Strategies for linking individual psychology and social structure: Interdisciplinary and cross‐disciplinary social psychology

Abstract

Exploring relationships between individual psychology and social structure is taken to be the critical task of social psychology. Two alternate strategies for accomplishing this task are identified. The interdisciplinary strategy, embodied in the interpretive sociologies, develops a unified body of research and theory concerned with interaction, a phenomenon that exists at the intersection of psychology and sociology, and forms a bridge between them. The cross‐disciplinary strategy examines relationships between psychological and social‐structural variables.A review of relevant literature embodying each of these strategies suggests that the limits and liabilities of each are partially checked and remedied by the advantages and strengths of the other. The interdisciplinary strategy has the advantage of theoretical coherence, but as currently practised it tends to underemphasize social‐structural issues. The cross‐disciplinary strategy gives social structure its due but often ignores mediational processes and suffers from theoretical as well as professional fragmentation. A social psychology containing interdisciplinary and cross‐disciplinary enterprises, both operating in concert with ‘psychological social psychology’, can provide the strongest base for understanding the mutual dependence of individual psychology and social structure.