Era reprezentarilor sociale

Abstract

Certain trends that have been noticed lately - and which are found in the interpretative visions of some of the most valuable philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, or economists of present times - put forward the issue of the substantial reassessment of knowledge with reference to the individual and to the relationships he or she develops or intends to develop in various social contexts. On such a background, certain transformations to be made are taken into account. These transformations concern the sphere of social psychology, in that bridging territory where "what is social in psychology and what is psychological in sociology " and where " not just the individual, as a separate unit, or the collectivity, as an autonomous social structure ", but " the interaction between the individual and the collectivity" as well matter. Establishing that it is precisely in the sphere of social psychology that the confirmation of the great shift of accents must take place, a reconfiguration capable of conferring a different caliber and another significance to the science centered on the systematic study of "individuals in a continuous relation with their fellow pears and with the cultural-ideological environment in which they live", the specialists cannot but point out that this kind of metamorphosis relates, in the most direct way, to the valorization of the concept of social representations. In their view, this concept in particular embodies best the investigational direction that has to prove unity, also focusing at the same time on the "human groups" and on the "problems affecting a large number of social actors", on "human nature" and the "social construction of reality". In fact,there has come a time when we can talk about an era of social representations, since, at the moment it is precisely the social representations, and not any other constructions of cerebral extraction, that express the "central and common concept of all social and human sciences" and, at the same time, the most important factor that "guides us in the way of naming and differentiating the various aspects of our daily reality, to interpret them, to decide upon them and, where appropriate, to take a stand against them and to defend that position".