Using data from policy analyses, media analyses and a European-wide survey about public perceptions of biotechnology conducted in 1996 and again in 1999, it is shown how a country's public develops an everyday understanding of a new technology (genetic modification) construed as potentially harmful by the media. To understand the reliance on images and related beliefs, we propose a theory of collective symbolic coping. It identifies four steps: first, the creation of awareness; second, production of divergent images; third, convergence upon a couple of dominant images in the public sphere; fourth, normalization. It is suggested that symbolic coping occurs in countries where a recent increase in policy activity and of media reporting has alerted the public; that this public show a high proportion of beliefs in menacing images; that these beliefs are relatively independent of pre-existing popular science knowledge; and that they are functionally equivalent to scientific knowledge in providing judgmental confidence and reducing self-ascribed ignorance. These propositions are shown to be true in Austria and Greece. Several implications of the theory are discussed, including social representation theory and public understanding of science.

Both conversation analysis (inspired by ethnomethodology) and discourse analysis (of the kind proposed and practised by Potter and Wetherell) are usually treated as self-sufficient approaches to studying the social world, rather than as mere methods that can be combined with others. And there are two areas where their conflict with other approaches is clearest. First, they reject the attribution of substantive and distinctive psychosocial features to particular categories of actor as a means of explaining human behaviour. Second, they reject use of what the people they study say aboutthe world as a source of information that can ever be relied on for analytic purposes. These two negative commitments mark conversation analysis and discourse analysis off from almost all other kinds of social scientific research. In this article, I consider how sound the justifications are for these commitments. I conclude that they are not convincing and that neither approach should be treated as a self-sufficient paradigm. 10.1177/09579265030146004

This paper engages with recent debates in geography and associated disciplines that are concerned with the wider analytic issues to be confronted in researching an elite. Drawing on a case study of the construction of a policy position on GMOs and the Environment in Ireland, the methodological challenges encountered researching up the hybrid elite central to this development are interrogated. In particular, emphasis is placed on the politics of time, which becomes central when a new sector is emerging, and meanings and definitions are being constructed.