the study considers mass media communication as intertwined with social norms, as assumed by the perspective of social representations. it explores the italian press communication by focusing on three pairs of men and women politicians with different political orientations and all serving as presidents of the houses of parliament in three legislatures. the article concentrates on five newspaper...

This paper presents the theory of social representations as a model of social scientific theory. In doing so, it attempts to reconstruct the foundations of the theory of social representations by focusing on intellectual resources that were available to Serge Moscovici during the time he was developing the theory. These resources shaped his epistemology, and firmly distinguished the theory of s...

Signed graphs are graphs with signed edges. They are commonly used to represent positive and negative relationships in social networks. While balance theory and clusterizable graphs deal with signed graphs to represent social interactions, recent empirical studies have proved that they fail to reflect some current practices in real social networks. In this paper we address the issue of drawing ...

Following Moscovici (1972), this paper addresses the questions: What is the aim of research within a social representations perspective? Is it to support or to criticize the social order? Is it to consolidate or transform it? After a brief overview of social representations theory, I argue that while the theory appears to have the conceptual tools to begin this critical task, there are serious ...

This research utilizes social representations theory to inform the study of tailorable technologies. Specifically, we investigate how social representations theory can be used as a mechanism to understanding technology tailoring-in-use. The work extends earlier tailorable technology design work by looking at the processes by which people tailor technology during use. It also extends social repr...