Social representations and discursive psychology: From cognition to action

This article compares and contrasts the way a set of fundamental issues are treated in social representations theory and discursive psychology. These are: action, representation, communication, cognition, construction, episte mology and method. In each case we indicate arguments for the discursive ps ychological treatment. These arguments are then developed and illustrated t hrough a discussion of Wagner, Duveen, Themel and Verma (1999) which highli ghts in particular the way the analysis fails to address the activities don e by people when they are producing representations, and the epistemologica l troubles that arise from failing to address the role of the researcher's own representations.