From one new law to (many) new practices? Multidisciplinary teams re-constructing the meaning of a new disability law.

This paper explores how a new French law incorporating a new conceptualization of disability formulated at the international level by the WHO is appropriated at the local level by multidisciplinary teams of professionals in charge of the assessment of disability. Drawing on social representations theory, its concept of cognitive polyphasia and its conceptualization of legal innovation, the paper specifically examines how the teams deal with the tensions between the old and the new models of disability and how the group dynamic is associated with how they do this: by hybridization of old and new models, by selective prevalence according to context, or by displacement of one model. Focus groups with the teams (n = 65 from 10 groups), analysed with indicators of interaction, bring evidence of the three forms. They show how different groups, by drawing differently, depending on their relational dynamics, from a variety of meaning systems circulating at the cultural level, reach different decisions that may lead to different practices in the local implementation of the same laws. We finish by discussing how social representations theory, linking the cultural/global and the interactional/local levels, can enhance our understanding of how socio-psychological processes intervening in the appropriation of legal innovations may produce different practical implementations of the same new laws.

How groups cope with collective responsibility for ecological problems: Symbolic coping and collective emotions.

This study explores the way groups cope with collective responsibility for ecological problems. The social representations approach was adopted, and the collective symbolic coping model was used as a frame of analysis, integrating collective emotions to enhance the understanding of coping processes. The original feature of this study is that the analysis is at group level. Seven focus groups were conducted with French students. An original use of focus groups was proposed: Discussions were structured to induce feelings of collective responsibility and enable observation of how groups cope with such feelings at various levels (social knowledge; social identities; group dynamics). Two analyses were conducted: Qualitative analysis of participants' use of various kinds of knowledge, social categories and the group dynamics, and lexicometric analysis to reveal how emotions varied during the different discussion phases. Results showed that groups' emotional states moved from negative to positive: They used specific social categories and resorted to shared stereotypes to cope with collective responsibility and maintain the integrity of their worldview. Only then did debate become possible again; it was anchored in the nature-culture dichotomy such that groups switched from group-based to system-based emotions.