ABSTRACT
The general scope of this chapter is social knowledge, with a special interest in its dynamics. How does social knowledge change, and how can such processes of change be understood? In a recently published book, Ivana Marková (2003) addresses these questions from within the theory of social representations and states: “Although we have numerous theories about stable universals, their nature, content and form, we do not have theories of social knowledge based on concepts of change” (p. 5). The issue of change versus stability has for a long time been an issue in the literature on social representation (see Marková & Wilkie, 1987; McKinlay & Potter, 1987; Perez Campos, 1998; Purkhardt, 1993). Even if our interest in social knowledge is broader than the fi eld of social representation, we will use the theoretical development of social representation as our special case in exploring transformations and changes of social knowledge. The more precise scope of this chapter is the relation between change and stability, with a special focus on processes of construction, transformation and evolution of social knowledge.
