Billig has evaluated Tajfel and Turner's theorising of intergroup conflict as limited because of the emphasis placed on cognitive processes. Discuss Billig's evaluation and assess his arguments for a discursive psychological approach.
Response.
Michael Billig was a student of Henri Tajfel and was originally involved in research to highlight a cognitive approach to intergroup conflict. His research in this area has lead him to a discursive psychological position arguing that the cognitive social approach is limiting in relation to categorisation and does not go far enough in its explanations of extreme prejudice and bigotry. Whilst paying tribute to Tajfel and Turner's paper on cognitive aspects of conflict (1979 cited in Brown 2007) Billig (2002 cited in Brown 2007) suggests that categories cannot be explained in terms of cognitive psychological theories as we actively construct meanings using the language that happens between us and around us thus making categories flexible and dynamic and open to change.
In order to assess Billig's evaluation and critique of social identity theory it is important to understand exactly what Tajfel and Turner proposed as one of the most influential theories in modern European social psychology on group identity and conflict. This essay will put forward Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory giving their arguments for a cognitive social theory and how it originated. Discussion will then look at Billig's (2002 cited in Brown 2007) critique of the theory and his suggestions to improve it by looking at group conflict and identity from a discursive psychological point of view which would incorporate extreme motivational prejudice and bigotry which he feels is omitted in the cognitive social approach.
Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory was set against the backdrop of post war Europe where theorists such as Asch (1954 cited in Brown 2007) argued that groups were a negative force which affected otherwise rational individual behaviour which ultimately lead to conflict.