Research

Stability + change:

The self in JC Turner's Self-categorisation Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory.

Some Social Psychology research is rightly criticised for over-emphasising individual cognition and neglecting the effects of structural factors on social identities. Self-categorisation theory, though, clearly highlights an interaction between person and situation. This interaction influences which social categories we apply to ourselves and others at a given time, which in turn influences how we ‘think, feel and act’. We relate to the world as individuals, as particular versions of our individual selves or as members of socially defined, situationally relevant classes of people.

The theory discusses what categories we adopt, when we adopt them and what they mean, but has said less on longer term stability and change in these aspects of categorisation. This PhD aims to exploit an existing study design (the Who said what? paradigm) to investigate that stability and change, particularly as engendered by structural influences in the social world. In doing so, I will also investigate a perceived affinity between social categorisation and post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Bourdieu.

Bourdieu describes how shared enduring dispositions generated by and within shared material conditions also act to shape, preserve and reproduce those material conditions. Identifying such a reciprocal process of influence between person and social structure, as opposed to person and situation, will consolidate an under-researched aspect of social categorisation. This further permits social psychology to echo in its own terms Foucauldian critiques of institutions, policy and power which preserve prevailing social and economic relations and which favour the adjustment of individuals to circumstances over social change.