Abell & Walton 2010

8/13/2019 Abell & Walton 2010

1/6

Copyright The British Psychological SocietyReproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

Commentary

Imagine: Towards an integrated and applied socialpsychology

Jackie Abell* and Chris WaltonLancaster University, UK

This commentary does not aim to engage with the epistemological and ontological

technicalities of the discursive psychology maintained by epistemological construction-

ism and discursive psychology reliant on ontological constructionism approaches that

form the basis of the two papers under discussion; other commentators, both in thisissue and in the future, are likely to do that. Instead, this commentary aims to situate

both papers within a broader frame of contemporary, primarily British social

psychology, to ponder the circumstances that gave rise to them and their implications

for social psychologists, discursive and non-discursive, alike. We have organized this

commentary into two parts. The first part considers two simple questions. First, why

does Corcoran critique DPEC for failing to do things that other discursive approaches

provide for? And, second, why does Corcoran take DPEC research to task for having

too little potential for or made too little contribution to improving the lives and

subjectivities of people in general? These two questions are not unrelated, but for

claritys sake we will try to answer them separately. The second part of this

commentary will consider the influence of discursive psychology on social psychology

more generally.

DPEC and discursive psychology

On a purely theoretically level, there remains within what Corcoran glosses as the DPECposition fertile ground for discussions of epistemology, ontology and the potential for

that approach to engage with the subjectivities of people in the real world. But tosuggest that DPEC needs to be theoretically refurbished such that it can become DPOCseems to ascribe to DPEC a status that is unwarranted. Such a project would bereasonable if DPEC, as an approach to doing social psychology or as an analytic method,were, metaphorically speaking, the only or biggest kid on the discursive psychologicalblock. But it is not. A simple survey of the empirical qualitative research published in

* Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Jackie Abell, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Bailrigg,Lancaster L A1 4YF, UK (e-mail: [email protected]).

The

British

Psychological

Society

685

British Journal of Social Psychology (2010), 49, 685690

q 2010 The British Psychological Society

www.bpsjournals.co.uk

DOI:10.1348/014466610X535540

8/13/2019 Abell & Walton 2010

2/6


this journal over the past 10 years reveals a variety of discursive approaches to socialpsychology. Excluding research that explicitly identifies as having adopted analytic

methods such as content analysis, thematic analysis, grounded theory or interpretativephenomenological analysis, or any other method that may be glossed (for the presentpurposes) as a non-discursive approach, there remain 68 articles all of which mayreasonably be glossed as adopting a discursive approach to social psychology. Thisgrouping is admittedly highly inclusive, running from sequential conversation analysis(CA), through membership categorization analysis (MCA), discursive psychology (aka

DPEC), and discourse analysis (DA), all the way to feminist post-structuralist DA, andalong the way the researchers adopt a wide range of epistemological and ontologicalpositions.1 Quite simply, and on the basis of this evidence, discursive approaches to

social psychology are a very broad church and the members of its congregationdemonstrate in their empirical investigations dazzling inventiveness in theircombination of approaches, methods, epistemological, and ontological positions.Further such a state of affairs is entirely consistent with the view that what matters isempirical utility rather than methodological purity; a view which can now be foundclearly expressed in the pluralistic approach (Frost, 2009; Haslam & Parkinson, 2005).All of which again begs the question, why focus on DPEC?

It is evident from his response that this question occurred to Potter (2010). Hisaccount of the emergence of discursive psychology seems oriented to just thisconcern. As his history admits, the DPEC position is just one of a number of

discursive approaches to social psychology. Is it therefore that DPEC is thepredominant discursive approach to doing social psychology? Again a survey of thisjournal would suggest not. Of the 68 articles, 14 categorized as discursive explicitly

claim to adopt a discursive psychological approach in the manner of Edwards andPotter (1992). Of the articles, 12 claim to be doing sequential CA or MCA and thoughmany of the remainder state that their approach is informed by discursive psychologytheir analyses extend into areas beyond the scope of the so-called DPEC position. Onthe face of it then, and setting aside any merits of Corcorans theoretical critique ofDPEC, there seems to be little empirical need for it.

