Social representations theory in North America, Oceania, Asia and Africa

The present paper is included within a wider research program launched by de Rosa in 1994, aimed at performing the meta-theoretical analysis of the scientific literature published on Social Representations Theory (SRT), and representing the unified framework of the EC-funded project (ITN-People MSCA-IDP 2013, no. 6072799, http://www.europhd.eu/SoReComJointIDP) and explores the state of the art of the Social Representations Theory (SRT) in the geo-cultural contexts of North America (Canada and the United States of America - USA), Australia and New Zealand, Asia and Africa, spatially and temporally, as well as from a conceptual, disciplinary, theoretical, empirical and thematic point of view. For all four geo-cultural papers, the Grid for Meta-Theoretical Analysis was applied on publications extracted from the So.Re.Com “A.S. de Rosa” @-library and meta-theoretically analyzed. The size of the samples was: 395 for North America, 107 for Australia and New Zealand, 194 for Asia and, respectively, 103 for Africa. The findings of the meta-theoretical analysis were then explored based on absolute and relative frequencies, lexicometrically (Hierarchical Descending Classification) and through clustering algorithms (Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components analysis). Results for North America revealed that SRT was employed differently in Canada as compared to the USA, in the sense that while used empirically to study objects of high social relevance in both countries, there seems to be a distinct trend of reconceptualization and reformulation of SRT in the USA that we did not find in Canada. All in all, SRT appears to have been adopted in this area due to its applicability in studying a wide range of social phenomena, thus being pragmatically useful in obtaining information about lay knowledge. However, the low penetration rate of SRT in the USA may be indeed due to its epistemological and methodological traditions (socio-constructionism and qualitative research), incompatible with the existent publishing tradition in the USA, which favors individualistic approaches to social phenomena as well as quantitative research. For Australia and New Zealand, our findings revealed that SRT has most likely permeated this geo-cultural area in the context of Social Psychology, which was highly developed along the lines of Social Cognition and Social Identity Theories, influences which we found in the scientific production on SRT as well, especially around the time when SRT was first adopted here. More recently, the attempts at integrating SRT within mainstream social psychology seem to have declined. Thematically, SRT has been mainly employed in studying identity issues and objects of high social interest for this context. We also found differences between Australia and New Zealand in terms of their preference for employing qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Our findings support the originality of the SRT contributions from this geo-cultural area, both in terms of theoretical as well as empirical advancement of SRT. For the Asian geo-cultural context, our results revealed that SRT was adopted by Asian social psychologists due to its epistemological and empirical compatibilities with their purpose of creating an original Asian social psychology, interested in indigenous social phenomena specific to their cultures (Liu & Ng, 2007). Thus, our findings show a vast array of diverse social objects for which empirical research with SRT was conducted, in line with both the cultural background and the societal interests in the region. All in all, the development of SRT in Asia seems to be linked to the desire to construct an indigenous social psychology, which supports the versatility of the theory in studying lay knowledge and social phenomena of high interest across a wide range of contexts. Finally, for the African geo-cultural context, our results revealed that SRT was adopted by social psychologists due to its epistemological and methodological compatibilities with the demands of this geo-cultural area, namely for a conceptual framework that is apt to capture social phenomena in context, free from the bias of having been tailored on Western populations and thus carrying implicit assumptions not pertinent to this area. Our findings also reveal that SRT was applied in accordance with its original premises, especially the trans-disciplinary ones, and that it fulfills its critical potential of addressing issues having to do with social oppression and inequality (Howarth, 2006), specific to this area.