Citizen weeks or the psychologizing of citizenship.

Abstract

Arland Deyett Weeks (1871-1936) was an American educator and social reformer who published The Psychology of Citizenship in 1917 with the intention of compiling the psychological, psychobiological, and psychosocial knowledge needed for governing modern democratic Western industrialized societies, as well as offering suggestions for intervention and social reform in the educational, legal, and occupational domains. His point of view can be placed within the progressive social and intellectual movement that characterized the policies of the United States in the first decade of the 20th century. His sociopolitical ideas were fed by transcendental and pragmatic sources, especially with respect to the way of dealing with tension between the individual and the collective. Modern psychological techniques (occupational, educational, legal psychology, etc.) nourished his reform program. In this article, we contextualize Weeks's book within these ideas and show its historical significance in the sociocultural and intellectual context that gave it meaning.

Social psychology and citizenship: A critical perspective

“…Nevertheless, there has historically been some social psychological work on the topic and, more recently, citizenship has emerged as a subject of renewed interest in the discipline. In their review of social psychological literature on citizenship, Stevenson, Dixon, Hopkins, and Luyt () observe that citizenship research has early roots in social psychology (see also Loredo‐Narciandi & Castro‐Tejerina, ), reflecting early scholars' (such as Gordon Allport's) interest in enhancing citizens' democratic participation. While, in the context of the broader de‐politicisation and individualisation of the discipline, these critical concerns did not flourish at the time, there has been some work on citizenship in the discipline.…”

Social citizenship and immigration: Employment, welfare, and effortfulness in online discourse concerning migration to the United Kingdom.

“…Indeed, this is arguably behind the absence of concern with citizenship more broadly from social psychology in the latter part of the 20th century. As Loredo-Narciandi and Castro-Tejerina (2013) have demonstrated, citizenship was a concern in some early variants of social psychology, but this waned as the discipline came to be characterized by an experimental and hypothetico-deductive impetus as it sought to model itself increasingly on the natural sciences in the decades after the Second World War (Stevenson et al, 2015).…”