No abstract

This article addresses the difficulties of generalizing new norms and practices, focusing on the role of the legal system for proposing change and innovation to society. It first presents some contributions offered by the social representational approach for understanding these issues, based on the assumptions of the interdependence both of change and stability, and of the social and the individual. Afterwards it is argued that for advancing the study of change the approach needs to offer more attention to: (1) the role of expert mediating systems regarding the translation of new norms to concrete contexts and their articulation with practices; (2) the arguments and discursive strategies employed in everyday communication to resist change with normative force; and (3) the consequences for the relations between representations and practices of the distinction between 'transcendent' and 'immanent' representations. In the empirical part of the paper, and with the goal of better understanding the difficulties linked to the generalization of new norms and practices, these notions are used for analysing a controversy which, in a context of changed norms regarding public participation, involved the expert and lay spheres in a debate about the built heritage of a community.

In this article I argue that a desirable future direction for political psychology would be to pay more attention to social-psychological processes involved in the response to innovative laws, in particular those devised with sustainability and environmental protection aims. This involves taking into account the following premises: (1) innovation and change are not unitary phenomena; instead there are different types of innovation; (2) legal and policy innovation is a specific type and is highly central in an era when global challenges are increasingly dealt with by global treaties which are then translated into national laws with a call to transform local practices; (3) offering attention to the reception of such innovation involves developing specific conceptual tools; (4) devising a typology of legal innovation is one step in this direction; (5) furthering our comprehension of how people, groups, and institutions receive-i.e., accept, contest-legal innovation for sustainability is important for helping to push forward sustainability goals, which are legislated but far from attained.The present article outlines theoretical tools for addressing psychosocial processes involved in the reception of legal innovation, drawing mostly on the approach of social representations and the literature of environmental psychology, and offers three criteria for a typology of laws. Finally I present some examples of responses to subtypes of legal innovation from the sustainability domain, taken as an illustrative case, and discuss differences and commonalities in the processes of acceptance and resistance that each mobilizes.

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 strategies by both spheres. The implications of the use of reification and consensualization as communicative formats and how they may depend on several power resources and have different impacts on change are discussed.Keywords: communicative formats; consensualization; power relations; reification; social representation About the authors SUSANA BATEL is a Ph.D. student at the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), in Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently looking at how the relationships between expert and lay systems impact on public participation and on the preservation and rehabilitation of urban environments. She is interested in both social psychology and environmental psychology, and in the relations between identity, social representations and discourse and their impact on social change. PAULA CASTRO is Associate Professor at Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), Lisbon, Portugal. She is a social psychologist interested in examining the socio-psychological processes involved in the reception of techno-scientific and legal innovation by individuals and communities. She has published in international journals such as "Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology", "Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour" and "Environment and Behaviour". Kronberger & Seifert, 2002;Moscovici, 1993). However, it has also been remarked that the theory needs to more extensively examine the consequences of unequal power relations for the communication between the two spheres (Voelklein & Howarth, 2005;Campbell & Jovchelovitch, 2000). This would namely imply looking more closely at how power differentials shape the concrete transformations suffered by the innovative ideas, analyzing the direction of these transformations and whether they accelerate social change or slow it down (Castro & Batel, 2008;Voelklein & Howarth, 2005).In this paper we shall argue that although the TSR already has some es...

No abstract