Making Sense of “Helping Friends”: “Flexing” Motivational Accounts of Cannabis Growing

Abstract

Using ethnographic fieldwork among cannabis growers and dealers, I investigate how they adjust their self-proclaimed motives for growing to fit others’ normative expectations. Scholars have typically interpreted the motivational accounts of offenders as either reports of what really happened or as ideal types. To scrutinize the complexity of their motives, I use narrative ethnography to show how they are situationally constructed. In particular, I show how one large-scale cannabis grower provides four motivational accounts in four separate settings to illustrate how these accounts are artfully created and situationally conditioned. All four accounts include the topic and utterance of “helping friends,” but they are used to signify very different and even contradictory meanings. To analyze how people can tell different and even competing stories without compromising their sense of being self-coherent, I introduce the concept of “flexing meaning.” The term flexing is a verbification of the word flexible, and it enables us to analyze how people and accounts create coherency and credibility by adjusting—flexing—meanings of established utterances and expressions. Using this case study, I discuss how people can make sense of and live by different and conflicting accounts without experiencing that they are being inauthentic.