Discourse discourse

social psychology and postmodernity

Ian Parker

pp. 80-94

in: Joe Doherty, Elspeth Graham, Mo Malek (eds), Postmodernism and the social sciences, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s social psychology was in crisis. It still is. However, political debates outside the discipline are more muted now, and this has meant that the rhetoric of dispute and debate over social-psychological theories and methods has softened. Things appear to have settled a bit, and in the place of arguments over the ways in which the discipline has or has not participated in the oppression of ordinary people, we have gentler debates over the conceptual value of attending to the accounts ordinary people give (for example, Antaki, 1988). A consequence is that social psychology today (in Britain and North America) is developing an interest in discourse and in discourse analysis. This topic and its method has emerged in and around Potter and Wetherell's (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology.