We report a study of intergroup relations in a paper factory in which we examine the utility of three social‐psychological approaches: realistic conflict theory, the contact hypothesis and social identity theory. A sample of 177 shop floor workers from five different departments was interviewed. From them, measures of intergroup differentiation, perceived intergroup conflict, amount of intergroup contact, and strength of workgroup identification were obtained. The latter was assessed using a new scale of group identification developed for this study. Reliability and validity data for this scale are reported. Using multiple regression analyses we attempt to explain variance in respondents' intergroup differentiation using the other measures as predictor variables. The most powerful and reliable predictor was perceived conflict which, as expected, was positively correlated with differentiation. Less consistent was amount of contact which was negatively but only weakly associated with differentiation. Strength of group identification, while generally showing a positive correlation with differentiation as predicted, was also only a weak and inconsistent predictor variable. Noting that these results confirm findings from other studies we discuss their theoretical implications.

This article discusses the ways in which a sample of English respondents oriented to the task of formulating an account of their country in an interview context. Attention to both the content and the organizational features of talk suggested that respondents were generally reluctant to be heard to speak about `this country' in categorical terms, to adopt an explicitly national footing or to display a sense of patriotic national pride. They treated all of these as potentially hearable as symptomatic of `typical' Anglo-British xenophobia. In contrast to many extant analyses, which suggest that national discourse may provide a legitimate vehicle for the expression of exclusionary or racist sentiments, it appeared that, for these English respondents in this context, talk about `this country' was often treated as a delicate topic, functionally equivalent to, and subject to the same opprobrium as, talk about `race'. At the same time, however, various features of the respondents' discourse pointed to the presence of banal (Billig, 1995) national referents. Possible interpretations of this are discussed.

Social scientific work on the suppression, mitigation or denial of prejudiced attitudes has tended to focus on the strategic self-presentation and self-monitoring undertaken by individual social actors on their own behalf. In this paper, we argue that existing perspectives might usefully be extended to incorporate three additional considerations. First, that social actors may, on some occasions, act to defend not only themselves, but also others from charges of prejudice. Second, that over the course of any social encounter, interactants may take joint responsibility for policing conversation and for correcting and suppressing the articulation of prejudiced talk. Third, that a focus on the dialogic character of conversation affords an appreciation of the ways in which the status of any particular utterance, action or event as 'racist' or 'prejudiced' may constitute a social accomplishment. Finally, we note the logical corollary of these observations - that in everyday life, the occurrence of 'racist discourse' is likely to represent a collaborative accomplishment, the responsibility for which is shared jointly between the person of the speaker and those other co-present individuals who occasion, reinforce or simply fail to suppress it.

Vernacular representations of nationhood collected in England differed from canonical accounts of social categorization in three respects. First, nations were not typically constructed as simple person categories, but rather as hybrid collectivities of human beings, objects and geographical locations. Second, national representation was not confined to the present tense, but was typically conveyed through temporal distinctions and narratives. Third, speakers displayed a reflexive concern over the rationality and morality of national categorization and stereotyping. Speakers could manage the tension between the need to recognize both national diversity and entitativity by forging a distinction between Englishness (identified with homogeneity, ethnic nationalism and the past) and Britishness (identified with pluralism, civic nationalism and historical progress). However, accounts had a dilemmatic quality. The strategies speakers used to promote images of contemporary national in-group diversity often implicitly presupposed a normal moral order of national cultural homogeneity. The association of pluralism with values of progressive social change meant that accounts of 'our' distinctive lack of national character could carry tacit implications of relative superiority. General implications for social identity approaches to social categorization are discussed.

The concept of citizenship is currently the subject of extensive, and often heated, debate on the part of policy makers and social scientists. Many of the key concerns encapsulated in the idea of citizenship-collective identity, solidarity, pro-social behaviour, group boundaries, intra and intergroup conflict-also represent longstanding concerns on the part of social and community psychologists. However, at present, very little psychological theory or research directly addresses the subject of citizenship. The aim of this Special Issue is to explore how the construct of citizenship might contribute to social psychological understandings of social conflict and solidarity and, conversely, to consider how existing social psychological theories and methods might contribute to contemporary understandings of citizenship. The authors of the six articles in the Special Issue apply a range of theoretical perspectives (self-categorization theory, social identity theory, rhetorical psychology, the theory of social representations) and methods (experiments, surveys, interviews, ethnography) to examine situated understandings of citizenship in a variety of domains (civic and political participation, immigration attitudes, minority identities, nationalism). Despite their different approaches, the authors display a common concern to recognize complexity, contradiction and contestability as inherent, and often productive, features of the everyday construction and performance of citizenship. As a consequence, social psychological perspectives may have the potential to restore the damaged reputation of the citizen currently apparent in much policy and social scientific discourse.

This paper explores how the constructs of 'prejudice' and 'racism' were used and understood by respondents in an interview study concerning the settlement of Albanian refugees in Greece. Analysis indicated the existence of multiple, potentially contradictory, common sense understandings of prejudice and racism, analogous to some accounts of the prejudice construct in academic social psychology. However, notwithstanding the fact that respondents displayed multiple understandings of racism or prejudice in theory, these abstract formulations were rarely employed to account for actual instances of discrimination. Specific discriminatory acts against Albanian people were framed instead as matters of fear and risk. By virtue of being cast within a problematic of in/security rather than within the discursive frame of prejudice, particular hostile actions against the Albanian refugees could be glossed as reasonable and understandable.

What happens if one treats social identity as a flexible resource in conversational interaction? Close attention to the sequencing of talk suggests that speakers' identities are much more subtle than simple pre‐given category labels suggest, and that they change rapidly as a function of the ephemeral (but socially consequential) demands of the situation. Were a psychologist to have sampled the interaction only at one given point, they would have seen a participant using, or being attributed with, only one identity; but we show that speakers use, and attribute each other with, a variety of different identities as their business progresses. In so doing, the speakers can be seen not only to avow contradictory identities but also to invoke both group distinctiveness and similarity—and neither of these strategies are easy to square with social psychological theories of identity. We put what we find in this particular case study into the debate between, on the one hand, ethnomethodological preference for working from participants' own orientations to identity and, on the other hand, social psychological research practices which tend to privilege analytically given social categories. At the very least, we argue, the social psychological approach can be enriched by attending more to identity as a matter of situated description and less as a matter of perceptuo‐cognitive processing.

In this article we question recent psychological approaches that equate the constructs of citizenship and social identity and which overlook the capacity for units of governance to be represented in terms of place rather than in terms of people. Analysis of interviews conducted in England and Scotland explores how respondents invoked images of Britain as "an island" to avoid social identity constructions of nationality, citizenship, or civil society. Respondents in Scotland used island imagery to distinguish their political commitment to British citizenship from questions relating to their subjective identity. Respondents in England used island imagery to distinguish the United Kingdom as a distinctive political entity whilst avoiding allusions to a common or distinctive identity or character on the part of the citizenry. People who had moved from England to Scotland used island imagery to manage the delicate task of negotiating rights to social inclusion in Scottish civil society whilst displaying recognition of the indigenous population's claims to distinctive national culture and identity.