From one new law to (many) new practices? Multidisciplinary teams re‐constructing the meaning of a new disability law

Abstract

This paper explores how a new French law incorporating a new conceptualization of disability formulated at the international level by the WHO is appropriated at the local level by multidisciplinary teams of professionals in charge of the assessment of disability. Drawing on social representations theory, its concept of cognitive polyphasia and its conceptualization of legal innovation, the paper specifically examines how the teams deal with the tensions between the old and the new models of disability and how the group dynamic is associated with how they do this: by hybridization of old and new models, by selective prevalence according to context, or by displacement of one model. Focus groups with the teams (n = 65 from 10 groups), analysed with indicators of interaction, bring evidence of the three forms. They show how different groups, by drawing differently, depending on their relational dynamics, from a variety of meaning systems circulating at the cultural level, reach different decisions that may lead to different practices in the local implementation of the same laws. We finish by discussing how social representations theory, linking the cultural/global and the interactional/local levels, can enhance our understanding of how socio-psychological processes intervening in the appropriation of legal innovations may produce different practical implementations of the same new laws.

Social representations of psychology: When paradoxes become a strength

“…For example, they criticize its scientific dimension in order to reaffirm medical supremacy. These results suggest that the way psychologists and psychology are represented depends on the group dynamic of each team (see also Caillaud et al, in press) and only marginally on individual variables (e.g. the profession, Caillaud and Haas, 2017).…”

Social representations of the undernourished child and health‐seeking behaviour in Nepal: From othering to different types of otherness

“…This in turn may shape the types of knowledge they use and how they are combined (or not). The term relational outcomes (Caillaud, Haas, & Castro, 2021) thus seems more appropriate than the term cognitive outcomes : it emphasizes the idea that these different forms of cognitive polyphasia both shape and are shaped by specific Self–Other interactions.…”

A Dignified Judge’s (Re)Presentation of Self

“…(Jodelet, 1984;Piaser and Bataille, 2011, p. 46). Furthermore, the members of these groups are then capable of drawing from various meaning systems and communicative practices depending on the context in which they act (e.g., Caillaud et al 2021Renedo & Jovchelovitch 2007, Jovchelovitch 2008.…”