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Action and representation – A comment on Batel and Castro ‘Re‐opening the dialogue between the theory of social representations and discursive psychology’
Author(s) -
Potter Jonathan
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
british journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.855
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 2044-8309
pISSN - 0144-6665
DOI - 10.1111/bjso.12275
Subject(s) - discursive psychology , representation (politics) , social representation , action (physics) , focus (optics) , naturalism , pragmatics , psychology , relevance (law) , epistemology , task (project management) , naturalistic observation , social psychology , thematic analysis , discourse analysis , sociology , linguistics , qualitative research , social science , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , politics , political science , law , management , optics , economics
Batel and Castro propose a reconciliation of social representation theory and discursive psychology. This comment highlights the continuing relevance of long‐standing critiques of social representation theory from discursive psychologists as well as their central focus on both how representations are built to appear factual and the role of representations in practices. It suggests that the analytic approaches proposed by Batel and Castro (e.g., focus groups and thematic analysis) are not sufficient to the analytic task. The proposed ‘Pragmatic Discourse Analysis’ falls short on its central task of identifying pragmatics. The virtues of working with naturalistic data using methods that attend to the action orientation of talk and text are pressed.