ABSTRACT
At the end of the last chapter, I suggested that people’s accounts of themselves, the stories they weave to account for their lives, the things they have done and intend to do and so on, are heavily dependent upon the co-operation of others. Our self-narrative, and indeed any account we may offer of ourselves or our actions, therefore must inevitably be a negotiated one, a joint product which emerges from social interaction. Davies and Harré (1990) suggest ‘positioning’ as a term to refer to this process of negotiated accountproduction. But the concept of positioning is also used by social constructionist writers (particularly those influenced by poststructuralism) to refer to the process by which our identities and ourselves as persons come to be produced by socially and culturally available discourses. Although the idea of positioning bears some surface similarity to the concept of ‘role’, there are important differences between them. These are described in more detail by Davies and Harré (1990), but focus upon the dynamic nature of positioning and the need to get away from thinking of people as occupying pre-ordained societal ‘slots’ that come with a pre-written script or set of expected behaviours, which people somehow ‘slip on’, like an overcoat, over their real selves. In this chapter, I will outline what is meant by positioning both when used to talk about the role of discourses in the production of personhood and identity, and when used in a more interpersonal context.
