ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the significant impact Billig's classic paper, Prejudice, categorization and particularization: From a perceptual to a rhetorical approach, has had on re-theorizing prejudice in social psychology. Billig's critical questioning of perceptual and cognitive models of prejudice challenged the commonly held view in social psychology that prejudice was an inevitable, albeit unfortunate, consequence of categorization. Discursive psychology's approach to categorization has been strongly influenced by Harvey Sacks' work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, which examines how categories are used in naturally occurring conversation and social interaction. In emphasizing the flexible and context specific nature of categorization and particularization, Billig's paper argued for examining how categories are used in everyday conversation and institutional talk on prejudice. In the first and most ambitious social psychological studies of this kind, and drawing extensively on Billig's scholarship, Wetherell and Potter's Mapping the language of racism presents a systematic and detailed analysis of the language of racism and prejudice in New Zealand.
