Ongoing changes in many Western countries have resulted in more healthcare services being transferred to municipalities and taking place in patients’ homes. This greatly impacts nurses’ work in home care, making their work increasingly diverse and demanding. In this study, we explore home‐care nursing through a critical discourse analysis of focus group interviews with home‐care nurses. Drawing on insights from positioning theory, we discuss the content and delineation of their work and the interweaving of contextual changes. Nurses hold a crucial (...) position in home healthcare, particularly in ensuring care for sicker patients with complex needs. Assessing health needs, performing advanced care, and at the same time, providing customized solutions in various homes were identified as distinctive for home‐care nurses’ work. Changes have made nurses’ work become driven by comprehensive tasks and acute medical needs that require much of their competence and time. Urgent care seems to take precedence in nurses’ work, leaving less time and attention for other tasks such as conversations and support for coping with everyday life. This underlines the need to investigate and discuss the content and scope of nurses’ work to help shape the further development of home‐care nursing. (shrink)

This paper examines methodological issues associated with the theory of planned behaviour and explains that an alternative account of data used to support this theory can be provided by positioning theory. A case is presented that shows tests of the theory of planned behaviour fail to eliminate the possibility of alternative explanations for co-variation in its data. An agency or person-centered alternative shows how a causal interpretation can be reinterpreted as evidence of the actions of a person. Unlike the conceptualisation (...) of the individual as behaving in keeping with postulated underlying cognitive laws or rules we assume that the person has, through socialisation, acquired the skills necessary to initiate and manage their own actions. Unlike the interest in TPB data as a causal explanation of action we draw attention to the interpretation of patterns in these data as an aggregate of each person using a common mode of explanation to justify and explain their intentions. (shrink)

Contemporary social theory has consistently emphasized habitual action, rule-following, and role-performing as key aspects of social life, yet the challenge remains of combining these aspects with the omnipresent phenomenon of self-reflective conduct. This article attempts to tackle this challenge by proposing useful distinctions that can facilitate further interdisciplinary research on self-reflection. To this end, I argue that we need a more sophisticated set of distinctions and categories in our understanding of habitual action. The analysis casts light on the idea that (...) our contemporary social theories of self-reflection are not consistent with everyday notions of agential knowledgeability and accountability, and this conclusion indicates the need to reconceptualize discourse and subjectivity in non-eliminative terms. Ultimately, the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity turns out to be a theoretical necessity for the conceptualization of discursive participation and democratic choice. (shrink)

In a collaborative work situation at a distance, the use of avatars to represent collaborators reduces collaborative effort. Also, animated avatars can help distant users to ground their relationship and facilitate their interaction because they materialise visual clues for the distant collaborators and their current activity. To check the validity of these hypotheses we set up an experiment based on the use of a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) synchronised for collective medical decision-making. Several teams of practitioners from different disciplines will (...) be required to deal with liver tumours displayed in Argonaute 3D. In this paper, we provide some evidence from existing studies for the hypotheses and select several measures to estimate the grounding process in CVEs. Next, we briefly describe the setup used to collect observable data with Argonaute 3D and we summarise first observations acquired with practitioners. (shrink)

This paper addresses the application of positioning theory, a new emerging theoretical scheme on the issue of cultural stereotyping. First, a critical conceptual analysis of the words‘cultural stereotype’is presented. Secondly, the basic tenets of positioning theory are outlined. Finally, it will be demonstrated how the framework of positioning theory can be used to analytically refine the concept of cultural stereotype. The main upshot of the article is that within social psychology, the concept of cultural stereotype is used in a conceptually (...) vague and blurred way and that, with the necessary conceptual refinements, other research-agendas on stereotypes will have to be tackled if social psychologists want to contribute anything to the societal efforts of changing stereotypes. (shrink)

A transformational model of professional identity formation, anchored and globalized in workplace conversations, is advanced. Whilst the need to theorize the aims and methods of clinical education has been served by the techno-rational platform of ‘reflective practice’, this platform does not provide an adequate psychological tool to explore the dynamics of social episodes in professional learning and this led us to positioning theory. Positioning theory is one such appropriate tool in which individuals metaphorically locate themselves within discursive action in everyday (...) conversations to do with personal positioning, institutional practices and societal rhetoric. This paper develops the case for researching social episodes in clinical education through professional conversations where midwifery students, in practice settings, are encouraged to account for their moment-by-moment interactions with their preceptors/midwives and university mentors. It is our belief that the reflection elaborated by positioning theory should be considered as the new epistemology for professional education where professional conversations are key to transformative learning processes for persons and institutions. (shrink)

Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of (...) particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others. (shrink)

This article explains how data associated with attitude change and persuasion in mainstream psychology and social psychology can be reinterpreted as evidence of the agentive ability of taking a position. A critical review is made of the elaboration likelihood model and a position model is adapted from positioning theory. The postulates of the elaboration likelihood model are then subjected to critical scrutiny by means of comparison with our position model. In this way regularities associated with attitude change and persuasion are (...) interpreted as evidence of a deliberative process, involving negotiation and the use of supporting and opposing arguments. We present this as evidence of the commonly held agentive ability to position oneself and anticipate the positions of others. (shrink)

