Social Representations of Justice as Developing Structures: Sociogenesis and Ontogenesis

Abstract

Social injustice has been present in Argentina, as in other Latin American countries. Retributive justice has become a daily matter of debate since the fear of crime and the degradation of political and social participation have led to the weakening of social bonds and fractures in the sense of community. Reflections and discussions on diverse – even opposite – ways to understand and promote justice have a long tradition in social sciences that can be traced to Ancient Greece. The justice-injustice opposition could be considered a theme that permeates the entire history of Western culture (Marková 2000), leading, within the same society, to the coexistence of different ways of understanding justice based on different ideological groundings (Campbell 2001). Social representations (henceforth SR) are the product of everyday exchanges and are constructed as a way to understand social objects that challenge the cultural available meanings and require a symbolic coping process. The ontogenesis of SR is the process through which individuals reconstruct SR while appropriating them and, in so doing, develop diverse social identities (Duveen/Lloyd 1990). This chapter presents a set of studies aimed at understanding the sociogenesis and ontogenesis of SR of justice, as well as the relationship between the two processes.