The Psychology of Restorative Justice

Managing the Power Within

Theo Gavrielides, Theo Gavrielides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317018667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit pénal

This ground-breaking collection dares to take the next step in the advancement of an autonomous, inter-disciplinary restorative justice field of study. It brings together criminology, social psychology, legal theory, neuroscience, affect-script psychology, sociology, forensic mental health, political sciences, psychology and positive psychology to articulate for the first time a psychological concept of restorative justice. To this end, the book studies the power structures of the restorative justice movement, the very psychology, motivations and emotions of the practitioners who implement it as well as the drivers of its theoreticians and researchers. Furthermore, it examines the strengths and weakness of our own societies and the communities that are called to participate as parties in restorative justice. Their own biases, hunger for power and control, fears and hopes are investigated. The psychology and dynamics between those it aims to reach as well as those who are funding it, including policy makers and politicians, are looked into. All these questions lead to creating an understanding of the psychology of restorative justice. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and campaigners.

PART I:
Developing Theory: Social Sciences Meet Psychology and Neuroscience

Chapter 1
A Micro-Social Psychology of Restorative Justice: The Contribution of Positioning Theory

Giuseppe Maglione

Introduction

Among the diverse developments within social sciences during the past 50 years, one stands out as particularly relevant (Korobov, 2010). This is the analytical endeavour to bridge macro and micro dimensions of social action, focusing on the fluid transactions between small-scale/short-term social practices and long-term/large-scale institutions (Bateson, 1972; Granovetter, 1973; Goffman, 1974, 1981; Bourdieu, 1984). In this perspective, the traditional distinctions between individual and social or agency and structure, have become more blurred, precarious and questionable. The so-called ‘discursive turn’ in human and social sciences has further fuelled such a transformation, which is at the same time epistemological, methodological and theoretical (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). This work aims at showing the potential contribution of a recent instance of this scholarly development – that is, positioning theory (PT) – to the understanding and the advancement of restorative justice (RJ). The concept of ‘positioning’ consists in an attempt to challenge the static idea of ‘role’ within traditional social psychology, in order to articulate both a more interactive and dynamic sense of the multiple ‘selves’ one ‘has’, and also how these are actively constructed, in conversations between people or in other discursive contexts (Davies and Harré, 1990; Harré and van Langenhove, 1992, 1999; Harré and Moghaddam, 2003). The positioning’s grammar elaborated by Rom Harré and colleagues can be applied as an heuristical tool to develop a specific understanding of RJ practices, focusing on the power dynamics and conversational shaping of the self which might take place within RJ encounters. Moreover, PT can be used as the backdrop for a ‘normative’ elaboration of RJ. This means that it could help to point out the potential of RJ to redefine the criminal/legal labels which constrain participants’ possibilities of doing, being and becoming, offering instead opportunities to rethink themselves, their actions and relationships, in ‘restorative’ ways. Along these lines it is possible to advocate for a discursive understanding of RJ as an emancipatory and transformative framework for dealing with social conflicts and harms.

The argument of this chapter is established throughout two main sections. First, I provide an introduction to PT, focusing on Harré and colleagues’ work, its scholarly underpinnings and recent deployments. In the second section I introduce and discuss the rationale behind the application of PT to RJ, as well as concrete normative and descriptive ways PT can contribute to the development of research and practice of RJ. Some concluding thoughts are finally presented.

Positioning Theory

The concept of ‘positioning’ is originally known for its use in the marketing of products, services and brands (Trout, 1969). In this context, ‘positioning’ consists in detecting and trying to occupy a market niche for a brand, product or service by discursively establishing a unique and appealing identity. Within social sciences the first use of ‘positioning’ was made by Wendy Hollway (1984), who described women’s and men’s subjectivities as ‘the product of their history of positioning in discourses’ (p. 228), making reference to the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. Harré and colleagues, starting from the early 1990s, have further elaborated on Hollway’s intuition, offering an articulated theory (i.e. PT) which has gained momentum in the scholarly literature over the past 15 years, mainly due to its contribution to bridge the gap between people, institutions and societies in social analysis (Zelle, 2009, p. 1).

PT emerged in the academic milieu of late 1970s social psychology. Overall, social psychology consists of ‘the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behaviour in social situations’ (Baron, Byrne and Suls, 1989, p. 6). Harré, originally a philosopher of science, has contributed to the revision of social psychology through the elaboration of a broad interdisciplinary approach (that is, ‘ethogenics’; see below) which combines social psychology with philosophy of language and microsociology (Harré and Secord, 1972; Harré, 1979; Harré and Gillet, 1994). Within this perspective, PT represents the most well-known and widely applied conceptual development. In the following sections, I will focus on the PT’s ontological, epistemological and theoretical underpinnings as well as on the possibility of enriching PT by re-elaborating its ‘post-structuralist’ roots.