This article proposes an analytical framework that combines Conversation Analysis, Positioning Theory, and Stance Analysis to study communalization and distinction as basic interactive mechanisms within group interactions. The framework is based on the premise that participants in multi-party interactions constantly manage the local demands of the ongoing conversation and turn-by-turn talk as well as implicitly or explicitly evoked references to global discourses, which in turn are closely related to the topic currently discussed. By considering both micro- and macro-contextual features in (...) the analysis of group interactions, it is possible to reach a deeper understanding of dynamic group activities. The framework has been empirically developed based on data from a study on epistemic positioning practices in adolescents’ group interactions about popular TV series in Germany. The data comprises ten videotaped focus group discussions that have been elicited in a school context. By applying the framework to the analysis of a single case from the corpus, insights can be gained, both on how group members’ finely adjust their epistemic and evaluative stances as well as on how the participants themselves interactively link their stances to broader discourses. (shrink)

Fugue and chaos are used in their contemporary meaning. Elements of the fugue, albeit a ‎small number of universals, will be demonstrated in the area of visual and verbal colors. ‎Chaos dominates the internet, fashion, and everyday life. The visual and verbal colors are ‎differentiated and their communicative potential is indicated alongside the diachronic changes. The prototypes of colors are the interface between visual and verbal colors.‎.

Building upon Thornton's (1991) work on teachers as “curricular-instructional gatekeepers,” the author explores what guided the curricular decision-making for one novice teacher concerning controversial issues that center on race, social class, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues. Qualitative case study revealed context, student demographics, and teacher positionality as influencing this teacher's choices regarding these themes in her curriculum. Findings indicated that this teacher was willing and able to challenge racist views in her classroom when she was a student (...) teacher and her students more closely mirrored her own race and social class. When she was a full-time teacher of students who were of a different racial and class background, she was unable to similarly challenge their homophobic beliefs. Implications for teacher education are discussed. (shrink)

Although existing scholarship offers critical insights into the working mechanisms of project-based research funding, little is known about the actual practice of writing grant proposals. Our study seeks to add a longitudinal dimension to the ongoing debate on the implications of competitive research funding by focusing on the incremental adjustment of the funder/fundee relationship around a common discursive practice that consists in describing and evaluating research projects: How has the perception of what constitutes a legitimate funding claim changed over time (...) and why? By investigating the normative framework enacted in the justification strategies of applicants, we shed light on the historical coevolution of the increasing competition for project funding, the epistemic culture of applicants, and grant writing rhetoric. To do this, we mobilize a comprehensive data set consisting of archival data from Europe’s oldest and largest funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as well as a corpus of 80 successful grant proposals written between 1975 and 2005. We find that the 1990s mark an important normative consolidation of what we consider to be a legitimate funding claim: Ensuring the success of the project and the project’s results becomes a major concern in applicant rhetoric. This time period coincides with a substantive rise in the level of competition for project funding. Yet, even though justification strategies might seem to address the same issues in grant proposals across the disciplines under investigation, the normative framework to which applicants refer differs according to the applicant’s epistemic culture. (shrink)

This article contributes to the concept of social values by presenting analytical tools that explore how social values are classified, re-presented and interpersonally performed in the construction of identities. I approach social values as classificatory systems of acceptability and desirability that are collectively generated. The meanings of social values are embedded in culture and in power imbalanced social relations; they constantly undergo reformulation in identification processes and are also used to define the social order. I suggest that social values can (...) be analysed in relation to aspects of representation and interpersonal positioning that are also involved in the construction of identities: Value classifications involve compartmentalising moral orders into e.g. good, desirable, important, necessary; value projects are concerned with how value classifications and content occupy roles and become oriented to action; and value positioning is concerned with how narrators align with value classifications and projects as well as with individuals and groups seen to share or reject such classifications and projects. (shrink)

A conception of parental experience is proposed to enhance the move of the study of parenting into the interpersonal realm by describing parental subjectivity from the parent's point of view. Explanations are based on that which the parent can be accountable for, on parental dialogues with observers/clinicians about their dialogues with their infants. This conception of parental subjectivity is compared with other conceptions which define parental subjectivity as the mental apparatus of the parent and not as representing the evolving relation (...) of the parent with the infant, and with explanations which consider parental reports in terms of the parent's psychodynamics and cognitive abilities rather than in terms of the on-going dialogues between themselves and their infants. The paper introduces a typology of parental dialogues with observers/clinicians about their dialogues with their infants, within the context of the non-verbal nature of the infant's communication. The findings from empirical examinations of this typology are presented, and their implications for the proposal that the study of parental relations with their infants should consider the parent's accountability are discussed. (shrink)