Jackie Abell
Biographic Data
| ID | 124928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jackie Abell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jackie |
| FAMILY NAME | Abell |
| SIGNATURE | ABELL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8891-7881 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 217 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Analysing entertainment documentaries with discursive psychology incorporating Goffman’s concept of frames
Discursive approaches have established how entertainment documentaries about the super-rich can be analysed as a form of political communication to explore how positions on wealth inequality are legitimised. Programmes broadcast in the UK draw upon neoliberal ideology to present extreme wealth as the product of individual achievements as the nation is positioned as a meritocracy. This article offers an illustrative example of how ostentatious spe…
Exploring economic inequality with critical qualitative approaches in psychology
This editorial introduces our special issue showcasing how qualitative research methods can be used in psychological research to explore economic inequality. Economic and class-based inequalities are global problems that have a negative impact on people’s well-being. The papers within the special issue demonstrate how differing methodological approaches such as discursive psychology, thematic analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis…
Exploring how entertainment documentaries construct London to account for the residence of the international super-rich in the “hostile environment” for migrants
Unlike poorer migrant groups, governments offer visa inducements to attract wealthy individuals into a country. However, super-rich migrants’ impact on the UK has been shown to be negative. This research explored how entertainment documentaries account for super-rich individuals residing in London. Discursive Social Psychology was used to analyse 2490 min of programmes from non-subscription UK terrestrial channels broadcast throughout 2016 in the…
Examining the role of television programmes in legitimising inherited wealth and privilege for the super-rich in a society that values meritocracy
Recent years have seen the proliferation of television broadcasts that focus on the lavish lifestyles and consumption of “rich kids.” However, flaunting inherited wealth is an accountable activity within UK society that claims to be based on meritocratic values. Whilst wealthy individuals are a source of public spectatorship, they are also attributed with contributing to economic inequality and inhibiting social mobility. This study draws on soci…
You come back fighting. That’s what gives you the drive to achieve’
Inequality in society is legitimised through the ‘meritocracy myth’ and existing research claims that the affluence of the super-rich is the result of their superior traits. Discursive Social Psychology examines the ways in which psychological concepts such as personality traits function in talk. This research explores how entertainment documentaries construct the traits of the super-rich to legitimise their wealth. A corpus of 41.5 hours of terr…
Intersectionality of Ethno-cultural Identities and Construal of Distant Suffering Outgroups
In this paper, we explore how white Catholic men talk about the indirect dilemma of non-intervention for black ethnic outgroups. We illustrate how they mobilise global categorisation (all humanity) and use various forms of denial to deal with their non-involvement. Having analyzed representative fragments of their prejudice avoidance talk, we conclude with some observation about the strategic deployment of categories and denial forms as part of i…
Volunteering to Help Conserve Endangered Species
This study explores identity in providing voluntary help for endangered animal species. Identity is a cornerstone of social psychological explanations of helping behaviour but has not been understood in relation to human–animal relationships. Open‐ended questionnaires were administered to 111 volunteers working in a range of international conservation projects aimed at protecting endangered animals. Participants were asked their reasons for volun…
Defending the Faith(s)? Democracy and Hereditary Right in England
The persistence of traditional monarchies in modern societies, which are otherwise characterized by democratic and egalitarian values, remains a paradox in the social sciences. In part this is attributable to the lack of psychological investigation into the relationship between subject and sovereign, and in particular the ways in which the political and social values of the citizenry shape understandings of a hereditary monarch's right to represe…
Enacting national concerns
Although the study of national identity in social psychology has examined the various ways in which the national group is ‘imagined’, little attention has been paid to the many collective national commemorations, celebrations and rituals of state assumed to unite the nation. This is surprising given the number of celebrations and commemorations which fill the calendars of modern nations throughout the world and which are assumed by social scienti…
Children's Knowledge, Beliefs and Feelings about Nations and National Groups
The Minority‐Majority Conundrum in Northern Ireland
Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with ma…
Who ate all the pride? Patriotic sentiment and English national football support
The growing popularity of English national insignia in international football tournaments has been widely interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a renewed English national consciousness. However, little empirical research has considered how people in England actually understand football support in relation to national identity. Interview data collected around the time of the Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup tournaments fail to substantiate t…
‘They're not racist …’ Prejudice denial, mitigation and suppression in dialogue
Social scientific work on the suppression, mitigation or denial of prejudiced attitudes has tended to focus on the strategic self‐presentation and self‐monitoring undertaken by individual social actors on their own behalf. In this paper, we argue that existing perspectives might usefully be extended to incorporate three additional considerations. First, that social actors may, on some occasions, act to defend not only themselves, but also others …