Positioning Theory: Positions, Speech Acts and Storylines

As Davies and Harré have openly acknowledged, PT emerged as an attempt to overcome the problems inherent in the use of the concept of role in developing a social psychology of selfhood (Davies and Harré, 1990). They hold that the concept of ‘positioning’ can be used to facilitate a linguistically orientated thinking of the interplay between individual and social in ways that the use of the concept of ‘role’ would not permit. ‘Positioning’, as a methodological tool, is meant to offer a different viewpoint on the dynamic aspects of social encounters, charting their interactive unfolding in everyday life, in contrast to the way in which the use of ‘role’ serves to highlight static features. More precisely, Harré (2004) describes PT as ‘the study of the nature, formation, influence and ways of change of local systems of rights and duties [that is, what you may say/do and what you may not] in small scale social interactions [that is, conversations]’, influenced by broader societal discourses (p. 5).

‘Positioning’ per se is a metaphorical idea that expresses the discursive process by which an individual ‘locates’ herself/himself (or is located by others) within and through conversation, how speakers’ rights and duties, opportunities, obligations and constraints are taken up and laid down, ascribed and appropriated, refused and defended in the fine grain of the encounters of daily lives, within an unfolding storyline (Davies and Harré, 1990; van Langenhove and Harré, 1999). How these speakers’ sets of rights and duties (or positions) are shaped and used, within and through conversation, is what a positioning analyst aims to understand (van Langenhove and Harré, 1994). Rights and duties form a sort of ‘local moral domain’ inserted and gaining meaning within wider storyline(s) developed during an encounter, a dimension usually neglected by psychologists working on conversational interactions (Harré et al., 2009).

The precondition for the positioning is the fact that people’s words are provided with ‘illocutionary force’, the capacity to ‘do things with words’ in the outer world (Austin, 1962). This is nothing but the social force of discursive acts (also known as speech acts): words do not passively describe the world, but actually shape it, defining our possibilities of doing, being, becoming. It is possible to schematically represent the structure of positioning as the combination of position(s), illocutionary force(s) and story line(s). These three elements and their relationships form a sort of triangle within which it is possible to interpret a wide range of social events (Harré, 2004).

Types and Examples of Positionings

Positioning acts have been described by van Langenhove and Harré (1999) as varying according to ‘who positions who’ and according to the content of positions. The main way of classifying them is between first-, second- and third-order positioning acts. A ‘first-order positioning’ takes place when an individual locates herself/himself and others, engages in speech acts and follows a storyline (van Langenhove and Harré, 1999, p. 20). Second-order positioning occurs when the first-order positioning is intentionally challenged by a speaker and has to be then negotiated. This situation might happen when one of the participants in a conversation feels that she/he is being ‘wrongly’ positioned and thus demands to be repositioned, claiming new rights and duties in the social interaction. Third-order positioning happens when a speaker negotiates a positioning act taking place in a conversation with someone else (van Langenhove and Harré, 1999, p. 21). This occurs when participants in a particular conversation observe another conversation and challenge the positioning happening in this other encounter.

An example can clarify how different forms of positioning actually work. An instance of first-order positioning paradigmatically occurs during criminal justice trials.¹ When a suspected offender tries to challenge the judge or the prosecutor’s statements, the judge (or prosecutor) usually authoritatively reminds (that is, discursively positions) the suspected offender that ‘it’s not his role’, that the ‘court questions and he answers’, that he cannot go ‘off topic’, that ‘we are here to discuss a specific charge’ and so on. In this case, we can easily detect a specific institutional storyline (the trial) based on a wider discursive reservoir (‘conventional’ criminal justice), a certain set of speech acts (questioning, deposition, cross-examination, reprimanding and so on) and one main example of first-order positioning (the authority locates in the conversation the suspected offender, imposing certain rights and duties as a speaker – but also as a legal subject), mobilized within and through a face-to-face interaction.

Let us imagine now, that once the suspected offender has been positioned by the court, he responds saying that the court or the prosecutor has been ‘paid’ by the victim; for this reason he will not recognize the court/prosecutor’s authority, because in short they ‘nothing have in common with the really fair justice’. In this way the suspect challenges the first-order positioning enacted and imposed on him in the first instance by the authority, drawing upon a certain discursive field (the ‘really fair justice’), performing a certain speech act (public criticism from a moral stand), ultimately repositioning the legal authority and herself/himself.

