Representation and Power

Power is tied to all of the identified dimensions of the dynamics of the collaboration, but it is an especially prominent factor regarding the dimension of ‘representation’, which elaborates the communicative process of constructing the legitimate ‘stake’ of the actor in the

collaboration. In order to gain a more fine-grained understanding of the discursive construction of the roles of the stakeholders¹, this study applies

‘positioning theory’ (Van Langenhove and Harré, 1999) to give a normative perspective on why the voice of certain actors is more pronounced in the collaboration, and certain issues and interests more prevalent. Positioning theory originates from the field of social psychology, and shares the same social constructivist roots as discourse theory, and is therefore interested in how social reality is produced through social interactions.

It was originally developed to study meaning-making in interpersonal communication, but its utility has been extended beyond its original purpose, for example, to study international conflicts (Moghaddam et al., 2007).

The main analytical tool in positioning theory is the analytical triangle (Figure 2), with three interrelated angles to analyze the positioning processes in interpersonal communications (Van Langenhove and Harré,

1 In the context of this study, the term “stakeholder” refers to the organizations participating in the regional place marketing projects (see Table 2 in Chapter 5).

1999). These are ‘speech acts’, ‘story lines’ and ‘positions’. Speech acts are utterances with certain culturally recognizable force effects such as criticism or praise (Austin, 1961). Positioning theory is interested especially in what kind of social tasks speech acts are used for, and towards what ends (Slocum and Van Langenhove, 2003). In order for speech acts to become sensible, they need to be framed in a context. In positioning theory these frames are conceptualized as story lines, which are narrative structures concerning certain social situations consisting of actions, events or episodes. In other terms, story lines are discursive tools to make sense out of the social situation. Story lines follow certain culturally meaningful forms, which highlights that they are constructed through interactions between actors. This means that they also have normative elements or

‘moral orders’ which can be understood as assumptions of how actors should be or act in the story line. Positioning theory is interested in this normative aspect of story lines, which it analyzes through the concept of positions i.e. sets of rights and duties attributed to the actors within story lines. ‘Rights’ here means the possibility to say or do certain things, while

‘duties’ reflects obligations or responsibilities for doing or saying things.

The subject of the positioning can be either an actor doing the speech act (reflexive positioning), or another actor present in the story line (interactive positioning) (Davies and Harré, 1999). Notable here is that ‘actor’ does not refer only to people, but also to more abstract entities such as places which can be positioned in the discourse (Slocum-Bradley, 2010).

Speech acts

Story lines

Positioning

Positions

Figure 2. Positioning triangle (adapted from Van Langenhove and Harré 1999)

The positioning process reflects power dynamics of the social situation in the sense that strong positions are characterised by a predominance of rights, while subservient positions with duties or obligations. The ability to attribute positions to oneself or others is not equally distributed, but rather depends on 1) the discursive ability, and 2) the location of the actor within the local moral order and networks (Van Langenhove and Harré, 1999). The former relates to the discursive skills of the actor which limit their possibilities to participate to the discourse. This can be considered as a matter of power, meaning that some specialised uses of language are restricted to certain groups of people, and therefore the power that comes with the use of language is not evenly distributed in the society (Van Dijk, 1998). This is a relevant notion regarding collaborations in expert-driven fields such as place marketing, where the knowledge about the subject is within the hands of a small group of experts. The latter aspect concerns the story line of the interactive situation, where certain distributions of rights and duties between actors are normatively supported and legitimated. This involves the ‘moral order’ in the story line, which

manifests as expectations or prescriptions of what should or should not happen, or how the actors should act in a given situation (Moghaddam et al., 2007a, p.13). As with discursive ability, the moral order relates to power in a sense that it can limit the discussion, as well as support certain points of view or actions (Van Langenhove, 2017). Because of this normative function of story lines, they can stabilise certain distributions of positions between groups, and therefore legitimize the power relations between them (Tan and Moghaddam, 1999). In this sense, positioning can be understood as a discursive struggle where actors position themselves and others in order to achieve a distribution of positions favouring their group.

Indeed, as Slocum-Bradley (2010) has emphasised, this struggle over which rights or duties belong to which person or group is often a source of conflicts between actors in a social situation, such as a collaboration.

The positioning theory draws attention to the interactive nature of positioning, which occurs through active negotiations or other social interactions (Harré et al., 2009). This means that the distribution of

positions between actors (or other entities which can be attributed agency in discourse) are not ‘determined’ by social structures, but rather they are co-constructed by people who interact with each other (Harré and Van Langenhove, 1999; Depperman, 2015). As Langenhove (2017) has noted, there are no social structures, but only people acting according to rules, customs or conventions. The agency of the actors comes into play especially in the form of power to activate moral orders which support certain positions.

This study argues that co-constructed story lines illustrate the power dynamics between participants, as they support certain distributions of positions. Hence, they influence the dynamics of collaboration, through normative expectations which support certain issues, interests and

representations over others. Further discussion conserning this argument is presented in the concluding Chapter 7 regarding the relationship

between the distribution of positions, discursive dynamics, and the discursive antecedents of the collaboration.