Discourse of the collective subject: social representations and communication interventions

Abstract

We present herein the Discourse of the Collective Subject method as a way to retrieve social representations. We sought to reconstitute these social representations through DCS maintaining the link between their individual and collective dimensions. The Discourse of the Collective Subject were obtained through an empirical study and they are herein called speaking and spoken products. They are speaking products because social representations are discursive practices, current behaviors of social agents. They are also spoken products because society (or the others), while socially-shared cognitive schemes, are always present in individual speeches. The social representations reconstructed by Discourse of the Collective Subject allow common people to identify with them, enabling its use in practices of social intervention.