Articles available via LSE Research Online are protected under intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law discussed earlier versions of these ideas with various colleagues over the past year and am grateful for their constructive and critical responses. Audience research is at a crossroads. Looking backwards, the legacy o...

The sociology of education continues to thrive as a field of study. Researchers, particularly those interested in educational reform, have increasingly come to recognize the importance of understanding the social context of schooling and how it affects the actions and attitudes of those who are involved in it. Whether concerned with implementing a new mathematics curriculum or adopting legislat...

In this paper, we try to expand the lenses classically used in social psychology of development, and in particular, in the post-Piagetian tradition, to recent contributions of social and cognitive dynamics in development and learning. Psychological development has to be redefined as involving socially framed, culturally mediated and interpersonally negotiated processes, and the dynamic relation...

Irregular Warfare (IW), with its emphasis on social and cognitive phenomena such as population sentiment, is a major new focus of the Department of Defense (DoD). One of the most important classes of IW action is Information Operations (IO), the use of information to influence sentiment. With the DoD’s new focus on IW comes the new need to analyze and forecast the effects of IO actions on popul...

Social interaction is pivotal to the formation of social relationships and groups. Much is known about the importance of interaction content (e.g., the transfer of information). The present review concentrates on the influence of the act of conversing on the emergence of a sense of solidarity, more or less independently of the content. Micro-characteristics of the conversation (e.g., brief sile...