The social practice of stereotyping: Forming attitudes on gender and genetically modified food

Beskrivelse

Human beings are notorious categorizers with a predilection for defining, labelling and evaluating. By referring to categories like for instance sex, age, religion and occupation, we construct social roles for ourselves and for our fellow human beings, and we thereby seem to strengthen our sense of individual security. However, such categorization at the same time functions as a system of social control as stereotyped perceptions about who we are (our identities) and what we can do (our actions) also constrain our range of freedom (Sacks and Jefferson 1995); Schneider 2004; Pickering 2001). However, we not only construct categories for people, but also for things, drawing on an inventory of subjective stances afforded by the resources language holds for evaluation. In my talk I am going to suggest that no matter whether we categorize people or we categorize things, our approach builds on elements characteristic of stereotyping, which - by its evaluative and reproductive nature - plays an important role in the formation of attitudes and thus influences the choices available to us. These points will be illustrated through analysis of examples from focus group data, using the Appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005) as a model for identifying negotiable attitudes towards people and things. The data used in the study was obtained from the rather different fields of banking and biotechnology.