What are Social Representations?

Social representations are about different types of collective cognitions, common sense or thought systems of societies or groups of people. They are always related to social, cultural and/or symbolic objects, they are representations of something. There is no clear-cut definition used by the advocates, and Moscovici himself gives a number of definitions:

Social representations […] concern the contents of everyday thinking and the stock of ideas that give coherence to our religious beliefs, political ideas and the connections we create as spontaneously as we breathe. They make it possible for us to classify persons and objects, to compare and explain behaviours and to objectify them as part of sur social setting. While representations are often to be located in the minds of men and women, they can just as often be found “in the world”, and as such examined separately. (Moscovici 1988: 214)

A social representation is a system of values, ideas and practices with a twofold function: first, to establish an order which will enable individuals to orientate themselves in their material and social world and to master it; and secondly to enable communication to take place among members of a community by provid­ing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual group his­tory. (Moscovici 1973: xiii)

[…] from the dynamic point of view social representations appear as a “network” of ideas, metaphors and images, more or less loosely tied together. (Moscovici 2000: 153)

Social representations are not to be seen as logical and coherent thought patterns. They may instead be full of thought fragments and contradictory ideas. With the concept cognitive polyfasia social representations theory refers to the fact that everyday think­ing about something may be characterized by different, sometimes opposite, forms of thinking.

To deal with the tricky question of how collectively shared social cognitions must be to qualify as social representations, Moscovici makes a distinction between hegemonic representations, emancipated representations and polemic representations. Hegemonic representations are shared by most of the members of a political party, a nation, or other structured macro unit. They are uniform and ‘prevail in all symbolic or affective practices’ (Moscovici 1988: 221). In contemporary society climate change conceived of as a threat towards human life and society may be an example of hegemonic social rep­resentations. Politicians generally agree that it is a severe problem, the media reporting is dominated by certainty about the existence of anthropogenic climate change (Olaus­son 2009, 2010), and the public at large has adopted the same view (Berglez, Höijer & Olausson 2009). Emancipated representations relates to subgroups that create their own versions with “a certain degree of autonomy with respect to the interacting segments of society” (Moscovici 1988: 221). One example could be representations of health and illness in traditional and alternative medicine. These representations may partly be complementary and the public may pick up ideas of both and combine with their own experiences of health and illness. Polemic representations, at last, are related to social conflicts, struggles between groups, and controversies in a society. They are determined by “antagonistic relations” and “intended to be mutually exclusive” (Moscovici 1988: 221), such as political ideas of liberalism and communism. The classification of social representations into these three categories is however, as much classification, somewhat vague, not least because ideas and social thinking is complex and often heterogeneous. As mentioned above social representations are multifaceted and may even be intrinsi­cally contradictory.

What kind of collective cognitions does the theory of social representations have in mind? The following remarks may be made:

1. Social representations refer to cognitions stamping the collective thinking of society. Of special interest are phenomena that in different ways diverge from traditional views, create tensions in society and challenge everyday life of citizens, groups and institutions. Such phenomena are especially well suited for studying how old ideas are modified and transformed and new social representations are produced by public debate. We easily find examples in today’s society, which go through many quick changes related to, for example, new communication technology, biotechnology, environmental risks, global market, terrorism and violence.

2. As put by Moscovici (2000: 160) social representations “participate each time in the global vision a society establishes for itself”, and operates at different levels, includ­ing large communities like the nation and small subgroups of people. We may here, as noted by Olausson (2010), see a connection to the concept of ideology, especially current theories concentrating on ideologies in the plural form, and as sense making practices of society and everyday life (Fairclough 1992; Hall 1986; 1995).

3. Social representations are complex and holistic. They may be seen as “theories”, “network of ideas”, metaphors and images that include emotions, attitudes and judge­ments. They are, further, embedded in communicative practices, such as dialogues, debates, media discourses and scientific discourses (Marková 2003).

4/ Social representations refer to cognitions in communication, not least in public de­bate. Moscovici (2007/1961) early on here emphasized the role of the media in the growth of new social representations, while Marková (2003) especially emphasizes dialogical communication in groups and between individuals.

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