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This paper presents an analysis of identity leadership (Haslam et al., The new psychology of leadership: Identity, influence and power, Routledge, 2020) in the 1988 'Candlelight Demonstration' in Bratislava which was a precursor to the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The analysis is based on interviews with the five remaining leaders of the demonstration and addresses three core issues. First, how leaders use performative means (identity impresarioship) as well as limited rhetorical means (identity entrepreneurship) to assemble protestors and create a sense of shared identity amongst them. Second, how these strategies of mobilization are linked to the highly repressive context in which the demonstration took place. Third, we analyse the extent to which these strategies are rooted in a psychological understanding of the processes of mobilization. We conclude by addressing the implications for our general understanding of leadership and the mobilization of collective action and the need for more research into these processes under conditions of repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing interdisciplinary literature examines the role of hair textures and styles in Black and mixed‐race women's identity performances. Through an analysis of travel narratives, this paper extends and complements research on the context‐dependency of racialized identity performances. This paper presents an analysis of 24 qualitative interviews with Black and mixed‐race women in England and Germany. The question it seeks to answer is: 'How do changes in context alter Black and mixed‐race women's hairstyling practices as a performance of identity?' Navigating a novel context could lead the women to (1) conform to local standards of beauty and femininity, (2) resist external expectations, (3) try out novel performances and (4) negotiate the complex performance of belonging. All in all, this paper shows that Black and mixed‐race women dialogically re/negotiated and performatively re/created how they identify and how they are identified by others as they moved from one context to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores psychological processes that underpin the success of community change in the context of urban regeneration schemes. We adopt a social identity approach to develop an understanding of the ways in which social identity dynamics may impact upon peoples' experiences of regeneration, and what influence these identity processes have on the creation of new communities. Qualitative interviews, using thematic analysis as an analytic technique, were conducted with community members (n = 14) in a recently (2001–2011) regenerated area in the South‐West of England. Three overarching themes were identified: Patterns of identification, willingness to engage, and the notion of regeneration as an event. The research overall highlights the central role of group‐based identity in understanding the processes of regeneration and how this is experienced by different community members. Findings are discussed in relation to the impact regeneration schemes have on community members' sense of collective self, unity, and engagement. The research highlights the pivotal role of social identity processes in delivering successful and sustainable strategies of urban regeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While injustice is widespread, collective action against it appears to be rare. This paper argues that this may be because research often focuses on a narrow range of outgroup‐oriented actions, such as demonstrating, signing petitions, that are symbolic of a collective response to injustice. The present work takes a bottom‐up approach to study a broad range of collective and individual actions that people undertake in response to collective injustice. Participants indicated actions they felt they could take (Study 1) and, via interviews, actually had taken (Study 2) in response to human‐induced earthquakes. These studies revealed a broad range of actions, many of which are collective but ingroup‐ (e.g., helping ingroup members) rather than outgroup‐oriented. Study 3 further conceptualized these collective and individual actions by including quantitative measures thereof in an assessment of responses to stressful life events that were collective or individual. Results revealed that, while traditional forms of collective action are rare, ingroup‐oriented and individual level (e.g., social support) responses form distinct dimensions in response to both individual and collective events. This work extends our understanding of responses to collective injustice and suggests the need to broaden the scope of collective action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews are used as a research tool in numerous studies of identity. They have also been studied as social interactions in themselves. From this perspective, analysts have looked at the ways interviews generate identities, and how both parties work to fulfill the associated roles and expectations (e.g., the interviewer's neutrality). Interviewers thus become a more 'visible' participant, and several studies examine the influence of their multiple category memberships on the interaction. This paper aims to extend these insights to the insider/outsider dilemma in interviews, by looking at how participants make relevant and use interviewer identities as a resource. The data comes from a corpus of interviews with Syrian people on identity conducted by a British interviewer. The analysis shows how the interviewer's identity as a sojourner and stranger was used to warrant positive assessments of national character; her national identity was invoked to normalize national feelings; her identity as Christian used to characterize religious identity as inherent; and her identity as Westerner was used to legitimate complaints. I discuss implications for interviews on identity and identity within interviews, and argue that this approach is a thoroughly empirical way to address the shifting, practical ascription of insider-outsider status to the interviewer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two complementary explanations have been offered by social psychologists to account for the universal hold of national identity, first that national identity is ideologically assumed, as it forms the 'banal' background of everyday life, and second that national identity is 'hotly' constructed and contested in political and everyday settings to great effect. However, 'banal' and 'hot' aspects of national identity have been found to be distributed unevenly across national and subnational groups and banality itself can be strategically used to distinguish between different groups. The present paper develops these ideas by examining possible reasons for these different modes and strategies of identity expression. Drawing upon intergroup theories of minority and majority relations, we examine how a group who see themselves unequivocally as a minority, Irish Travellers, talk about their national identity in comparison to an age and gender-matched sample of Irish students. We find that Travellers proactively display and claim 'hot' national identity in order to establish their Irishness. Irish students 'do banality', police the boundaries and reputation of Irishness, and actively reject and disparage proactive displays of Irishness. The implications for discursive understandings of identity, the study of intra-national group relations and policies of minority inclusion are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses critical discursive psychology to examine expressions of dissatisfaction and complaint by people with learning disabilities. UK government policies stress that people with learning disabilities should have more control over their lives. Expressing dissatisfaction