We are an island
In this article we question recent psychological approaches that equate the constructs of citizenship and social identity and which overlook the capacity for units of governance to be represented in terms of place rather than in terms of people. Analysis of interviews conducted in England and Scotland explores how respondents invoked images of Britain as “an island” to avoid social identity constructions of nationality, citizenship, or civil soci…
Romantic Scotland, tragic England, ambiguous Britain
This article compares the ways in which references to ‘the (British) Empire’ were constructed and used in interview accounts of national identity and domestic politics in Scotland and in England. In Scotland, spontaneous accounts of Empire were typically formulated in conjunction with nationalist moral meta‐narratives. Respondents variously inferred heroic national character from Scotland's role in Empire, or cast Scottish history as an enduring …
English Identity and Ethnic Diversity in the Context of UK Constitutional Change
At the time of the devolution settlement in the UK, there was widespread concern that the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales would prompt a rise in English identity at the expense of British identity and, in turn, threaten polyethnic constructions of citizenship. Such presumptions typically rested on reified understandings of the category labels British and English, and conflated the construct of national ide…
Trying similarity, doing difference
Advocates of semi-structured interview techniques have often argued that rapport may be built, and power inequalities between interviewer and respondent counteracted, by strategic self-disclosure on the part of the interviewer. Strategies that use self-disclosure to construct similarity between interviewer and respondent rely on the presumption that the respondent will in fact interpret the interviewer's behaviour in this way. In this article we …
For Queen and Country? National Frames of Reference in the Talk of Soldiers in England
Social scientists frequently use the iconic figure of the soldier who fights and dies for the nation to exemplify the power of processes of national identification. However, little work has considered how soldiers themselves orient to the possibility of being motivated by a desire to ‘serve the country’. The present study explored this through a series of interviews with members of the British Army and Territorial Army. Although in explicit talk …
I Take Full Responsibility, I Take Some Responsibility, I'll Take Half of it But No More Than That
The focus of this article is the conversational management of blaming and accountability. In particular, we explore how involved speakers routinely allocate and avoid blame in everyday talk. In considering such a problematic notion of social interaction, we analyse the BBC interview between Princess Diana and Martin Bashir that was aired on British national television on 20 November 1995. In the analysis, we consider how different discursive stra…
English Identity and Ethnic Diversity in the Context of UK Constitutional Change
At the time of the devolution settlement in the UK, there was widespread concern that the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales would prompt a rise in English identity at the expense of British identity and, in turn, threaten polyethnic constructions of citizenship. Such presumptions typically rested on reified understandings of the category labels British and English, and conflated the construct of national ide…
We are an island
In this article we question recent psychological approaches that equate the constructs of citizenship and social identity and which overlook the capacity for units of governance to be represented in terms of place rather than in terms of people. Analysis of interviews conducted in England and Scotland explores how respondents invoked images of Britain as “an island” to avoid social identity constructions of nationality, citizenship, or civil soci…
Who ate all the pride? Patriotic sentiment and English national football support
The growing popularity of English national insignia in international football tournaments has been widely interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a renewed English national consciousness. However, little empirical research has considered how people in England actually understand football support in relation to national identity. Interview data collected around the time of the Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup tournaments fail to substantiate t…
Romantic Scotland, tragic England, ambiguous Britain
This article compares the ways in which references to ‘the (British) Empire’ were constructed and used in interview accounts of national identity and domestic politics in Scotland and in England. In Scotland, spontaneous accounts of Empire were typically formulated in conjunction with nationalist moral meta‐narratives. Respondents variously inferred heroic national character from Scotland's role in Empire, or cast Scottish history as an enduring …
Trying similarity, doing difference
Advocates of semi-structured interview techniques have often argued that rapport may be built, and power inequalities between interviewer and respondent counteracted, by strategic self-disclosure on the part of the interviewer. Strategies that use self-disclosure to construct similarity between interviewer and respondent rely on the presumption that the respondent will in fact interpret the interviewer's behaviour in this way. In this article we …
The Minority‐Majority Conundrum in Northern Ireland
Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with ma…
For Queen and Country? National Frames of Reference in the Talk of Soldiers in England
Social scientists frequently use the iconic figure of the soldier who fights and dies for the nation to exemplify the power of processes of national identification. However, little work has considered how soldiers themselves orient to the possibility of being motivated by a desire to ‘serve the country’. The present study explored this through a series of interviews with members of the British Army and Territorial Army. Although in explicit talk …
You come back fighting. That’s what gives you the drive to achieve’
