Developments within the social identity tradition have led to work on the inductive aspects of categorization and the relation between personal and social identity, individuality and groupness. Other issues raised by Doise represent important areas for research and theoretical discussion.
The choice of Willem Doise to give the 1987 EAESP Tajfel Memorial Lecture was most apt. As always, his remarks are interesting, frank and constructive. I shall try to reply in the same spirit of constructive discussion. recognizes that social identity (SI) ideas have continued to develop since the intergroup theory of the early 1970s and rightly includes self-categorization theory (SCT) within this development. It is from the perspective of SCT that I shall reply, since I see SCT as the contemporary response of the SI tradition to the issues he raises. An important development in SI research in the late 1970s was a shift in focus from the problem of social conflict to the problem of the relationship of the individual to the group. SCT came into being to address the problem of the relationship between personal and social identity. The early intergroup theory was so successful that many people (not Doise) seem to think that SI theory came to a halt in 1976 (which is about when the intergroup theory was finalized). If this were true, I could accept Doise's initial remarks, but I believe that many researchers, including myself, already feel both in tune with their import and that we are researching the relevant issues, not as complementary to SI ideas but as derivations from them.
For example, taking the inductive aspects of categorization: SCT is a theory of psychological group formation. It proposes that group behaviour is individuals acting in terms of a shared social identity (and less in terms of their personal differences). Group formation is seen as a distinctive psychological process which depersonalizes self-perception. For this process to be explanatory we must be able to specify the antecedents of social categorical self-perception: how categories (social and selfcategories) form and become salient in perception, when individuals will be perceived as a group, etc. Such hypotheses have been developed and are being tested -about how individuals come to