At this point of the story, the court might consider the suspect’s behaviour as contemptuous and then order a police officer to limit the suspect’s freedom, scheduling a new hearing. Getting out of the courtroom the suspect might finally shout to the audience, that he was actually allowed as a ‘good and abiding citizen’ to denounce the court’s corruption; it was indeed his ‘duty’. In this way we also see a third-order positioning act lastly performed. Two things should be additionally noticed. The first is that the different participants’ moral stands anchored in a given societal discursive reservoir (‘conventional’ criminal justice), create a rigid asymmetry between the participants, enforcing the court’s positioning of the suspect. This shows a typical power dynamic taking place when certain positionings are enacted by certain subjects (the court), performing speech acts with different illocutionary force. The second remark is that this kind of process might result in deeply affecting the participants’ experience of themselves, even modifying their idea of themselves (understood as social self; see below), especially if repeatedly performed (for example, the suspect’s self-image as ‘good and abiding citizen’ might be weakened or even strengthened by the court’s actions).

Selves, Others and Power

As already highlighted, PT is originally meant to contribute to a social psychology of selfhood, freed from the objectifying consequences of ‘role theory’. Traditionally, within social psychology, the formation of the self in relation to social situations is a crucial topic. The ‘role theory’, as a specific social-psychological perspective, has typically interpreted the development of self as related to roles (or social positions – for example, husband, student, writer, etc.) tied to statutes (sets of social expectations) rooted in wider social structures (Biddle, 1986). In this way, the self emerges from the individual’s strain to conform to social expectations in a broader social context. This perspective helps to describe and explain the self’s static features (or fixings), but ‘pays the price’ to objectify and reduce the individual agency in shaping one’s personhood (Davies and Harré, 1990).

In contrast, PT focuses on the formation of self from the specific angle of the local and conversational production of the personhood, as a dynamic and fluid process which involves an agentic role for individuals. On this view, Harré starts from the basic idea that persons ‘have’ selves (Harré, 2004, p. 3). He identifies four main items in personhood that the word ‘self’ is currently used to designate. There is the embodied self, as the unity and continuity of a person’s point of perception and action, a relatively self-identical and fixed self. The autobiographical self is the ‘character’ of the stories we tell about ourselves, a sort of hero or heroine of stories, whose qualities might vary according to within which story the self takes place. The social self comprises the personal multiple qualities that an individual expresses in a social encounter. Finally, the idea of self-concept refers to what individuals think of themselves, their beliefs, skills, moral qualities, fears and life courses. While the embodied self is invariant under the transformations that occur in everyday life, the autobiographical self, the self-concept and especially the repertoire of social selves (targeted by PT) may and do change and sometimes in fundamental ways (Harré, 2004, p. 4). The positions which individuals create, negotiate, resist and finally adopt contribute to organizing our social selves, understood as dynamic discursive constructs. In this way PT endorses a de-essentialized notion of self, as a ‘point of suture’ between subject positions (Hall, 1996, p. 5). Positions, in fact, not only ‘locate’ people within certain ‘storylines’ (Andreouli, 2010, p. 14.4), but also provide people with ways of making sense of the world. As Davies and Harré (1990) remark, ‘[o]nce having taken up a particular position as one’s own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, storylines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned’.

A relevant issue related to the fashioning of the social self through positioning is the significance and role of the power dynamics entailed in positioning processes. PT conceptualizes power looking at who manages to ‘get’ the right to position and who does not, but also at the ‘“moral quality” associated with a set of rights and duties which delimit what can be said or done from a certain position, in a particular context and towards a particular speaker’ (Andreouli, 2010, p. 14.5). In positioning themselves and the other or in being positioned, individuals exert power by initiating, accepting or rejecting positioning acts. The production of ‘valid’ positions, their social support (that is, illocutionary force), the ‘entitlement’ to position the other and the condition for ‘true’ positions are all issues which prominently represent the role of power dynamics within positioning (Andreouli, 2010, p. 14.5).

Ontological, Epistemological and Theoretical Underpinnings

PT is grounded in a wide range of philosophical (Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault), sociological (Erving Goffman) and psychological (Lev Vygotsky) concepts and theories. As already stated, the disciplinary framework within which PT emerges is Harré’s ethogenic revision of social psychology. Ethogenics is an interdisciplinary approach aiming at understanding social order looking at how individuals attach significance to their actions and form their selves by linking these to the larger structure of rules and cultural resources in society (Harré and Secord, 1972).

Harré’s positioning is based on the ethogenic project to identify and understand rules used by people to organize conversations and their social effects. In the ethogenic perspective, positioning is the site as much as the tool to investigate the dynamic and ‘ever changing assignment of rule-governed rights and duties (inherent in storylines) among individuals or groups in social encounters’ (Korobov and Bamberg, 2006, p. 257). Ethogenics might be considered akin to the more recent discursive turn in psychology, both at theoretical and methodological level (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), as criticism against both the individually orientated behaviouristic psychology and psychodynamic analysis.

Besides ethogenics, as already mentioned, it is possible to identify at least four main thinkers, whose works ontologically, epistemologically and theoretically ground PT: Goffman, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Vygotsky. Goffman’s interest in the conversational construction and maintenance ...