ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, through the exploration of concepts such as reference groups and the generalised other, we saw how individuals are thought to assume the common-sense beliefs and ways of thinking prevalent in their society. Moscovici (1984) described these taken-for-granted assumptions as social representations. These shared assumptions about the nature of the world and of human beings, it is argued, enable people in a society to make sense of their experience, to communicate effectively with each other and to co-ordinate their activities. To take the example quoted by Mead in Chapter 4, to the extent that people in a society all implicitly believe in the ownership of personal property, this gives rise to a whole array of shared social practices including fitting locks on your doors and taking out insurance policies, the development of property laws, policing activities, giving gifts and teaching your children to share. Even the use of money itself would make little sense if there were no such thing as personal property. None of these things would be widespread social practices and some of them would not even be possible (such as insurance, which depends upon large numbers of people making the same assumptions) if individual people all practised different beliefs regarding property. Social representations may therefore be characteristic of whole societies. But of course not everyone in a society holds exactly the same beliefs on everything, so that sub-cultures and groups have their own characteristic social representations of some things. For example, the British National Front and the Ku Klux Klan in America are charac-
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terised by representations of race not shared to the same extent by the rest of their respective societies. The Hippie movement of the 1960s was characterised by representations of love and sexuality and by a work ethic that conflicted with the assumptions fundamental to the commonly accepted North American way of life at the time. For Moscovici, it is these shared social representations that gives a group its groupness; where there are shared social representations, we can say that a group, rather than just an ad hoc collection of people, exists.
