Concepts play a part in any scientific endeavour. They simultaneously serve as receptacles for previously attained knowledge, as vehicles of scientific and didactic communication, and as building blocks in the construction of new descriptive and explanatory schemes. In this sense, concepts are central to the cognitive organisation of scientific disciplines. But disciplines also differ from one another, and not just in terms of the stock of concepts deemed necessary for internal scientific communication but also, for example, in terms of the logic of conceptual change, the relative influx of connotations, and the degree of universal adherence to specific definitions.

One crucial characteristic of the social sciences is that they share part of their vocabulary with the lay people they study. In some cases, social scientific terminology has trickled into everyday speech; in other cases the social sciences have proceeded by refining and redefining locutions found in natural languages. The aim of this book is to study empirically, by means of a detailed case study, the mechanisms that shape concept formation in the social sciences. It focuses on the history of the concept of ‘mobbing’, with special reference to the interaction between science and lay conceptions. This condensed conceptual history shows that the public discourse, that was instrumental in the diffusion and entrenchment of the notion of mobbing in the early 1970s, significantly shaped the career, contents, and uses of the corresponding scientific concept.