Inequality in society is legitimised through the ‘meritocracy myth’ and existing research claims that the affluence of the super-rich is the result of their superior traits. Discursive Social Psychology examines the ways in which psychological concepts such as personality traits function in talk. This research explores how entertainment documentaries construct the traits of the super-rich to legitimise their wealth. A corpus of 41.5 hours of terr…
Volunteering to Help Conserve Endangered Species
This study explores identity in providing voluntary help for endangered animal species. Identity is a cornerstone of social psychological explanations of helping behaviour but has not been understood in relation to human–animal relationships. Open‐ended questionnaires were administered to 111 volunteers working in a range of international conservation projects aimed at protecting endangered animals. Participants were asked their reasons for volun…
Enacting national concerns
Although the study of national identity in social psychology has examined the various ways in which the national group is ‘imagined’, little attention has been paid to the many collective national commemorations, celebrations and rituals of state assumed to unite the nation. This is surprising given the number of celebrations and commemorations which fill the calendars of modern nations throughout the world and which are assumed by social scienti…
I Take Full Responsibility, I Take Some Responsibility, I'll Take Half of it But No More Than That
The focus of this article is the conversational management of blaming and accountability. In particular, we explore how involved speakers routinely allocate and avoid blame in everyday talk. In considering such a problematic notion of social interaction, we analyse the BBC interview between Princess Diana and Martin Bashir that was aired on British national television on 20 November 1995. In the analysis, we consider how different discursive stra…
Examining the role of television programmes in legitimising inherited wealth and privilege for the super-rich in a society that values meritocracy
Recent years have seen the proliferation of television broadcasts that focus on the lavish lifestyles and consumption of “rich kids.” However, flaunting inherited wealth is an accountable activity within UK society that claims to be based on meritocratic values. Whilst wealthy individuals are a source of public spectatorship, they are also attributed with contributing to economic inequality and inhibiting social mobility. This study draws on soci…
Intersectionality of Ethno-cultural Identities and Construal of Distant Suffering Outgroups
In this paper, we explore how white Catholic men talk about the indirect dilemma of non-intervention for black ethnic outgroups. We illustrate how they mobilise global categorisation (all humanity) and use various forms of denial to deal with their non-involvement. Having analyzed representative fragments of their prejudice avoidance talk, we conclude with some observation about the strategic deployment of categories and denial forms as part of i…
Defending the Faith(s)? Democracy and Hereditary Right in England
The persistence of traditional monarchies in modern societies, which are otherwise characterized by democratic and egalitarian values, remains a paradox in the social sciences. In part this is attributable to the lack of psychological investigation into the relationship between subject and sovereign, and in particular the ways in which the political and social values of the citizenry shape understandings of a hereditary monarch's right to represe…
I Take Full Responsibility, I Take Some Responsibility, I'll Take Half of it But No More Than That
The focus of this article is the conversational management of blaming and accountability. In particular, we explore how involved speakers routinely allocate and avoid blame in everyday talk. In considering such a problematic notion of social interaction, we analyse the BBC interview between Princess Diana and Martin Bashir that was aired on British national television on 20 November 1995. In the analysis, we consider how different discursive stra…
For Queen and Country? National Frames of Reference in the Talk of Soldiers in England
Social scientists frequently use the iconic figure of the soldier who fights and dies for the nation to exemplify the power of processes of national identification. However, little work has considered how soldiers themselves orient to the possibility of being motivated by a desire to ‘serve the country’. The present study explored this through a series of interviews with members of the British Army and Territorial Army. Although in explicit talk …
‘They're not racist …’ Prejudice denial, mitigation and suppression in dialogue
Social scientific work on the suppression, mitigation or denial of prejudiced attitudes has tended to focus on the strategic self‐presentation and self‐monitoring undertaken by individual social actors on their own behalf. In this paper, we argue that existing perspectives might usefully be extended to incorporate three additional considerations. First, that social actors may, on some occasions, act to defend not only themselves, but also others …
We are an island
In this article we question recent psychological approaches that equate the constructs of citizenship and social identity and which overlook the capacity for units of governance to be represented in terms of place rather than in terms of people. Analysis of interviews conducted in England and Scotland explores how respondents invoked images of Britain as “an island” to avoid social identity constructions of nationality, citizenship, or civil soci…
Romantic Scotland, tragic England, ambiguous Britain
This article compares the ways in which references to ‘the (British) Empire’ were constructed and used in interview accounts of national identity and domestic politics in Scotland and in England. In Scotland, spontaneous accounts of Empire were typically formulated in conjunction with nationalist moral meta‐narratives. Respondents variously inferred heroic national character from Scotland's role in Empire, or cast Scottish history as an enduring …
English Identity and Ethnic Diversity in the Context of UK Constitutional Change
