A discussion of positioning theory: An interview with Michael Bamberg and Luk Van Langenhove

Abstract

Since 2015 a Positioning Theory conference has been held biannually in either Europe or the US. These conferences have become a significant event for scholars and practitioners interested in the development and application of PT providing thereby a platform for discussing the latest research, sharing insights, and fostering collaborations. In the fourth edition of the conference, organised in Finland in July 2024, Professor Van Langenhove and Professor Bamberg both provided keynotes and Pasi Hirvonen and Bo Allesøe Christensen seized the opportunity of engaging both in an interview discussing their insights, contributions and personal thoughts about PT and its history.

Introduction

Following the seminal introduction of Positioning Theory by Davies and Harré (1990), the theory has gained significant traction within the domain of social and discursive psychology. Subsequent developments of the theory and positioning analysis have been advanced by scholars such as Luk Van Langenhove and Michael Bamberg amongst many others. These contributions have expanded the theory’s application across various fields, including education, anthropology, communication, and political science (see McVee et al., 2024). Positioning Theory provides a framework for analysing social interactions by examining the positions and storylines that persons adopt, and how these in turn shape their behaviour and identity.

Since 2015 a Positioning Theory conference has been held biannually in either Europe or the US. These conferences have become a significant event for scholars and practitioners interested in the development and application of Positioning Theory providing thereby a platform for discussing the latest research, sharing insights, and fostering collaborations. In the fourth edition of the conference, organised in Finland in July 2024, Professor Van Langenhove and Professor Bamberg both provided keynotes and Pasi Hirvonen and Bo Allesøe Christensen seized the opportunity of engaging both in an interview discussing their insights, contributions and thoughts about Positioning Theory and its history.

Professor Emeritus Luk Van Langenhove is a renowned scholar in the field of social sciences, particularly renowned for his contributions to the study of Positioning Theory. Van Langenhove has made significant contributions to the development of the theory, particularly in understanding the moral contexts of intentional action, the relationship between agency and structure, and the dynamics of social episodes. His contributions have been instrumental in broadening the scope of Positioning Theory’s application in the analysis of social interactions and international relations.

Professor Michael Bamberg is a highly esteemed scholar in the field of psychology, with a particular focus on narrative and identity. Bamberg’s contributions to Positioning Theory include his work on narrative practices and the role of positioning in identity construction. He has explored how individuals use narratives to position themselves and others, thereby shaping their identities and social interactions. The insights provided by Bamberg’s research into the interplay between narrative, positioning and identity have further enriched the theoretical framework of Positioning Theory.

During the interview, Bamberg and Van Langenhove provided detailed descriptions of their personal engagement with Positioning Theory and its historical development. They also contextualized the theory within the broader movement of discursive psychology. Additionally, the interview explores differing views on the role of theory and its accompanying ontology in social psychological research. This discussion leads to considerations of how the role of theory impacts the methodological use of Positioning Theory, as well as future directions and potential challenges for research inspired by this framework.

The interview took place on July 31, 2024 at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio Campus, and was recorded and afterwards transcribed in. The speakers include Pasi Hirvonen (PH), Luk Van Langenhove (LVL), Michael Bamberg (MB) and Bo Allesøe Christensen (BAC)

Interview

BAC: Thanks, Luk and Michael, for doing this with us. Let us start with how would you describe your way into Positioning Theory? How did you encounter it? What has it meant for you and why did it appeal to you?

MB: I have given this a lot of thought because it’s a long story, and it could probably be cut into just a couple of claims of positioning myself in terms of “this is who I am,” or “this is who I became”. I started to get into psychology at the height of the cognitive revolution. And that term is relevant because Rom Harré picked up on it. This was at a time when the mind had become the topic, I mean, the topic of psychology. So, the mind had just been discovered, so to speak. And this happened in the early/mid-70s when there was a lot of money flowing into cognitive science.

At that time I was very excited about studying what, from my perspective now, a little bit disrespectful, is located basically between the ears. Yeah, that’s where the mind was or still basically is. And trying to get into the mind, metaphorically speaking, meant getting into the central bridge, like the bridge of a ship as the command-center of who we are, what we do, our identities. And the methodology and methods that came with this turn, were attempts to try to tap into this. And the methods that flooded psychology at that time were part of an experimental methodology. And for conducting experiments, you have to have a theory, so that you can develop hypotheses. And then you typically get the answers: “yes” or “no”. And from there you build new theories or elaborate, refine, and so on. So, the methods flooding our disciplines at that time were, though not totally new for the social sciences, focusing on the interview, as a way of getting into the mind in psychology especially, but in sociology as well. And even in social psychology - I happened to study developmental and cognitive psychology in grad school – in social psychology also, I mean, what was considered ‘social’ was investigated by talking to people and trying to tap into what their conceptual assumptions were about communities, society, and about the individual and about what was going on.

