ABSTRACT
Groups and communicative genres What is it that holds collectives together? Is it simply a shared identity of belonging to the same collective? Or do we need to call upon some other resources to understand the forms of collective functioning? Contemporary social psychology has opted fairly unanimously for the former of these alternatives, and chosen to ignore the second. Yet an attentive reader of Serge Moscovici’s (1961/1976/2008) Psychoanalysis: Its Image and Its Public will fi nd a focus on precisely this second alternative, which is elaborated through the analyses of communicative systems which occupies Part II of the book. As Willem Doise (1993) remarked in his comments on the reception of the theory of social representations in the AngloSaxon world, it was notable how little attention had been paid to this part of the book. It is here that Moscovici formulates a set of original hypotheses about the communicative systems of diffusion, propagation and propaganda as distinct communicative genres. Through his content analysis of the French press, one can see Moscovici tracing the outlines of different types of groups structured through distinctive forms of social-psychological organisation. What is challenging here is a recognition that there can be different types of social-psychological organisation, each founded on a particular form of communication.
