VI. Identity and Social Change: Contextualizing Agency

Abstract

The term ‘politics’ has wide-ranging referents. However, broadly construed it refers to processes whereby the social relations that determine our conditions of existence are produced, reproduced, and transformed. These processes operate at any number of levels from the (very) local to the global. A fully explicated analysis requires several levels of explanation and it would be folly for psychology to seek to supplant other disciplines’ investigations of the ideological and institutional dynamics to social reproduction and change. However, it would also be folly to ignore the psychological: the social world is reproduced and transformed through human social action and we need a theorization of how wider social processes are psychologically mediated and translated into human social action. That is, we need a psychology that addresses the constitution of social actors and their capacities to both reproduce and transform contemporary social relations (Reicher and Hopkins, 2001). Undoubtedly, this is a tall order. To theorize how social relations structure identity is one thing. It is quite another to explain how identities may be reconstituted and alternative social relations brought into being.

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