So, the methods then were tailored to get into what was between the ears, that is, inside the head. And the interviewer was then constructed as somebody in psychology similar to a mixture of a priest or a therapist who were trying to bring out what was hidden in the soul or essence of the person. This tradition of interviewing back then became the privileged method to get into the new essence, that is, the minds of people like you and me.

Moving a little forward, I think that’s where Rom Harré and Bronwyn Davis came along and challenged this. And I think at that point already, correct me if I’m wrong, the term “the second cognitive revolution” was born, and came into usage. And I think, now I’ll try to make that clear in a second, that this term is a misnomer. Because what happened back there and then, and thereafter, is probably better comprehended as a merger of newly emerging traditions running under the headers of “turns to discourse” and to “narrative.”

At the beginning, discourse and narrative also was located between the ears and were studied as something in there, so to speak. But then, you know, the work with life stories entered discussions in psychology and sociology, and there was a slide earlier [in the conference] on the work by Elliot Mishler (1999) on storylines and that of Cathy Kohler Riessman (1990). And the term “storylines” became to represent a powerful conceptual orientation in the social sciences independent and running parallel to Rom Harré’s work on and with discourse and narrative.

Moving now a little more forward from there, I think from my perspective nowadays, is what Alexandra Georgakopoulou calls “the second narrative turn”. It’s interesting – It’s always the first and the second of this type of thing – but it’s typically a way of making sense of changes in ways of continuity and disruption. The new turn happened when I think she and a bunch of others, including myself, tried to take discourse and, in particular also narrative, out from between the ears into what happens between people. And that coincided and squared nicely with the other emerging interdisciplinary movement of qualitative inquiry that was running in parallel. And also infused by a good shot of ethnography, ethnomethodology, but ethnography in particular, where the interview, the ethnographic interview, was part of - slightly exaggerating or reframing it here - being with the folks out there, the real people, and not being the researcher in the white lab coat anymore. The researcher was now being one of them, trying to understand what’s going on from their perspective.

So, this then became, I think, a new subject. And the new unit of analysis became what is happening between people, their relational business. It turned to discursive practices. And again, you know, Rom had a book on…I think it’s called Discursive Practices. Is that right?

BAC: The Discursive Mind.

MB: The Discussive Mind! Thank you. To me that signals that Rom still was caught in connecting this discursive move toward what's happening between people to something that is simultaneously “in the mind” as well. And I think that is not a happy marriage. The mind is the mind, like people’s thoughts and conceptualizations, and what is happening between people is happening between people, such as their actions and activities. Not that people’s actions are not ‘mindful,’ but I think the unit, the whole level of analysis has shifted to the relational business between people, and the role of the researcher has shifted with it. And I think this also captures the paradigmatic shift toward qualitative inquiry.

So, with the qualitative stance that I entered from one direction and uncovering the powers of positioning analysis jolted me into a “wow!-experience”: This opened up a new territory, getting much closer into what is happening between people than the traditional toolboxes I had been exposed to thus far. I can elaborate on that, but also how it changed my sense of analysis. For instance, if you are interested in doing interviews and analyzing what is actually happening between the interviewer and the interviewee, then questions and answers become part of the conversation, that is, to be studied as relational (positioning) business, rather than as a way of trying to tap into people’s minds, into what is between the ears.

So that was my entrance to all of this. I had already “flirted” in´97 with Positioning Theory. And, from where I am nowadays, my attempts back then – I reread them recently, still make a lot of sense to me. However, I was not really there in terms of where I am now, because the potential of positioning, the positioning way of doing analysis and the framework of positioning (rather than Positioning Theory, we can talk about that also a little bit later), i.e., the analytical powers of it, just had started appealing to me. Was that kind of what you were thinking of?

PH & BAC: Yeah.

MB: Great. Thank you.

