Given that pride, shame, guilt, humiliation and embarrassment have both social and psychological elements to their experiences, the study of pride and shame is usually conducted by social psychologists. Social psychology is, however, not itself a unified field, consisting of psychological and sociological perspectives (House, 1977; DeLamater, 2006). Psychological social psychology starts from the inside out, focusing on the individual to study how they respond to social stimuli, whereas sociological social psychology starts from the outside in, starting with the social and cultural context and studying how this affects individuals. While pride and shame has mainly been studied from the psychological perspective (eg Tangney and Dearing, 2002), there are many who have critiqued such an approach as too narrow and limiting to understand the complexity of experiences of pride and shame (eg Gordon, 1981; Scheff, 2003). The approach taken in the research outlined in this book follows on from such critiques to argue that we cannot understand these experiences without understanding the social, cultural and political pressures that are exerted on social work institutions, organisations and practitioners.

This book, therefore, takes a sociological approach to social psychology, being broadly grounded in a constructionist orientation. The foundation of such a position is that people make sense of their experience through social interaction (Geertz, 1973), principally through language (Wittgenstein, 1967), which is not considered to represent some objective reality, but, rather, constitutes their social worlds. Language, therefore, enables not just knowledge and beliefs to be created, but also social institutions and identities (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Given the importance of language in the creation of people's worlds, to understand their experience, their beliefs, their identities and their emotions, we need to understand the discourses that construct and maintain such a world. We can consider a discourse as ‘a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements … that in some way together produce a particular version of events’ (Burr, 1995: 48), which not only provides meaning for individuals and communities, but also provides the boundaries and, therefore, the possibilities for acting, thinking and feeling (Foucault, 1990).

A major strand of sociological social psychology within Europe argues that within the marketplace of discourse, certain opinions, images, metaphors and ideologies eventually become collectively adopted, and objects and things in the world are named, equipped with attributes and values, and integrated into a socially meaningful world (Wagner, 1996).