Applying DPEC

However, such a view would elide the practical motivation underlying Corcoranstheoretical critique, to configure a discursive social psychology that can chart themeans to create, in a proactive sense, a language of potentials, enablement and

respect that serve as alternatives to the more historically dominant languages ofconstraint, disablement, and disrespect (Corcoran, 2009, p. 379). Irrespective of anyconcerns, we might have about the kind of language of potentials that a communityof social psychologists may create, it would seem that Corcorans dissatisfaction withDPEC lies with its perceived failure and/or limited potential to make meaningfulcontributions to the ways that most people, from which we infer most non-discursive psychologists, think, speak, and feel about their selves. In the simplestpossible terms, DPEC stands accused of lacking the theoretical basis to make

1 These groupings are based on the methods that the authors describe adopting and in many cases they do not explicitly stateadopting a specific approach. The extent to which the authors of all those articles maintain the epistemological and ontologicalposition of the method stated is, of course, debatable, and beyond the scope of this simple commentary.

686 Jackie Abell and Chris Walton

8/13/2019 Abell & Walton 2010

3/6


meaningful and engaging contributions to psychologys commitment to promotinghuman welfare (Miller, 1969).

This we can separate into two basic concerns; has DPEC been insufficiently applied?Arguably yes. A brief analysis of Potters publications reveals that their primary focus hasbeen on the continued development and extension of discursive psychology as analternative to traditional cognitive social psychology and as an analytic method. Weshall comment on the sustainability of these critiques of social cognition later in thispaper. The latter focus has increasingly become associated with a concern to access

phenomena that would have occurred without the presence or involvement of theresearcher. Though the merits of privileging this type of data have and will continue tobe debated (see Potter, 2002; Speer, 2002) it has led DPEC researchers, if we can for amoment imagine that such things exist, to go where the naturalistic data are. One

perhaps unintended consequence of the desire to access this type of data and thedevelopment of technologies and techniques that support its collection, is that it hasbrought DPEC researchers together with practitioners and service providers with theexplicit shared aim of examining how things get done in practice (Hepburn & Wiggins,2007; Stokoe, in press). Consequently, it is only recently that researchers who may beidentified as adopting the DPEC position have really begun to have meaningfulengagement with outside agencies to which they have fed back the findings of theirresearch and, on the basis of that feedback, have informed changes to institutionalpractices. This has the potential to affect, if they have not already actually done so,

material change in the experiences and lives the people who use and in some cases relyon those services. That these projects can have this effect and that they have done sowithout compromising on their epistemological positions is testament to intelligence of

the staff in those institutions rather than the intransigence of the researchers. Quitesimply, lay audiences are demonstrably capable of understanding how basic grammarcan configure the experiences of the people they aim to support (Antaki, Finlay, &Walton, 2009) without those researchers relying on recourse to mentalistic concepts;we are, on the basis of our practical experience, in agreement with Potter that it ispatronizing to suggest that lay audience are unable to engage with the language ofdiscursive psychology. In fact, it can be liberating for them to see what had previouslybeen regarded as an intractable epistemic problem, how do we know that what he sayshe wants is what he really wants, reduced to an effect of repeated questions and

preferred and dispreferred responses.Secondly, is this applied discursive research sufficiently visible? Unarguably it is not.

And here the issues that Corcoran identifies about the capacity of DPEC to makemeaningful contributions to improving the lot of a broader humanity become germaneto all, and particularly all British, contemporary social psychologists who recently havebeen, will soon again and for the foreseeable future be required to demonstrate theimpact of the research they conduct.

DPEC and mainstream social psychology

So far we have questioned Corcorans specific focus on DPEC as a somewhat limited,straw man representation of discursive psychology. Defending his patch of limited turf,

Potter offers a justification for the beginnings of DA within social psychology. This is awell-rehearsed argument claiming a lack of attention to language within socialpsychology and the adoption of a realist stance on the psychological workings of the

Imagine 687

8/13/2019 Abell & Walton 2010

4/6


individual. In his response to Corcoran, Potter writes, critiques have focused on theway that the objects of individual psychology have been produced as unitary, inner, and

mental, by means of various methodological restrictions, and how these combine with abroader telementation picture that has language as a conduit for conveying ideas fromone mind to another cognitivist arguments involves showing that talk has beentreated as a diagnostic of some mental object that can better (more coherently,parsimoniously) be seen as an element in a situated practice (pp. 67).

