Disciplining social psychology: A case study of boundary relations in the history of the human sciences

Strains in experimental social psychology: A textual anaylsis of the development of experimentation in social psychology

“…7 The importance of developing a unique and delineated area of expertise -both ontological and methodological -can best be understood in the context of the development of social psychology as a profession. Prior to World War II, social psychology seemed to be an academic subdiscipline taught to undergraduates within, and with a few Ph.D.s awarded from, psychology or sociology departments (Good, 2000). With perhaps only the exception of Floyd Allport's Syracuse program awarding Ph.D.s in "Social Psychology" (Samelson, 2000), the field did not take its present form as a North American-wide, university-based subdiscipline until after the war, when autonomous programs for the formation of social psychologists took root at Michigan, Harvard, etc.…”

Contextualizing Floyd Allports'sSocial Psychology

“…Methodological individualism, more specifically, has helped to define psychology, where it has seemed to be taken for granted. However, methodological individualism is mentioned regarding ontological and content issues in social psychology and boundary discussions regarding the nature of, and overlaps between, psychology and sociology (Good, 2000;Greenwood, 2000;Parsons & Barber, 1948). …”

Constructing a social subject

“…John Greenwood is among several scholars to consider changing constructions of the social within psychology (Danziger, 1992(Danziger, , 2000Good, 2000;Greenwood, 2004;Stam, 2006). Greenwood states that, in a model dominant prior to 1930: [B]eliefs and attitudes were held to be social by virtue of their orientation to represented beliefs and attitudes of members of social groups, irrespective of the types of objects to which they were directed.…”