: Distance à l’objet et représentation sociale de la crise économique

International audienceThis study had two objectives: to report the concept of distance to the object (Abric, 2001) to the Romanian research field of social representations and to verify the functionality of this concept in relation to a particular object: the economic crisis. Distance to the object was operationalised as attribute variable using participants from three different professional groups: bank officials, small and medium entrepreneurs, students from economic profile. Data from the 90 participants were collected using the technique of guided association and a semi-structured interview. The main assumption, confirmed by initial data considered in this study, indicated that, despite the apparent similarities, there are differences between the content and structure of social representations of the three professional categories. Even if the “money” (the main element of the content) and “unemployment” (the pillar strength of structure evocations) are the common denominator formal, functional, the two terms have different meanings and target different temporalities in each representation: technical- timeless (bank officials), existential-present (entrepreneurs), and theoretical-future (students). Plastic expressed, the construction of economic crisis representation illustrates that, although living under the same sky, we have different cognitive-behavioral perspectives, even if there is a consensus on the negative valence of the object represented. Results, consistent with other research data (Dany & Abric, 2007; Salesses, 2005), confirm the confidence in the heuristic value of the concept of distance to the object, in fact, a good “litmus” of the relationship between practices – social representations