These kinds of claims have been contested within social psychology on the grounds

of a straw man characterization of the discipline in general and social cognition inparticular. The history of social psychology is a chronicle of interdisciplinary theoreticalinfluences and mixed methods. Whilst there has been the development of newqualitative techniques within social psychology (such as DA, CA, and MCA), and the

emergence of a qualitative methods section (QMiP) in the BPS, qualitative methodsper se are not new within the discipline. Moreover, the importance of language has beenrecognized in classic social psychological research. For example, Brannigan (2004)observes that Milgrams study was more about the verbal explanations that blamed theexperimenter, than it was about a willingness to hurt others, concluding that [t]hepsychologist who discovers such relationships empirically is basically only discoveringhow language works in the construction of reality (p. 32). Furthermore, Jost andKruglanski (2002) amongst others (e.g., Smyth, 2001, 2004) have warned about thedangers of producing exaggerated differences between subgroupings on the basis of

method and the philosophy of constructionism noting, [e]xperimentalists

hold aless pragmatic view of truth that is less extreme and more reflexive than what is oftenascribed to them by social constructionists (p. 174). Yet, these differences have formed

the narrative of camps within social psychology and had real consequences in terms ofaccess to journals and research funding (Manstead & Wetherell, 2005). In short, whilstcognitive work was prioritized in social psychology, discursive work becamemarginalized.

In his defence of DPEC, Potter dismisses social cognitions use of qualitativemethods as a variant of content analysis that transforms it into themes and variables,losing the contingency and action-orientated nature of ongoing interaction in livesettings (p. 13). Unfortunately, by focusing on methodological differences, Potterfurther ring fences DPEC and obscures a common project amongst social

psychologists; that of exploring and understanding the social contingency andsituatedness of human action. In social neuroscience, for example, researchersrecognize the interrelationship between cognition and culture (e.g., see the work onprejudice by Ibanez, Haye, Gonzalez, Hurtado, & Henriquez, 2009). Language is notsimply a conduit for conveying ideas from one mind to another but is shaped bycultural norms and values, which in turn shapes how we relate to one another. Fiskeand Taylor (2008) note that, As social cognition research outgrows its original Western(North American and European) boundaries and simultaneously reaches into the brain,it extends its cultural reach as well (p. 21). In their study of in-group definition and

intergroup relations, Livingstone, Spears, and Manstead (2009) use thematic textualanalysis to examine how these are produced, contested, and defended in language.They note, rather than being unproblematic givens, in-group goals, interests,membership, and its very essence are actively contested by group members (p. 297).

The work of Reicher and Hopkins (1996, 2001) has focused on how political identitiesare constructed, contested, and defended in interaction. Yet these are not DPECresearchers.


8/13/2019 Abell & Walton 2010

5/6


It is surprising then that discursive psychologists do not acknowledge this work, oreven stake a claim to having made important inroads. Mainstream social psychology

isengaging with language as a construction yard (Potter, 1996); as a site where socialpsychological life is produced and played out. Some might argue it always did. In short,discursive psychology has entered the mainstream. Why not recognize theachievements and impact discursive psychology (including DPEC) has had uponthe discipline of social psychology? Why focus on a small patch of turf and not theentire field?

In his request for mutual respect between the groupings within social psychology,Reicher (2005) notes the reluctance of academics to engage with, or even read, the workof groups other than their own. If they did, the rhetoric of camps may start to lookshaky. Or, perhaps there is more investment in keeping old divisions alive than in

working towards the kind of organic pluralism Haslam and Parkinson (2005) suggest.Jahoda (2007) observes, there is a lack of consensus about what social psychology isor ought to be (p. 2). This will remain the case so long as we look inwards at our owncamp and speculate about what the neighbours might be doing on the other side ofthe fence.

