Wolfgang Wagner is a current and productive advocate of the social representation approach. He developed a version of the theory in which social representations are freed from individual minds and instead conceived of as concerted interactions. These epistemological starting points come very close to the enactive outlook on consensually coordinated actions. Yet Wagner is not radical enough in that he continues to see concerted interaction as an expression of representations that are already shared by the actors constituting a group. In our view, the ubiquitous notion of sharedness—which is also found in studies on social models, cultural patterns, schemas, scenarios, and so forth—is conceptually problematic and reveals a misapprehension of how orchestrated actions come about. Moreover, it obscures a proper understanding of what really constitutes intrinsically social behavior. Enactivism provides a much more consistent epistemology for a psychology that is intrinsically social.
Allport, F. H. (1924). Social psychology. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
2.
Baerveldt, C. (1999). Culture and the consensual coordination of actions. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nijmegen.
3.
Baerveldt, C., & Verheggen, T. (1999). Enactivism and the experiential reality of culture: Rethinking the epistemological basis of cultural psychology. Culture & Psychology, 5(2), 183-206.
4.
Baerveldt, C., Verheggen, T., & Voestermans, P. (2001). Human experience and the enigma of culture: Toward an enactive account of cultural practice. In J. R. Morss, N. Stepenson, & H. van Rappard (Eds.), Theoretical issues in psychology (pp. 49-57). Boston, MA: Kluwer.
5.
Baerveldt, C., & Voestermans, P. (2005). Culture, emotion and the normative structure of reality. Theory & Psychology, 15(4), 449-473.
6.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
8.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1990). Some propositions about the relationship between culture and human cognition. In J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp. 65-129). New York: Cambridge University Press.
9.
Edwards, D. (1997). Discourse and cognition. London: Sage.
10.
Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. London: Sage.
11.
Farr, R. M. (1987). Social representations: A French tradition of research. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 17(4), 343-370.
12.
Farr, R. M. (1996). The modern roots of social psychology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
13.
Farr, R. M. (1998). From collective to social representations: Aller et retour. Culture & Psychology, 4(3), 275-296.
14.
Greenwood, J. D. (1994). Realism, identity and emotion: Reclaiming social psychology. London: Sage.
15.
Harré, R., & Gillett, G. (1994). The discursive mind. London: Sage.
16.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
17.
Janssen, J. A. P. J., & Verheggen, T. (1997). The double center of gravity in Durkheim’s symbol theory: Bringing the body back in. Sociological Theory, 15(3), 294-306.
18.
Jaspars, J. M. F., & Fraser, C. (1984). Attitudes and social representations. In R. M. Farr & S. Moscovici (Eds.) Social representations (pp. 101-123). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
19.
Kreppner, K. (1999). Enactivism and monadology: Where are Baerveldt and Verheggen taking the individual and cultural psychology? Culture & Psychology, 5(2), 207-216.
20.
Lahlou, S. (1996). The propagation of social representations. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 26, 157-175.
21.
Locke, J. (1975). An essay concerning human understanding (5th ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1689.)
22.
Marková, I. (1996). Towards an epistemology of social representations. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 26, 177-196.
23.
Maturana, H. (1970a). Biology of cognition, Biological Computer Laboratory Research Report BCL 9.0. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois.
24.
Maturana, H. (1970b). The neuropsychology of cognition. In P. Garvin (Ed.), Cognition: A multiple view (pp. 3-24). New York: Spartan.
25.
Maturana, H. (1975). The organization of the living: A theory of the living organization. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 7, 313-332.
26.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. Dordrecht: Reidel.
27.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. J. (1984). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Boston, MA: Shambala.
28.
Merwe, W. L. van der, & Voestermans, P. P. L. A. (1995). Wittgenstein’s legacy and the challenge to psychology. Theory & Psychology, 5(1), 27-48.
29.
Moscovici, S. (1963). Attitudes and opinions. Annual Review of Psychology, 14, 231-260.
30.
Moscovici, S. (1988). Notes towards a description of social representations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 18, 211-250.
31.
Moscovici, S. (1995). Geschichte und Aktualität sozialer Repräsentationen. In U. Flick (Ed.), Psychologie des Sozialen: Repräsentationen in Wissen und Sprache (pp. 266-314). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rororo.
32.
Moscovici, S. (1998). Social consciousness and its history. Culture & Psychology, 4, 411-429.
33.
Némedi, D. (1995). Collective consciousness, morphology, and collective representations: Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge, 1894-1900. Sociological Perspectives, 38, 41-56.
34.
Potter, J., & Litton, I. (1985). Some problems underlying the theory of social representations. British Journal of Social Psychology, 24, 81-90.
35.
Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
36.
Saito, A. (1996). Social origins of cognition: Bartlett, evolutionary perspective and embodied mind approach. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 26, 399-421.
37.
Schaller, M., & Crandall, C. S. (Eds.). (2004). The psychological foundations of culture. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
38.
Schmauss, W. (1994). Durkheim’s philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge: Creating an intellectual niche. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
39.
Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.
40.
Shotter, J., & Billig, M. (1998). A Bakhtinian psychology: From out of the heads of individuals and into the dialogues between them. In M. Mayerfeld Bell & M. Gardiner (Eds.), Bakhtin and the human sciences (pp. 13-29). London: Sage.
41.
Strauss, C. (1992). Models and motives. In R. D’Andrade, & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models (pp. 1-20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
42.
Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
43.
Varela, F. J. (1979). Principles of biological autonomy. New York: Elsevier North Holland.
44.
Varela, F. J. (1984). Two principles of self-organization. In H. Ulrich & G. J. B. Probst (Eds.), Self-organization and management of social systems: Insights, promises, doubts, and questions (pp. 25-32). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
45.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, F., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
46.
Verheggen, T. (1996). Durkheims représentations considered as Vorstellungen. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 16, 189-219.
47.
Verheggen, T., & Baerveldt, C. (2001). From shared representations to consensually coordinated actions: Toward an intrinsically social psychology. In J. R. Morss, N. Stepenson, & H. van Rappard (Eds.), Theoretical issues in psychology (pp. 58-68). Boston, MA: Kluwer.
48.
Wagner, W. (1996). Queries about social representation and construction. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 26(2), 95-120.
49.
Wagner, W. (1998). Social representations and beyond: Brute facts, symbolic coping and domesticated worlds. Culture & Psychology, 4(3), 297-329.
50.
Wagner, W. (2003). People in action and social reperesentation: A comment to Jaan Valsiner’s (2003) ‘Theory of Enablement’. Papers on Social Representations, 12, 8.1-8.7 (http://www.psr.jku.at).
51.
Wagner, W., & Hayes, N. (2005). Everyday discourse and common sense: The theory of social representations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
52.
Wagner, W., & Mecha, A. (2003). On discursive construction, representation and institutions: A meta-empirical study. In J. Laszlo & W. Wagner (Eds.), Theories and controversies in societal psychology. Budapest: New Mandate.
53.
Whitaker, R (2002). Encyclopaedia autopoietica (http://www.enolagaia.com).
54.
Williams, M. (1999). Wittgenstein, mind and meaning: Towards a social conception of mind. London: Routledge.
55.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.). (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Original work published 1953.)
