The articles in this special issue cover a range of critical issues and approaches in social psychology. Two of their common features are: (a) their restatement—in various forms—of the unresolved epistemological problems that continue to inform critical discussions of social psychology; and (b) the rarely debated question of just what makes social psychology social. These two questions are interlocking: the undecided nature of the latter eventually creates an impassable barrier to resolving the former. Focusing on a cross-section of issues derived from the social psychology literature presented in this issue, I introduce the problematic and contested nature of the domain of social psychology.
Allport, F. H. (1924). Social psychology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin .
2.
Aronson, E. (1988, Winter). Aronson declares social psychology crisis over . Society for Personality and Social Psychology Dialogue, p. 2-2 .
3.
[Review of J. D. Greenwood , The disappearance of the social in American social psychology].
4.
Durkheim, È. (1982). Rules of the sociological method (W.D. Halls, Trans.). New York: Free Press . (Original work published 1895.)
5.
Durkheim, È. (1898). Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives . Revue de Métaphysique, 6, 274-302 .
6.
[Review of A. Brannigan , The rise and fall of social psychology: The use and misuse of the experimental method].
7.
Flick, U. (Ed.). (1998). The psychology of the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
8.
Gergen, K. J. (1973). Social psychology as history . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, 309-320 .
9.
Gilbert, M. (1992). On social facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
10.
Greenwood, J. D. (2004). The disappearance of the social in American social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
11.
Harré, R. , & Secord, P. F. (1972). The explanation of social behavior. Oxford: Blackwell .
12.
Hill, D. B. (2006). Theory in applied social psychology: Past mistakes and future hopes . Theory & Psychology, 16, 613-640 .
13.
Howarth, C. (2006). How social representations of attitudes have informed attitude theories: The consensual and the reified . Theory & Psychology, 16, 691-714 .
14.
Kruglanski, A. W. (2001). That ‘vision thing’: The state of theory in social and personality psychology at the edge of the new millennium . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 871-875 .
15.
Langdridge, D. (2006). Ideology and utopia: Social psychology and the social imaginary of Paul Ricoeur . Theory & Psychology, 16, 641-659 .
16.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
17.
Lewin, K. (1944). Constructs in psychology and psychological ecology . University of Iowa Studies in Child Welfare, 20, 23-27 .
18.
Lubek, I. (Ed.). (2000). Re-engaging the history of social psychology [Special issue] . Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 36(4).
19.
Lubek, I. , & Stam, H. J. (1995). Ludicro-experimentation in social psychology: Sober scientific versus playful prescriptions. In I. Lubek , R. van Hezewijk , G. Pheterson , & C. Tolman (Eds.), Trends and issues in theoretical psychology (pp. 171-180). New York: Springer .
20.
Margolis, J. (1997). The meaning of ‘social’. In J. Greenwood (Ed.), The mark of the social: Discovery or invention? (pp. 183-198). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield .
21.
McHoul, A. W. (1990). Can philosophy tell us what is social? Occasional paper Number 25, Department of Sociology, University of Manchester . (Available as ‘Can we know rules?’ from: http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/aiem/wocat1.html.)
22.
Moscovici, S. (2000). Social representations: Explorations in social psychology ( G. Duveen , Ed.). Cambridge: Polity .
23.
Orfali, B. (2006). Extreme right movements: Why do they re-emerge? Why are they accepted?Theory & Psychology, 16, 715-736 .
24.
Rodrigues, A. , & Levine, R. V. (Eds.). (1999). Reflections on 100 years of experimental social psychology. New York: Basic Books .
25.
Stam, H. J. (2000). Kurt Lewin. In A. E. Kazdin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology, Vol. 5 (pp. 44-46). Washington and New York: American Psychological Association and Oxford University Press .
26.
Stam, H. J. , Radtke, H. L. , & Lubek, I. (2000). Strains in experimental social psychology: A textual analysis of the development of experimentation in social psychology . Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 36, 365-382 .
27.
Valsiner, J. (2006). Dangerous curves in knowledge construction within psychology: Fragmentation of methodology . Theory & Psychology, 16, 597-612 .
28.
Walsh-Bowers, R. (2006). A theatre acting perspective on the dramaturgical metaphor and the postmodern self . Theory & Psychology, 16, 661-690 .
