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Thematization and Collective Positioning in Everyday Political Talk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2009

Jonathan White
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Abstract

This piece outlines some of the findings of an exploratory research project into popular forms of identification in the contemporary European context and their implications for projects of transnational integration such as the European Union. Drawing on a series of group interviews conducted with taxi-drivers in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic, it looks at how political problems are articulated in discussion, how speakers position themselves in relation to these problems, and how this differs according to the topics in question. It is suggested that these routinized discursive practices shape the way speakers make sense of the political world, and in turn the kinds of political association that make sense to them as citizens.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 699 - 709
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Peter Wagner, ‘Crises of Modernity: Political Sociology in Historical Contexts’, in Stephen Turner, ed., Social Theory and Sociology: The Classics and Beyond (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 97–115.

2 For a review of theoretical contributions to the EU debate, see Peter Wagner and Heidrun Friese, ‘Survey Article: The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 10 (2002), 342–64. On the empirical literature, see Martin Kohli, ‘The Battlegrounds of European Identity’, European Societies, 2 (2000), 113–37.

3 A like-minded approach is that of Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, ‘Europe Viewed from Below: Agents, Victims, and the Threat of the Other’, in Richard K. Herrmann, Thomas Risse and Marilynn B. Brewer, eds, Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 214–46.

4 This perspective is informed by the social-theoretical debate on ‘tacit knowledge’: cf. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina and Eike Von Savigny, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001); Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Knowledge and Presuppositions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). For an understanding of ‘positioning’, I draw on the discourse-theoretical work of Harré (in Rom Harré and Luk Van Langenhove, eds, Positioning Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)) and Mouffe’s application of the concept ‘subject-position’ (Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 97).

5 On the group-interview method, see William Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David L. Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research: Qualitative Research Methods Series 16 (London: Sage, 1997); and Michael Bloor et al., Focus Groups in Social Research (London: Sage, 2001).

6 On ‘self-understanding’, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond Identity’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 1–47.

7 Broadly, for the countries studied, the majority of taxi-drivers earn below the average income, and few have completed a university education. Calculation of earnings is problematic for two reasons, however. First, much depends on the times and the number of hours the individual chooses to work. Secondly, many drivers are wary of anyone who might turn out to be a tax-inspector, and so are reluctant to declare their income. Data compiled by national statistics offices should, therefore, be treated with scepticism. A better approximation can be had by browsing the internet chatrooms which taxi-drivers themselves use to compare earnings with one another – see e.g. www.taxi-driver.co.uk or www.taxiforen.de/forum. These indicate earnings after running costs (fuel, licensing, maintenance, car rental etc.), and before tax, of around €25,000 in Britain, €20,000 euros in Germany (though lower in the east), and €6,000 in the Czech Republic, each of which falls short of Gross National Income per capita as cited in the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2006 database. Drivers working night hours in capital cities (who do not feature in this study) may nonetheless earn higher figures.

8 Each discussion was led by the author in the local language, and recorded using audio microphone. Participants were encouraged to select the venue.

9 In Britain and Germany the rates were €60–70 per head; in the Czech Republic about €40. These were above waiting-time, and intended to represent a good return on two hours’ work for most drivers: however, they were not so high that a driver might not, in principle, have made the same amount in that time from fare-paying customers.

10 Cf. Pamela Conover, Donald D. Searing and Ivor Crewe, ‘The Deliberative Potential of Discussion’, British Journal of Political Science, 32 (2002), 21–62. Some studies based on participant observation in the United States have emphasized the tendency of non-elites actively to avoid discussion of politics: see, in particular, Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Others conversely argue that such discussion is by no means uncommon: see Katherine Cramer Walsh, Talking About Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The focus here is on what happens when the opportunity is provided, with the provision of opportunities treated as an important but separate issue.

11 For further details on participants, see the author’s webpage: http://jonathanpjwhite.googlepages.com/home.

12 The cards are reproduced on the author’s webpage: http://jonathanpjwhite.googlepages.com/home. The exercise draws on Anthony Coxon, Sorting Data: Collection and Analysis (London: Sage, 1999).

13 Amongst the interpreters of Wittgenstein this approach draws particularly on Barry Barnes, ‘Practice as Collective Action’, in Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and Von Savigny, eds, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, pp. 17–28; and Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 2, pp. 49ff.

14 On the ‘co-operative principle’ see H. Paul Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, eds, Syntax and Semantics: Vol. 3, Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 45–7.

15 Political psychologists have debated whether individuals carry ‘schemas’ of the political world, and of what ‘domains’ these might be composed (cf. Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, Social Cognition (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1984); Pamela Johnston Conover and Stanley Feldman, ‘How People Organize the Political World: A Schematic Model’, American Review of Political Science, 28 (1984), 95–126. The suggestion in Johnston Conover and Feldman is that there may be four basic domains of stimuli about which people have political beliefs – economic matters, social concerns, foreign affairs and racial affairs (with a suggested linkage between the last two). This has a clear affinity with findings here, differences in time and location notwithstanding.

16 Other studies, while not investigating the clustering of problems, identify a similar set of concerns amongst contemporary Europeans: e.g. Optem, ‘The European Citizens and the Future of Europe: A Qualitative Study in the 25 Member States’, Eurobarometer, 2006, available at http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/quali/ql_futur_en.pdf.

17 Cf. the distinction made by Mouffe, The Return of the Political.