Acknowledgements

Now that we have finished this book, we experience a strange mix of relief, exhaustion and pride. We hope that the latter will stay with us the longest. To indulge in that emotion, though, we also have to be very clear that there are many people who enabled us to feel proud now. This book is not an achievement of two people, but of many. The list of friends, colleagues and family members who were patient enough to listen to our ideas and who encouraged us is long, and it would be impossible to mention all of them by name. We will therefore limit ourselves to the ones that stand out in our memory as having been exceptionally generous with their time and support. We are very grateful for the input and valuable advice from our colleagues Tom Postmes and Russell Spears (both at the University of Groningen), and for the encouragement and feedback we received from our colleagues at home: Alex Haslam, Nik Steffens, Katie Greenaway, Tegan Cruwys and Kim Peters from the Social Identity and Groups Network (the SIGN team) at the University of Queensland. Special thanks go to Christine McCoy for the excellent administrative support she provided, and to our research assistants Coosje Veldkamp, James Schmidt, Michael Thai and Anh Thai (Hannibal) for their help with the research as well as the referencing and organisation of the many reprint permissions. We are grateful to the many honours students who build their research project around ideas presented in this book (Austin Chu, Marcus Goh, Nikita Healy, Rachel Ryan and Andrew Robinson); some of these student projects were essential for us to build our empirical case, and they are proudly presented here. We also would like to thank the editorial team at Cambridge University Press for their valuable feedback and for helping to get the book through production. We are also convinced that there would be no book had it not been for the financial support from the Australian Research Council (ARC, DP1210053). We are very grateful for this. Last but certainly not least, we would like to thank our teenage daughters, Helen and Sophie, for their patience, and for having to put up with parents who frequently broke their promise not to ‘talk shop’ over dinner; we will try our best to improve.