ABSTRACT
For anyone with a serious interest in interthinking, the good news is that the work of psychologists, linguists, sociologists and others has provided some valuable concepts, interesting findings and useful research methods. The bad news is that because this research is spread across several different disciplines, it lacks coherence. Different groups of researchers have their own discourses and research agendas, with not much dialogue taking place between them. Members of each discipline speak mainly to each other, in ways that draw heavily on the common knowledge of their disciplines (as a reader of this book might expect), so even the same words (‘language’, ‘discourse’ and ‘context’, for example) can mean different things in different research communities. My guess is that most of the researchers whose work I have drawn on throughout the book would not even recognize the study of collective thinking as one of their concerns.
