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Staging public engagement events to inform health policy is becoming increasingly common. In these events, participation from a diversity of individuals is fostered to enhance the input to policy from those groups of whom individual participants are seen to be are representative. Participants' identities thus come to be seen as constituted by group membership and roles they occupy in society. Recent insights from social psychology and other disciplines suggest that replacing the notion of role with that of subject positioning serves to better understand the multiple and fluid nature of personhood. In this paper we use the notion of subject positions to understand the way in which participants in a particular public engagement (The BC Biobank Deliberation) drew on different aspects of their identity to warrant arguments during deliberation. The aims of the paper are: to create theoretical links between deliberative democracy and positioning theory; to address a gap in knowledge of the process of deliberation itself, and to illustrate the use of positioning theory as a viable analytical lens through which to develop a deeper understanding of the communicative practices that constitute deliberation; and to contribute to the theoretical literature on positioning theory as the discursive constraints present in the institutional settings of deliberative forums offer a novel context within which to study subject positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the potential of the notions of reification and consensualization as developed by the theory of social representations as analytical tools for addressing the communication between the lay and scientific spheres. Social Representations Theory started by offering an over-sharp distinction between the reified and the consensual universes of which science and common sense, respectively, were presented as paradigmatic. This paper, however, suggests that the notions of consensual and reified can be considered as describing two distinct communicative formats: reification implying the use of arguments which establish prescriptions for representations and action, and consensualization relying on arguments which recognize the heterogeneity of representation and action. We illustrate this proposal through the analysis of a case in which the expert and the lay spheres of a Lisbon neighborhood opposed each other regarding the new laws of public participation in community matters. This analysis showed how reification and consensualization can be used as discursive formats by both spheres. The implications of the use of reification and consensualization and how they may depend on several power resources and have different impacts on social change are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accepting Cole's the premise that, 'cultural-inclusive psychology has been ... an elusive goal' (1996, pp. 7-8) but one worth striving to attain, I first set out to identify my domain of interest and competence as an intellectual. Deciding it to be social interaction between individuals, I then searched out theoretical approaches to this domain that encompassed as many approaches to this trans-historical concern that have emerged from cultural traditions bequeathing us their legacies. Doing this search comprehensively required me to move outside my Judeo- Christian, Greco- Roman, Renaissance heritage and its international diffusion via the European Empires since the 1500's, embodied most recently the American dominance of intellectual discourse since the Second World War. In my case, this journey has taken me in to Chinese culture and psychology where I have worked towards integrating the Chinese worldview and its psychological measures into the discipline of social psychology. Striving for a more inclusive culture-view, I am now using multi-cultural data bases to transcend this two-cultural focus and incorporate wider measures of cultural variation into our theorizing and empirical validation of universal models for social interaction. This paper describes my current procedures for such culture-mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the “real” physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conceptualization of social behavior from that basis. Formalism tends to lead toward a conceptually independent sociology that in principle requires only minimal reference to the empirical and ontological storehouse of other disciplines, while behavioral-realist theory leads to an interdisciplinary sociology that can be located within a hierarchy of behavioral sciences, leading to questions regarding the relationship between sociology and other disciplines as well as issues of transdisciplinary unification and possible interdisciplinary reduction. I explore the consequences of this split for the project of explanatory sociological theory within the context of how it has manifested itself in sociological network theory and social psychology. I close with a critique and assessment of formalist tendencies in sociological theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]