My new book,
“Submerged Goals. Social Psychology of Group Conflict in Liquid Modernity”, has just been published by Multimage. It is the
ninth book I have published and probably one of the works most closely connected to my studies over the past few years.
The starting point is an apparently simple question:
when a group enters into conflict, are we really arguing about what we say we want?Not always. Behind an explicit disagreement there may be personal interests, needs, expectations and goals that individual members do not openly declare, but which continue to influence their choices and behaviour.
This is the basis of the
Submerged Goals Hypothesis, the theoretical model I propose in the book. The idea is that, alongside a group’s official and shared objectives, there may be less visible individual goals which, under certain conditions, can shape the discussion, intensify opposition and make it more difficult to reach a common solution.
The book goes back to the major theories of sociology and social psychology on conflict, while attempting to reinterpret them within a society that is very different from the one in which those theories were originally developed. Twentieth-century organisations and groups were often built around relatively stable forms of belonging and strong collective identities. Today, in what has been described as
liquid modernity, social bonds are more fragile, identities are more mobile, and individuals move through different groups while carrying their own interests, needs and personal goals with them.
Submerged Goals therefore emerges from an attempt to
update the study of group conflict for contemporary society, not by abandoning the classic theories, but by using them as a starting point for understanding new dynamics.
It is a book on social psychology, but it deals with very concrete situations: associations, organisations, companies, work teams, movements, communities and, more generally, all those contexts in which people who claim to be pursuing the same objective may suddenly find themselves in conflict.
The book is published by
Multimage and is available in paperback for
€13.
For information and orders:Submerged Goals on the Multimage website
TORNA AGLI ARTICOLI
