ABSTRACT
In the late 19th century, Émile Durkheim, a renowned French sociologist crafted theories of solidarity and collective conscience, consciousness, or representation. Collective representations signify a shared consciousness or state of thought among members of groups that are very similar, a sense of solidarity of thought. Analyses of the Durkheim concept of collective representations at a social groups level has given rise to a fruitful field of research. From this, the first formulation of the Social Representations Theory by Moscovici (1961) was proposed more than 50 years ago. Social representations are knowledge socially generated and shared whose function is to define the environment of groups and to guide their practices and communication in these environments. The objective of this chapter is to present the main research orientations that emerge in this field, distinguishing four approaches (Moliner & Guimelli, 2015): (1) the sociogenetic model; (2) the sociodynamic model; (3) the structural model; and (4) the dialogical model.
