238 Social Psychology
psychology’s image of positivist “man” was further uncov-
ered to be commensurate with the Western ideology of pos-
sessive individualism, an “important ingredient of political
liberalism” and “predominant ideology of modern capital-
ism,” as Joachim Israel (1979) and others traced out (e.g.,
Sampson, 1977) in dissonance theory, level of aspiration
work, and social comparison group research. “Domination-
recognition” struggles provided another case in point, regard-
ing which Erika Apfelbaum and Ian Lubek (1976) asked
whether social psychology played a repressive role. Their
concern was that social psychology detracted attention from
identity processes, such as those among women and blacks,
and so eclipsed recognition of those relational spaces where
power shapes a group’s chances for visibility and its capacity
to claim an identity of its own (also see Apfelbaum,
1979/1999). Other critical historical studies elaborated this
central critique of social psychology’s subjects and subject
matters, such as Lita Furby’s (1979) and Karen Baistow’s
(2000) examination of the cultural, historical, and political
particulars of the concept of locus of control.
The Case of Locus of Control
Furby and Baistow both recognize several main features of
concepts articulated through notions of internal psychologi-
cal control, such as locus of control, level of aspiration,
learned helplessness, and self-efficacy. First, emphases on in-
ternal control reflect the discipline’s class-based interests in
“maintaining a prevailing control ideology that is as internal
as possible” (Furby, p. 180) and contributed to a fashioning of
a “self-management subject” (Baistow). Second, emphases
on self-determinism fit well with prevailing Protestant ethic
beliefs in the value of internal control, an integral ingredient
of capitalist ideology. Third, while for Furby this promulga-
tion of a self-determining subject indicates a repressive role
of psychology’s social control interventions, Baistow takes
this one step further to show a more productive potential of
psychology’s self-control ideologies. Drawing on Nikolas
Rose’s (1992) extension of Foucauldian analysis to psychol-
ogy, Baistow (2000) shows how, for example, increased
senses of internality could eventuate in challenges to the sta-
tus quo, such as black civil rights protests and the rise of black
militancy. In these cases, increasingly widespread notions of
locus of control introduced as solutions to problems of disad-
vantaged groups may have helped to make possible empow-
erment talk, now “commonplace in political rhetoric in the
USA and the UK in recent years and a seemingly paradoxical
objective of government policy and professional activities”
(p. 112). Contrary, then, to being overly individualized and
depoliticized psychological notions of control, locus of
control discourses became instead politicized through their
use in collective action to transform being powerless into
empowerment (Baistow, 2000).“Social Psychology in Transition”Reconnecting the Dots between the Personal
and the PoliticalIn addition to these critical histories of central social psycho-
logical concepts were those entered by women, feminist, and
black psychologists who provided detailed appreciations and
evidence on the social, cultural, historical, and political con-
tingencies of social psychology’s production of knowledge
on the one hand, and of social psychological life on the
other. Where many of these works dovetailed was on the
fallacy of attributing to nature what was instead, in their
view, thoroughly social. Psychologist Georgene H. Seward’s
1946 bookSex and the Social Order,for example, revealed
the historical contingencies of distinct sex-typed roles for
women and men by showing how these distinctions often
dissolved in times of economic or political turmoil. Just
years later, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1952) pub-
lishedThe Second Sex, whose central tenet, “woman is
made, not born,” struck a chord with Seward’s argument as
well as those who followed in subsequent decades. Betty
Friedan’s (1963) The Feminine Mystique rendered the
“woman question” anew through its language of humanistic
psychology identifying sex-role typing as stunting women’s
growth while forgoing a language of rights in favor of post-
war cultural discourse that neither wholly eschewed domes-
ticity nor wholly endorsed a single-minded pursuit of careers
for women (see Meyerowtiz, 1993). Dorothy Dinnerstein, a
student of Solomon Asch, published the feminist classicThe
Mermaid and the Minotaurin 1976, a book she had been
working on since the late 1950s and that stemmed from her
thinking through the “pull between individuality and the so-
cial milieu.” The nature of her questions and concerns car-
ried clear cold war preoccupations as well as feminist ones,
influenced by de Beauvoir and Norman Brown, in her at-
tempts to “resolve the contradictions between the Freudian
and the Gestalt vision of societal processes” (p. xii) and
those of gender arrangements. Kenneth B. Clark’s (1966a,
1966b) research on psychological hurt and social-economic-
political oppression of blacks, like his writing on civil rights,
and the dilemma of power and the “ethical confusion of
man” brought together the psychological and political. By
the late 1960s the black psychology movement voiced con-
cern over the discipline’s ethnocentrism and internal racism
(Richards, 1997).