Discussion on a modest contribution to the understanding of social representation perspective

Abstract

The object of the present discussion is based on a paper of a Swiss sociologist on a campaign for preventing cardiovascular diseases. Based on a Bourdieu perspective, the author compares the preventive discourse to the everyday behaviours and attitudes in the food and health domains. I show how this paper offers an excellent introduction to the main propositions of social representations theory. Furthermore, it appears as a pioneer work for facilitating the articulation between sociological and sociopsychologigal approaches of representative thinking, and a fruitful contribution to the critical analyses of the implicit representations of health carried by the medical prevention model.