LVL: So, here's my story. We have to go back to 1976 when I started to study psychology at the Free University of Brussels. It was actually more or less by mistake because I really wanted to do sociology and at a student information session I took the wrong room and I ended up in the psychology session and not in the sociology. And there was this guy: a very fierce, powerful figure, Jean-Pierre De Waele, who was talking about psychology and he did it in such a way that I thought “Hm, that’s interesting!”. Because at that time as the young person I was, I was very much into let's say political action. But that's not on the agenda here, and on the other hand I loved to do scientific studies. Actually, I had been studying chemistry in high school and so I saw Jean-Pierre De Waele as somebody who wanted to combine scientific thinking with political action. When lecturing he was very clear right from the beginning that he had some, let's say, strong opinions about the world and how to govern it. I was hooked immediately and when during one of his classes, he announced to the first year students that a famous philosopher was coming soon to Brussels and also first year students were invited, I knew I had to be there. That lecturer turned out to be Rom Harré and it was then I met him the first time. Now Rom Harré and Jean-Pierre De Waele had a fascinating joint project at that time: the development of a universal criminological file model. This project had its origin in De Waele’s double life, as he called it: besides being a university professor, De Waele was also the head of the psychiatric wards in the Belgian prison system and in that capacity he was supposed to give advice to the minister on releasing convicts in very severe level cases, like murders or sexual offenders. For that De Waele was looking for a way to assess the personality of the offenders, but as he was also very critical about using questionnaires and the classical methods of personality assessment, he started to look to ways to develop a scientific but non-positivist approach to psychology. Enter Rom Harré. He was also in the business of developing an alternative for the positivist way of thinking in psychology. He labeled that “ethogencis’.

And so, a kind of partnership developed between Rom and Jean-Pierre De Waele which meant that Rom Harré came on a regular basis to Brussels. And very soon, Rom invited students, including freshman students, to come to Oxford and attend lectures by Michael Argyle, who was then the head of the Department of Psychology, and his team. So that’s the context of how I got to know Rom Harré. Many students who entered the field in those days experienced being torn between the classical experimentalist approach and the non-positivist alternatives. In my case, the positivists were presented by De Waele as a kind of Goliath and Harré was seen as David. Being a young student, this marked me for life, although with the years I became a bit milder towards positivism and a bit more critical about the non-positivists.

Anyway, after finishing my master’s thesis, I did a PhD at the same university, after which, I was granted a six-month sabbatical, which I decided to spend in Oxford. My PhD was a study of the jury system in Belgium, and how small groups of jury members came to decisions. And here I tried to apply Rom Harré’s notion of ethogenics (Harré, 1977) as much as I could. However, I didn’t find the right ways to combine the study of jury deliberations with the thinking and the terminology used by Rom Harré and others on ethogenics. I felt something was missing: the moral dimension of legal decisions. So at the time I did my sabbatical at Oxford, I only had some vague ideas, but really no big plans of what to do there. Neither had Rom, and I think it was on the second day of my stay that Rom and I met at this office he said, “oh yes, by the way, I just published something that could be interesting for you”. And he showed me a reprint of the article that he’d done with Bronwyn Davis on Positioning Theory.

And Rom said “have a look at it, and tell me what you think about it”. So, I started reading, and I found it fascinating. I immediately felt this opened some kind of new way of looking at psychology and social interaction. But on the other hand, I was a bit disappointed that the article was not, let’s say, written in what I would call a Cartesian way. It was not very well structured in my humble opinion at the time. And I said, “well, can I play with it? Can I make a new draft of that? Can I rewrite it?” And he said “Oh, you can go ahead, go ahead. I have other things to do”. And I spent, well, 4–5 days, I think, writing what has then to become the varieties of positioning article, which was basically a more structured reformulation of the Davis and Harré article. And that’s where I introduced concepts such as self-positioning and other-positioning and so on. Unfortunately, I never met with Bronwyn Davies so I was not aware of how she reacted to the “varieties” article. Anyway, I thought it was a great output for my sabbatical that I had one article published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour together with Rom Harré.

Anyway, soon after finishing my sabbatical, a couple of things happened. I left the university to take up a position in the personal office of the Minister of Science as a Chief of Staff and then later in the Ministry of Science as a Secretary General. It was great and I enjoyed it very much. But that was more or less the end of my career as an empirical researcher. I simply didn’t have the time or intellectual space to do that. So, Rom and I started with the idea of bringing together some more articles on Positioning Theory, which then became the famous purple book on Positioning Theory (Harré & Van Langenhove, 1999). And gradually, I have to confess, I more or less forgot about it. And it is only because a couple of years later, when we had the Google Scholar tools, that I realized that something happened with Positioning Theory. It was actually taking on. And a lot of people were quoting Rom and me. And then really, I said,” Well, if it’s taking off, if there seems to be a need for this kind of thing, why wouldn’t I continue working on the theoretical part of it?” Which was also, I’d say compatible with my duties at the Ministry of Science. And then later on, I moved to the United Nations University, which again, was a very managerial function that did not leave me much time to do empirical research.