At the time of the devolution settlement in the UK, there was widespread concern that the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales would prompt a rise in English identity at the expense of British identity and, in turn, threaten polyethnic constructions of citizenship. Such presumptions typically rested on reified understandings of the category labels British and English, and conflated the construct of national ide…
Trying similarity, doing difference
Advocates of semi-structured interview techniques have often argued that rapport may be built, and power inequalities between interviewer and respondent counteracted, by strategic self-disclosure on the part of the interviewer. Strategies that use self-disclosure to construct similarity between interviewer and respondent rely on the presumption that the respondent will in fact interpret the interviewer's behaviour in this way. In this article we …
The Minority‐Majority Conundrum in Northern Ireland
Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with ma…
Who ate all the pride? Patriotic sentiment and English national football support
The growing popularity of English national insignia in international football tournaments has been widely interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a renewed English national consciousness. However, little empirical research has considered how people in England actually understand football support in relation to national identity. Interview data collected around the time of the Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup tournaments fail to substantiate t…
Children's Knowledge, Beliefs and Feelings about Nations and National Groups
Enacting national concerns
Although the study of national identity in social psychology has examined the various ways in which the national group is ‘imagined’, little attention has been paid to the many collective national commemorations, celebrations and rituals of state assumed to unite the nation. This is surprising given the number of celebrations and commemorations which fill the calendars of modern nations throughout the world and which are assumed by social scienti…
Defending the Faith(s)? Democracy and Hereditary Right in England
The persistence of traditional monarchies in modern societies, which are otherwise characterized by democratic and egalitarian values, remains a paradox in the social sciences. In part this is attributable to the lack of psychological investigation into the relationship between subject and sovereign, and in particular the ways in which the political and social values of the citizenry shape understandings of a hereditary monarch's right to represe…
Volunteering to Help Conserve Endangered Species
This study explores identity in providing voluntary help for endangered animal species. Identity is a cornerstone of social psychological explanations of helping behaviour but has not been understood in relation to human–animal relationships. Open‐ended questionnaires were administered to 111 volunteers working in a range of international conservation projects aimed at protecting endangered animals. Participants were asked their reasons for volun…
Intersectionality of Ethno-cultural Identities and Construal of Distant Suffering Outgroups
In this paper, we explore how white Catholic men talk about the indirect dilemma of non-intervention for black ethnic outgroups. We illustrate how they mobilise global categorisation (all humanity) and use various forms of denial to deal with their non-involvement. Having analyzed representative fragments of their prejudice avoidance talk, we conclude with some observation about the strategic deployment of categories and denial forms as part of i…
You come back fighting. That’s what gives you the drive to achieve’
Inequality in society is legitimised through the ‘meritocracy myth’ and existing research claims that the affluence of the super-rich is the result of their superior traits. Discursive Social Psychology examines the ways in which psychological concepts such as personality traits function in talk. This research explores how entertainment documentaries construct the traits of the super-rich to legitimise their wealth. A corpus of 41.5 hours of terr…
Examining the role of television programmes in legitimising inherited wealth and privilege for the super-rich in a society that values meritocracy
Recent years have seen the proliferation of television broadcasts that focus on the lavish lifestyles and consumption of “rich kids.” However, flaunting inherited wealth is an accountable activity within UK society that claims to be based on meritocratic values. Whilst wealthy individuals are a source of public spectatorship, they are also attributed with contributing to economic inequality and inhibiting social mobility. This study draws on soci…
Exploring economic inequality with critical qualitative approaches in psychology
This editorial introduces our special issue showcasing how qualitative research methods can be used in psychological research to explore economic inequality. Economic and class-based inequalities are global problems that have a negative impact on people’s well-being. The papers within the special issue demonstrate how differing methodological approaches such as discursive psychology, thematic analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis…
Exploring how entertainment documentaries construct London to account for the residence of the international super-rich in the “hostile environment” for migrants
Unlike poorer migrant groups, governments offer visa inducements to attract wealthy individuals into a country. However, super-rich migrants’ impact on the UK has been shown to be negative. This research explored how entertainment documentaries account for super-rich individuals residing in London. Discursive Social Psychology was used to analyse 2490 min of programmes from non-subscription UK terrestrial channels broadcast throughout 2016 in the…
Analysing entertainment documentaries with discursive psychology incorporating Goffman’s concept of frames
Discursive approaches have established how entertainment documentaries about the super-rich can be analysed as a form of political communication to explore how positions on wealth inequality are legitimised. Programmes broadcast in the UK draw upon neoliberal ideology to present extreme wealth as the product of individual achievements as the nation is positioned as a meritocracy. This article offers an illustrative example of how ostentatious spe…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Identity (music (6 works)