Review: Social Psychology: A Critical Agenda

Institutions tend to perpetuate themselves. In this, social psychology is certainly no different. We might then ask how the institutionalization of social psychology perpetuates the discipline in a particular form, and what alternatives are obscured, marginalized or excluded in that process. Social psychology: a critical agenda addresses precisely this question. From the outset it rejects the assumption that social psychology is simply a neutral enquiry into a particular aspect of human existence. It follows the poststructuralist technique of showing how the scientific ideal of the objective fact, untainted by the researcher's hand, collapses under scrutiny, and instead argues that knowledge only exits within discourses narratives that organize meaning so as to produce what then show up as facts. The authors argue that social psychology should then be analysed not in terms ofthe scientific truth or falsity of any of its individual claims, but rather as a series of narratives that rely on certain rules and conventions, and exploit identifiable rhetorical tactics, in order to produce its meaningfulness. Social psychology relies on a set of concepts so completely naturalized that it is hard at first to think of them as emerging only within a specific cultural and historical context. Concepts such as the self, society, mind, body, biology and psychology emerge in the west at particular, and historically quite recent, points. Yet they have become so fundamental to our thought that it may seem impossible to think in different terms. The first step would be to acknowledge that these apparently obvious and universally valid concepts are in fact both historically specific and deeply problematic.