I always kept this idea of trying to develop the theoretical aspects of Positioning Theory. Meanwhile, Rom and I, we became colleagues and also good friends, and we always had great time together. And we met in Bruges and in Brussels, and everywhere else in the world. And the fascinating thing about Rom was that he was always very open-minded to do things to experiment with. On the other hand, I could also see that Rom was somebody who always took too many things on board to work on. And he could never say “no”. Rom and I had a working relationship, he also worked with Ali [Moghaddam] and many others. When he was working with one person, he developed one aspect. And then he more or less forgot about the other aspects, and soon started with another discussion. That means that his ouvre, as I would call it, is actually consisting of a lot of continuity and unity. But it is not always very visible. And that’s also why I set myself as a goal, at one time, to try to make it more synthetical, let’s say summaries on what he has been doing and working on in the book People and Society.

So that’s my story about how I encountered Positioning Theory. And it played an absolutely important role in my whole career. It was this kind of hinge that I was using throughout many different things that I’ve done myself and a hinge to do things about the role of social sciences in society. Because at the end of the day, that’s for me the most important thing: What do we offer society as social scientists? And what can be done to raise the non-academic effect? Because at the end of the day, it’s not about being quoted by some of our colleagues. It is always fine and rewarding. That should not be the main aim. The main aim should be how can we change society. This resonates with Karl Marx (1845) who, in one of his Feuerbach theses, said that philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, but the point is to change it.

PH: In terms of the overall landscape of, let's say, social psychology and social theory – going perhaps now in more detail to Positioning Theory – what do you consider are the advantages and disadvantages of Positioning Theory compared to other social theories or social psychologies? I would also like to ask you that there's often a question about the differences and similarities between discursive psychology and Positioning Theory. How do you perceive those differences and similarities?

MB: When it comes to social theory, the business of theorizing is in my opinion overrated – to say the least. Let me put it this way. There was an article by Annette Karmiloff-Smith, and again, she was influential in my dissertation work, and it was titled, “If You Want to Get Ahead, You Have to Get a Theory”. And at the time, I think that was exactly where we were in the midst of studying the mind and cognition, you know, as a large field where discourse and narrative were located as concepts between the ears. But over time, I realized that –I think, Luk, this relates to your presentation yesterday [in the 2024 Positioning Theory conference] – within social sciences, we are doing social work, trying to understand, being in the framework of understanding, making sense of humans, human actions, interactions, which is always part of the social, and somewhat separate from our dreams and private interactions. But still, it is part of a network within which we are becoming who we are. That's where we don't necessarily need predictions. We don't need a theory in order to generate hypotheses and then carry out experiments, so to speak. Rather, we need a general way of engaging in this business, and maybe that's what you were hinting at, but I wouldn't want to call this theory. I’d rather like to position this as a call for frameworks. That as I, as a student, can evaluate and compare. And I think this is where, in my own presentation [in the Positioning Theory 2024 conference], I have always this slide of competing frameworks that work with different assumptions and metaphors. A lot of them are working with spatial metaphors, like positioning, but others are working with visual metaphors and family metaphors, like family resemblances, categorizing. And the voice, in [Ivana] Markova’s work, I think there is the notion of voice, that is very central.

So, to sum this up, I think what the advantage then of positioning, the framework that I would like to promote, you know, for young students or somebody who is coming – they don’t have to be young – into Positioning Theory – who is interested in trying to find something to work with – that’s where positioning, I think, offers, or has a lot to offer. In particular it is able to account for the kind of navigation, the temporal dimension. So, positions are nothing that are fixed, but rather they are in constant flux. And on top of this, positions are situated, contextual, where the field of analysis, I think, is also opening up for investigating the microgenetic emergence of phenomena.

One more thing, I think as a graduate student, or even as an undergraduate student, you don’t start with a theory. You definitely do not start with a theory. You start with what makes sense to you, with what you like. And there’s nothing wrong with this, right? I mean, this is exactly, in my opinion at least, the starting point. So don’t get a theory. Start with where you try to define – or position – yourself. And this is, I think, where in psychology in particular, young students say “look, you know, I don’t want to be a scientist. Yeah, I want to do what we do in qualitative [research]”. So, at that point, then, it’s time to find out more about what it is, kind of as your pocket of interest. And then move on with exploration.

