The Rhetoric of Conflict Inside and Outside the Stadium: The Case Study of an Italian Football Cheer Group - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 201

football context more than in other ones. Thus, applying the self-categorization
theory (Turner et al. 1987 ), in crowds, individuals do not simply lose control,
rather they act in accordance with their contextually specified and relevant social
identification (Reicher 1984 , 1987 , 1996 ; Drury and Reicher 2000 ; Potter and
Reicher 1987 ).
A more psychological account (Kerr 1994 ) assumes that “hooligans” are individ-
uals subjected to excessive arousal, which may arise from perceived lacks in their
everyday life. In this vein, more recent developments of the theory of fan aggression
in sports (Wann and Grieve 2005 ) incorporates the spectator's need for a positive
social identity and his or her degree of identification with the team as being critical
in setting the stage for aggression. It is argued that spectator aggression is more
likely to occur in persons high in identification with the team relative to those low in
identification and that this aggression is a direct result of the human desire to create
and maintain a positive social identity. That is, highly loyal fans, namely members of
cheer groups, because of their inability to disassociate themselves from unsuccessful
groups in an attempt to protect their identity, will resort to the aggressive strategy of
shouting at or derogating others to try to regain their positive social identity.
Even if these approaches have enabled researchers to better explain the riot
phenomenon, they have attracted some criticisms: several studies could neither
individuate attributes predicting riot participation nor clarify the relations between
violence and crowd behaviors (Stott and Reicher 1998 ).
In addition, some ethnographic accounts emphasize the importance of impression
management and possible differentiation of fans, as in the case of the “carniva-
lesque” conduct of Scottish fans in the 1990 Italian World Cup versus English
hooligans (Giulianotti 1991 ). In other words, fans can vary their conduct and
behavior in accordance with their adherence to different “discourses” and forms of
action (Giulianotti and Robertson 2004 ). As a consequence, beyond these theoretical
and, certainly, subjective perspectives, social and contextual factors and dynamics
should be considered when talking about social conflict among fans. Therefore, a
more situated perspective is advocated so as to better investigate cheer groups as
cultural and discursive constructions.

11.1.2 Cheer Groups as Cultural and Discursive Forms of Life

In the field of cultural (Cole 1998 ) and discursive psychology (Harré and Gillet
1994 ; Mininni 1995 ), the social, cultural, historical, and political context in which
people live is fluid and malleable, based on the discursive practices and actions of
all social groups. In accordance with socio-constructivism, both private and public
discourses (including mass media) play an important role in forming and informing
ingroups and outgroups (Kohl 2011 ; Power and Peterson 2011 ) and, therefore, are an
integral part of the dialogical construction of both subjective and social positioning
and social relations (Power 2011 ; O'Sullivan Lago 2011 ). As a consequence, the