It is a great pleasure to write this introduction to Michael Hogg's Kurt Lewin Award address. I first met Michael Hogg (Mike) in 1983 at the University of Bristol where he had just completed his PhD supervised by John Turner, and where Mike and I were appointed as assistant professors responsible for the whole social psychology program. We were temporary substitutes for Turner (who had moved to Australia) and Howard Giles, who had moved to California. We became great friends and lifelong collaborators. In 1985 Mike moved to a postdoc with Turner at Macquarie University in Sydney, and subsequently an associate professorship at the University of Melbourne in 1986 and then on to the University of Queensland, from 1991. There he founded the Centre for Research on Group Processes. After a period as visiting professor at Princeton University from 1997 to 1998, and an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at Queensland from 2004 to 2006, he moved to Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles where he directs the prestigious social identity research laboratory.
Mike's phenomenal research output has earned him fellowships and recognition from all of the major professional societies in his field. These include his election as a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1991), the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI, 2003); the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP, 2009); the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP, 2009); and the Association for Psychological Science (2010). He served as council member of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2012, and was then elected its president in 2013, a rare example of a non-North American holding that position. His achievements have also been recognized through the 2020 Distinguished Lifetime Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity, the 2021 SPSP Campbell Award for distinguished achievement and sustained excellence, and, celebrated here, the 2022 SPSSI Kurt Lewin Award.
As one of the most direct descendants of the Tajfel/Billig/Turner/Giles group, Mike has been a central figure in bringing social identity theory to international prominence. His early work with Turner provided one of the cornerstones of self-categorization theory, establishing both the empirical foundations and communicating the details of the theory. But most importantly it is his subsequent work to connect and engage with researchers in other parts of the discipline, by inviting contributions to edited collections, arranging conferences and seminars, and engaging with their interests so energetically, that enabled the social identity perspective to shift from being a niche European theory to a central and mainstream part of social psychology. In fact it is hard to envisage any current social psychological work on intergroup relations or group processes in social psychology that does not invoke social i