So, it is going from a large sense of methodology to a field. Yeah, often students say, “look, you know, I’m interested in” – like criminology is the biggest thing in the United States right now – “the criminal mind”. So, but still, you know, then, or immediately, the interest comes more from a qualitative perspective. And from there, I think, we can move into what positioning analysis has to offer. And so, this sounds like a little frivolous, but I would maybe end here by asking: “Do we actually need theory?”

LVL: Okay, I agree with most of the things you just said, Michael, even to the point that I was thinking, well, yes, there is no debate because, “yes, yes, yes, I agree with all the things you said”… Until, of course, you said, that radical statement at the end that we don’t need theory. Here, I totally disagree! I think even if you're interested in practicalities and changing practical things, we need theory. And I'm very much in line with what Kurt Lewin's phrase that there is nothing as practical as a good theory. So, it's a framework for making sense of data.

The whole issue is perhaps this one, that I would agree with your line of thinking if we’re talking about nomothetic theories and the theories that apply to everything and in every situation. But we need theories to make sense of the idiographic reality. The case-by-case et cetera.

So, theories, I’m perhaps a little bit more sympathetic towards them. Also because one thing I remember from the thinking of Rom Harré, and then especially his work on realist philosophy, is that he states that there are things that you can observe, that you can try to make sense of, and then there are always the hidden mechanisms, things you don’t see on the surface. And that is where the theory comes in. It’s something that makes the un-visible, unseeable things visible.

BAC: I'm wondering whether there's kind of like more than one notion of theory going on here. One as a kind of generalized, I would almost say ideology or thinking as a theory. And another one much more Aristotelian perhaps, where theory is more something which is composed of guidelines for guiding people when doing practices in a certain sense. In that sense, Michael you would be Aristotle and Luk would be Plato.

MB: Right. We then may have to speak Greek. Yeah, look, but here I think we have also something else. Um, I really would like to take these terms that we use out from our theorizing business and start from our everyday language use. And see, this is where discourse already is one of those potentially alienating terms: why don't we just call it about ‘talk?’ Uh, I mean, discourse is talk. And so ‘discursive psychology’ is a strange thing in a way, but it has been established under this header. It's within the academy. Or ‘discourse theory’ and ‘discourse analysis.’ Yeah, like ‘conversation analysis.’ These are different brands. And they are pretty different when you dig into them. Um, but even though, they also all share certain assumptions that differentiate them from the analysis of the cognitive domain. So, we deal with ‘talk’ as a window into the relational business between people which is different compared to a cognitive framework. So, the term theory, it seems to me, is occupied. I mean, it positions our analyses not as investigating talk as the relational business between people, but as what is happening in the cognitive domain, and consequently within a nomothetic paradigm and the traditional framework of positivism. And the attempt would be, I think, with a qualitative research orientation, that we are trying to break away from this. And I trust this is where Rom Harré also located himself, as an anti-positivist. Yeah? And if you are anti-positivist, you can't do a little bit of, you know, this is the ‘Mambo Number Five,’ (reference to a song by Lou Bega) – “a little bit of this and a little bit of that”. And, you know, dance with these different ways of sense making. So that's to Aristoteles and good old Plato.

LVL: Thank you, Aristoteles. My response would be that theorising is something that can not only be done at a nomothetic level, but also at an idiographic level. We can develop a theory of similarities, of similar things. And that is actually what Jean-Pierre De Waele and Rom Harré were doing in Brussels, where they were trying to give advice to the minister by presenting a theory of personality for one person and not a theory of personality of, let’s say, applicable to a group. And what is important also is the relationship, the dialectics, between what people think about reality and what scientists think. And here a useful conceptualization has been advanced by Alfred Schutz, who said we have to make a difference between first order and second order theoretical concepts. The first order concepts are the things that people think themselves about certain aspects of reality, including themselves as a person. And as a scientist, we have a duty to start from the first order conceptions that people have and then see to what extent we can bring in new ways of seeing it, and that can be called second order theoretical concepts.

So, I think it’s very clear that Rom Harré’s work on realist philosophy of science was indeed against positivism, absolutely, but he was not against the idea of advancing theoretical models to think about the world.

