Commentary on part II: Culture, narrative and the everyday dynamics of identity

The arguments of the previous five chapters capture some of the core strivings of social psychologists since their earliest days. There has always been a tension between extracting core features of behaviour and believing that such extraction is inevitably and misleadingly selective, or that behaviour does not exist in isolation and extraction per se is a meaningless activity. This distinction is useful and predicates very different approaches to research design, and indeed within each there is scope for much epistemological variation. There can be positivism within extraction models and within contextualising models, just as there can be critical perspectives in both qualitative and quantitative methods. Fetishising methodology, to use Moscovici’s phrase, can happen anywhere, as can the fallacy, first pointed out by Pliny the Elder, that we only define as worthy of study what it is that we have the tools to measure.