Work
In 1984 he published Social Texts and Context: Literature and Social Psychology with Margaret Wetherell and Peter Stringer. This collaboration was devoped in parallel to Potter and Wetherell's PhD work.
He is co-author, with Margaret Wetherell of the influential book Discourse and Social Psychology which is one of the foundational texts that developed a discourse analytic approach to social psychology, a programme now refined into discursive psychology. It offered new ways of conceptualizing fundamental social psychological notions such as attitudes, categories, social representations and rules. It has been cited more than three thousand times in more than a hundred different journals. One of its central achievements was to develop the analytic notion of 'interpretative repertoires' from Gilbert and Mulkay's work on scientific discourse and show how it could be more generally applied to social psychological topics. A joint grant led by Margaret Wetherell resulted in the volume Mapping the Language of Racism in 1992 that focused on the way racism is displayed and legitimated in conversations, newspaper articles and parliamentary debates.
At the start of the 1990s, in the book Discursive Psychology, he and Derek Edwards built a specific style of work that is now commonplace in journals across the social sciences as well as indirectly fostering a swathe of non-experimental approaches to social psychology. This took on core notions in cognitive psychology and in particular memory and attribution. Its aim was to show that existing cognitive conceptions of these notions failed to encompass the situated and flexible nature of actual language use and to consider how peoples' accounts of cognitive processes and events are themselves parts of actions. For example, they reanalysed Ulric Neisser's classic work on the Watergate testimony showing the way John Dean's accounts of his excellent memory were used by counsel as parts of building the case against Nixon. It was distinctive from the earlier discourse analytic approach to social psychology in its use of records of natural interaction rather than open ended interviews and its focus on sequential interaction rather than on the identification of interpretative repertoires.
In 1996 he published the book Representing Reality. This was the fruition of a sustained engagement with the sociology of scientific knowledge and other approaches to factuality and provided an overview, extension and critique of social constructionism in social sciences. It developed a discursive version of constructionism in contrast to the more familiar social constructionisms of thinkers such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.
His collection Conversation and Cognition, co-edited with Hedwig te Molder, brought together a group of conversation analysts, ethnothodologists and discursive psychologists (including Geoff Coulter, John Heritage, Anita Pomerantz, and Robert Hopper) to address fundamental issues at the boundary of work on cognition and interaction.
In 2007 he edited a three volume set of books that bring together a wide range of different studies in discursive psychology.
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