Prolegomena toward integrating social psychological and communicative parameters of intergroup relations

Abstract

This prologue to a special issue on social psychological processes and intergroup communication begins by outlining the constituents of the field of intergroup communication. This includes many of the major publications, disciplines and orientations involved, the methods, social groups, and communicative features studied together with selected research paradigms, applied and social domains, and theories featured. The empirical articles that follow are discussed with respect to two fundamental issues. The first refers to a seminal distinction manifest in social identity theory, namely, how social interactions can be distinguished, conceptually and operationally, as either interindividual or intergroup. Consequently, the articles are discussed in terms how they are variably manifest as intergroup encounters. The second issue relates to past principles of intergroup communication that are articulated, refined, and elaborated further by recourse, in the main, to the emergent concepts in this special issue.