One of the crucial things marking out different views of society is how they view individuals. Liberal models of society tend to take the individual as logically prior to society. Thus society will be fair if it allows people the freedom to pursue their own goals. From a critical perspective, adopting a liberal view will lead to emphasis on tackling problems at an individual level rather than focusin...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Critical Context
• Part I Mind and Society
• Part II Resolutions and Dilemmas
• References
• Index