about services is an important aspect of this process. However, given that such individuals are often treated as incompetent, and given the delicate nature of complaining about services one might rely on for day-to-day support, this can be difficult to do. In building complaints, speakers drew on repertoires about competence and incompetence, the right to free choice as a principle, and tempered dissatisfaction to make contrasts between good and bad supporters and practice. While the complaints show many of the general features of complaints identified in previous work in the general population, they were crafted to the particular institutional context of social care, and attended both explicitly and implicitly to the particular issues of competence, power, and authority found in those services. Speakers positioned themselves as competent, and service workers as more or less competent in their roles. Issues of power in social care services were observed explicitly in the accounts, whereby people described staff as controlling and it being difficult to voice dissatisfaction. They were also implicit in the way speakers drew on the others with institutional authority for corroboration and comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Self Categorization approach to national leadership proposes that leaders rhetorically construct national identity as essentialized and inevitable in order to consensualize and mobilize the population. In contrast, discursive studies have demonstrated how national politicians flexibly construct the nation to manage their own accountability in local interactions, though this in turn has neglected broader leadership processes. The present paper brings both approaches together to examine how and when national politicians construct versions of national identity in order to account for their failure as well as success in mobilizing the electorate. Eight semi-structured conversational style interviews were conducted with a strategic sample of eight leading Irish politicians on the subject of the 2008/2009 Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda. Using a Critical Discourse Psychology approach, the hegemonic repertoire of the 'settled will' of the informed and consensualized Irish nation was identified across all interviews. Politicians either endorsed the 'settled will' repertoire as evidence of their successful leadership, or rejected the repertoire by denying the rationality or unity of the populace to account for their failure. Our results suggest national identity is only constructed as essentialized and inevitable to the extent that it serves a strategic political purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the talk of three senior figures from the Palestinian Hamas political movement. Data are drawn from a series of journalistic interviews that were conducted in the months leading up to the invasion of Gaza by Israel in December 2007. Using membership categorization analysis, we explore the membership categories and category-bound attributes that interviewers use in questions about responsibility for potentially culpable actions and the ways that these are taken up, challenged, or reworked by interviewees in presenting their own versions. The analytic findings show that interviewers deploy categories bound up with terrorism while interviewees develop alternative categorizations of resistance. Interviewers construct Palestinians as victims of Hamas' actions while interviewees construct them as victims of Israeli aggression and international indifference. In warranting these alternative constructions, the interviewees contrast current behaviours of the international community with those of the past and align current Palestinian actions with those previously taken by Western nations in resisting illegitimate occupations. Through these descriptions of categories and actions, the interviewees attribute to the wider international community responsibility for addressing the events of the ongoing conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers one theme in the contemporary legacy of Potter and Wetherell's (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology. It overviews the context that led to that book and considers a series of critical responses from both experimental and critical/qualitative social psychologists. It refutes criticisms and corrects confusions. Focusing on contemporary discursive psychology, it highlights (a) its rigorous use of records of actual behaviour; (b) its systematic focus on normative practices. In methodological terms, it (a) highlights limitations in the use of open-ended interviews; (b) considers the way naturalistic materials provide access to participants' own orientations and displays; (c) builds a distinctive logic of sampling and generalization. In theoretical terms, it (a) highlights the way discourse work can identify foundational psychological matters; (b) offers a novel approach to emotion and embodiment; (c) starts to build a matrix of dimensions which are central to the constructing and recognizing of different kinds of social actions. It now offers a fully formed alternative social psychology which coordinates theory and method and a growing body of empirical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the concept of ideological dilemmas in order to explore how a sample of young people constructed potentially contrary themes of liberal citizenship in discussions of un/employment. The study took place in the context of recent policy developments in the UK which have sought to place a renewed emphasis upon notions of responsible citizenship in relation to both welfare and education policy. A total of 58 participants were interviewed in 24 semi-structured group interviews. In response to direct questions on un/employment, participants could resolve dilemmas concerning welfare rights and the responsibility to contribute to society by emphasizing a criterion of effortfulness, thereby adopting a primarily individualistic explanation of unemployment. In other contexts however, this could be replaced by an emphasis on social explanations of unemployment. In particular, participants could treat immigration as a cause of unemployment. These findings are interpreted in terms of people's capacity to construct rhetorical strategies based upon different ideological themes in particular contexts. They are discussed in relation to previous research on social policy discourse and recent debates regarding the appropriateness of seeking to identify ideological themes in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical exploration of the discursive and socio-historical practice of 'dyadic-containment' as a principle index for how we know, experience, and authenticate romantic relationships. Making intelligible an 'authentic' relationship as something which is fixed, enclosed and exclusive, the pervasive principle of dyadiccontainment has considerable implications for what it means to live out 'authentic' but ostensibly liberated relationships. Using post-structuralist discourse analysis to explore ways in which people can account for their consensual non-monogamous relationships (same and cross-sex, dyadic and non-dyadic), we critique the liberal-humanist framework from which such relationships can be played out. In that dyadic-containment as an aspect of an ontology of interiorized and contained 'realness' can be viewed as serving to characterize and authorize monogamous relationships (as we illustrate), practices of consensual non-monogamy that reproduce dyadic-containment as an organizing and authenticating principle are problematized. Limits to understandings and practices of some 'alternative' romantic relationships are therefore expounded and consideration is given to how relational difference might be otherwise premised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]