Conclusion

We must therefore be grateful to both Corcoran and Potter for bringing to the fore theseconcerns about methodolatry, straw person accounts of other approaches, and theincreasing need for social psychology to have a demonstrable broader impact. It isincumbent upon all social psychologists to move towards dialogue and interaction, torecognize advances and commonalities, and to develop methods and approaches thatcan meet the various aims of contemporary social psychological research.

Moreover, if social psychology is to continue to develop, to be seen as a thriving

discipline and if it is to be socially valued, we must also, as researchers, authors,reviewers, and editors, work towards making the impact and applied contributions ofour discipline more visible, not only within the academic literature but also to the widerpopulation.

ReferencesAntaki, C., Finlay, W. M. L., & Walton, C. (2009). Choices for people with intellectual disabilities:

Official discourse and everyday practice. Journal of Policy and Practice in Intellectual

Disabilities,6(4), 260266. doi:10.1111/j.1741-1130.2009.00230.x

Brannigan, A. (2004). The rise and fall of social psychology: The use and misuse of the

experimental method. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.

Corcoran, T. (2009). Second nature. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48(2), 375388.

doi:10.1348/014466608X349513

Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. London: Sage.

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2008).Social cognition: From brains to culture. London: McGraw-Hill.

Frost, N. A. (2009). Pluralism in qualitative research: A report of the work of the PQR Project.

Social Psychological Review,11(1), 3238.

Haslam, S. A., & Parkinson, B. (2005). Pulling together or pulling apart? Towards organic pluralism

in social psychology.Psychologist,18(9), 550552.Hepburn, A., & Wiggins, S. (2007). Discursive research in practice: New approaches to

psychology and interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Imagine 689

8/13/2019 Abell & Walton 2010

6/6


Ibanez, A., Haye, A., Gonzalez, R., Hurtado, E., & Henriquez, R. (2009). Multi-level analysis of

cultural phenomena: The role of ERPs approach to prejudice.Journal for the Theory of Social

Behaviour,39(1), 81110. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.2008.00391.x

Jahoda, G. (2007).A history of social psychology: From the eighteenth-century enlightenment to

the second world war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jost, J. T., & Kruglanski, A. W. (2002). The estrangement of social constructionism and experimental

social psychology: History of the rift and prospects for reconciliation. Personality and Social

Psychology Review,6(3), 168187. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0603_1

Livingstone, A. G., Spears, R., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2009). The language of change?

Characterizations of in-group social position, threat and the deployment of distinctivegroup attributes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 295311. doi:10.1348/0144666

08X329533

Manstead, A. S. R., & Wetherell, M. (2005). Dialoguing across divisions. Psychologist, 18(9),

542543.

Miller, G. A. (1969). Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare. American Psychologist,

24, 10631075. doi:10.1037/h0028988

Potter, J. (1996).Representing reality: Discourse, rhetoric and social construction. London: Sage.

Potter, J. (2002). Two kinds of natural. Discourse Studies,4, 539542.

Potter, J. (2010). Contemporary discursive psychology: Issues, prospects and Corcorans awkward

ontology. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49, 657678. doi:10.1348/014466610X

486158

Reicher, S. (2005). Where next?Psychologist,18(9), 553554.

Reicher, S., & Hopkins, N. (1996). Self-category constructions in political rhetoric: An analysis of

Thatcher and Kinnocks speeches concerning the British miners strike (19841985).European Journal of Soc ial Psyc holo gy, 26, 353371. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-

0992(199605)26:3,353::AID-EJSP757.3.0.CO;2-O

Reicher, S., & Hopkins, N. (2001). Self and nation. London: Sage.

Smyth, M. (2001). Fact making in psychology. Theory and Psychology, 11(5), 609636.

doi:10.1177/0959354301115002

Smyth, M. (2004). Exploring psychologys low epistemological profile in psychology textbooks.

Theory and Psychology,14(4), 527553. doi:10.1177/0959354304044923

Speer, S. (2002). Natural and contrived data: A sustainable distinction?Discourse Studies,4(4),

511525.

Stokoe, E. (in press). Conversation analysis, simulated interaction and role-play training.

In C. Antaki (ed.), Applied conversation analysis: Changing institutional practices.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Received 15 June 2010; revised version received 10 September 2010


Documents

Abell & Walton 2010