Social Representations and the Development of Knowledge

Gerard Duveen (Edited by), Barbara Lloyd (Edited by)

9780521363686, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 March 1990

208 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.428 kg

"...I found this book most rewarding. I would now hope for more. This major beginning, however, is marked by a range and a degree of novelty that are unusual, and the book deserves serious reading by all psychologists interested in the course of development and in its social bases." Jacqueline J. Goodnow, Human Development

This book raises for the first time developmental issues in relation to the theory of social representations, which Duveen and Lloyd introduced to account for the influence of social life on psychological processes. He describes a society's values, ideas, beliefs and practices as social representations which function both as rule systems structuring social life and as codes facilitating communication. The editors' introduction identifies the need to expand the theory of social representations to consider developmental changes in social beliefs, in individual understanding, and in the process of communication. Individual chapters examine aspects of such processes in the domains of nursery-school life, of gender, of social divisions in society, of images of childhood, of emotion, of intelligence and of psychology. In the final chapter Moscovici considers the contribution which these developmental perspectives make to the theory. The book will interest specialists and students in the human and social sciences, including developmental and social psychology, sociology, and communication studies.

List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction Gerald Duveen and Barbara Lloyd
2. The underlife of the nursery school: young children's social representations of adult rules William A. Corsaro
3. A semiotic analysis of the development of social representations of gender Barbara Lloyd and Gerald Duveen
4. Children's representations of social relations Nicholas Emler, Jocelyne Ohana and Julie Dickinson
5. Social representations of childhood: an implicit theory of development Maria D'Alessio
6. What is in an image? The structure of mothers' images of the child and their influence on conversational styles Luisa Molinari and Francesca Emiliani
7. The acquisition of reflexive social emotions: the transmission and reproduction of social control through joint action Gün R. Semin and Kalliroi Papadopoulou
8. From social cognition to social representations in the study of intelligence Felice F. Carugati
9. Prototypes of the psychologist and professionalisation: diverging social representations of a developmental process Paola De Paolis
10. Social psychology and developmental psychology: extending the conversation Serge Moscovici
Author index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH]