Positioning theory (e.g., Davies & Harré, 1990, 1999) studies the rights, duties, and obligations distributed among interlocutors or characters in and through conversations or narratives. The aim is to understand how those rights, duties, and obligations shape social structures while being shaped by them. The focus is on the social action, resisting the idea that “social behavior is a response to a social stimulus” (Harré, Moghaddam, Cairnie, Rothbart, & Sabat, 2009, p. 5). Rather than causation or hypotheses to interpret the meanings associated with social action, the theory capitalizes on what people are doing and saying in momentary conversational exchanges. As the theory focuses on the moment to explain the actions in a moral landscape, it takes in beliefs and practices as well as historical and social dimensions. This, according to Harré et al. (2009), is an important contribution of the theory to the cognitive psychology that neglected an important “dimension to the processes of cognition – namely concepts and principles from the local moral domain” (p. 6). Therefore, positioning theory is an effective tool to understand the complex interaction between psychological processes and social encounters within a moral landscape (Harré et al., 2009).
The theory is multidisciplinary, as it draws from cultural/discursive psychology,1 feminism, and poststructuralism, 2 aiming to understand how individuals gain or negotiate access to rights and duties to perform particular kinds of meaningful actions in a social episode, which can be a conversation or social gathering (Harré, 2012). Harré and Slocum (2003) argue that there are three categories of actions: “Those one has done, is doing, or will do; those which one is permitted, allowed or encouraged to do; and those which one is physically and temperamentally capable of doing” (p. 125). They further state that “positioning theory is concerned with the relations between these three domains. The focus, however, is on the relation between what one has or believes one has or lacks a right to perform and what one does, in the light of that belief” (p. 125). Harré (2012) argues that, in many cases, “the rights and duties determine who can use a certain discourse mode – for example, issuing orders, giving grades, remembering a past event” (p. 4). An essential goal of the theory is, therefore, to highlight practices that inhibit certain groups of individuals from saying certain things or performing certain sorts of acts or actions in discursive practices (Harré, 2012). The theory aims to accomplish this goal through a study of positions created in story lines as well as the social force of what is being said and done.
Positioning theory was developed in the 1990s by Rom Harré. Harré and his colleagues (e.g., Davies & Harré, 1990, 1999; Harré, 2012; Harré et al., 2009; Harré & Van Langenhove, 1991; Harré & Van Langenhove, 1999a; Moghaddam, Harré, & Lee, 2007) advanced the theory since then. Other influential scholars, including Bamberg (1997), Deppermann (2015), Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, and Cain (1998), and Wortham (2000), have also written extensively on the concept of positioning and/or positioning theory, critiquing, expanding, and deepening our understanding of the theory or certain elements of it. I present the current debates about the theory in great detail in Chapter 7.
Positioning theory has received considerable attention in a wide variety of disciplines. The application of the theory to various types of studies has resulted in new conceptualizations and understandings about some of its concepts. In the rest of this chapter, I first provide a short overview of the historical development of the theory. I then elaborate on the complex nature of the interaction among positioning, story lines, and rights and duties. I also would like to note that, throughout this book, I primarily review and rely on the principles of positioning theory promoted by Rom Harré and his colleagues for two main reasons. First, as I have stated, Harré and his colleagues are widely regarded as the primary scholars advancing the theory. Second, in the fields of applied linguistics and education, nearly all of the positioning studies I have read have been built or focused on the work by Harré and his colleagues (see Kayi-Aydar & Miller, 2018 for an extensive review). Given the strong influence of the work by Harré and his colleagues, I reference their work often throughout the book.
Positioning Triangle
Positioning theory offers a triangle, which consists of positions, story lines, and act interpretations, as an analytic framework. Those three mutually determine, influence, and shape one another in the unfolding social episodes (Harré, 2012). Harré further explains that “if any one changes – for example, by a successful challenge to the distribution of rights and duties, then all three change” (p. 6). Since positioning theory is partly built on John Langshaw (“J. L.”) Austin’s speech act theory (1962), speech acts and actions are considered to be an important component of the positioning triangle. Harré (2012) defines an action as “a meaningful, intended performance (speech or gesture)” and an act as “the social meaning of an action” (Harré, 2012, p. 8).3 In an effort to advance positioning theory, Herbel-Eisenmann, Wagner, Johnson, Suh, and Figueras (2015) propose replacing “speech acts” with “communication acts”:
Later work suggested that paralinguistic aspects of contributions like gestures (Harré, 2012) and physical positions and stances (Moghaddam, Harré, & Lee, 2008) also contribute to the interpretations of the speech action. Thus, we have begun to refer to these as communication acts to recognize that social force can be determined by more than just speech. (p. 187)
This is a meaningful suggestion that I support given the increasing number of studies that use paralinguistic elements along with physical positions in explaining positioning in story lines. Pinnow and Chval (2015) state that multimodal analysis, which “incorporates discourse and conversation analysis in order to examine linguistic utterances and draws upon research in multimodal communication” (Pinnow & Chval, 2015, p. 5), provides important insights into how semiotic resources are employed by individuals as they engage in positioning acts. In the next section, I explain the notions of positions, positioning, and story lines.
Positions and Positioning
Davies and Harré (1999) drew on Hollway (as quoted in Davies & Harré, 1999), who used the term position in his work on gender, to refer to presentations of self in communicative events. Davies and Harré (1999) define a position as
a complex cluster of generic personal attributes, structured in various ways, which impinges on the possibilities of interpersonal, intergroup, and even intrapersonal action through some assignment of such rights, duties and obligations to an individual as are sustained by the cluster. (p. 1)
According to Harré et al. (2009), “position s are features of the local moral landscape,” which “consists of practices” (p. 9). These practices, “habitual ways of speaking and interacting” (Deppermann, 2015, p. 370), vary widely; examples might include criticizing someone, assigning someone a task, giving a grade, and so on. Harré et al. (2009) suggest that “we, as analysts, extract from these practices something we call a ‘position’ which someone seems to ‘occupy’” (p. 9). A position may reflect social status, moral or personal attributes, characteristics or abiliti...