MB: You know, I think, then I want to – then I possibly am not a scientist – but I see positioning and positioning analysis as part of a methodological approach. Right, so that's the next topic here that you had [listed in advance as potential questions]. Rather than as fulfilling something that the theory is imposing on me, yeah, following theoretical commandments, so to speak. Because that's what theory means to me, too, that there is something like a framework, a straitjacket. But when it comes to a methodological approach, I see all this freedom, and I think that's also why qualitative inquiry for students in psychology is attractive. When they realize that psychology does not imply the white lab coat kind of methodology, but rather it has this openness. It opens up options to be, to work with people, with real people, yeah, not in an experimental situation, not in the lab. I think that's where we are freed from the fetters of being dominated by assumptions that come out of philosophers' minds, or theoretical assumptions. So, does that make sense? I mean, I don't know whether that makes sense or not, but that would be a way of positioning myself.

LVL: Well, I would say that I totally agree with you. Except that, it doesn't mean that everything goes, right?

MB: Mm-hmm

LVL: It still means that we have to think of some ways of making sense, of thinking about ourselves, about other people, about interaction. And that's what Positioning Theory tries to do. And that's why I would still call it a theory, and more than, let's say, just an analysis of reality. And the theory is that if you want to understand any aspect of, let's say, social life, you have to combine and find out what kind of relations there are between three things. That is, first the acts and speech-acts, and then, second, the positions and the moral orders. And third the storylines that are developed. And it's a triadic concept that is assumed to be or do more in general than just being a Positioning Theory. Whatever situation you are in, you can make the analysis by looking at those three things. And because it's something that is in a way unvisable and people do not necessarily even think about themselves, I would call it a theory. A theory that we have that can help us becoming clearer of ourselves and each other., if you think about your everyday life, why don't you try to frame it as a triad? A triadic relation between acts, speech-act on the one hand, storylines on the other hand, and positions that we can take, and then you might learn something.

BAC: It seems to me that, if I was to make a bridge here, we could, you know, perhaps use Blumer’s notion of sensitizing concepts. In this sense, then, what the concepts of Positioning Theory offers, could be seen as sensitizing us towards different contexts, as sensitizing ourselves to different kinds of situations, for understanding those, for engaging in some sort of inquiry.

LVL: And the other thing that I think is relevant is that the way Positioning Theory is formulated by this triad clearly is a statement against positivist thinking. I mean, the classical Newtonian mechanics that we all know that is the basis of positivism, starts from the idea that all the events that are happening, and the substance of the world, the matter, the energy, has to be situated in those two dimensions, time and space, and these two dimensions are independent, etc. We know that story.

And Positioning Theory says, “Well, no, that’s not a good way to go about it”. What is much more important than the actual Newtonian time and place that something is happening in, is the assignment of speech acts uttered to persons interacting, personally you can see that as a place, that can bring to the surface some actions, some speech acts. So, we have the Newtonian time space localizations that can be replaced by a new grid where the equivalent of space is persons and the equivalent of time becomes storylines. And on the other hand, to frame it in the episodes that are taking place through storylines. And that is, for me, the real innovation of Positioning Theory, to bring that framework upfront, and clearly, take a distance from the positivist thinking.

MB: And I think that's where we may disagree. And I also think that when it comes to what kind of concepts are these, and the kind of weakening it would do sensitizing them. Rights and duties, whose categories, whose concepts are these? Moral orders, storylines?

You know, it would be an interesting conversation to follow up on, where do these concepts come from, moving into their own, those histories. Because these are not the natives’ terms or concepts. Nobody talks about rights and duties. Occasionally, maybe, but this is on “Sundays in Church”. Moral Orders? Instead, what we do is, we negotiate, as people, as we are doing right now, the kinds of spaces or positions, that’s where things are happening. And we don’t need that type of vocabulary, that theoreticians have come up with, or scientists are coming up with. Because if, as long as we can work with how, and what vocabulary people actually use, in order, in their interactions, to make sense of themselves, where they navigate, being different, but also being similar and same, where they navigate a sense of continuity and change, then that may just be enough.

And that basically, because it comes more from a developmental vantage point, falls out of traditional social psychology. This is where identity is more than navigating sameness and difference. In addition, it also covers the negotiation and the navigation of agency and being a product of the world. What, Luk, you have in your opening of your keynote, structure and agency, the traditional concepts of psychology. But all this, but all this is captured by ‘positioning’ as it unfolds right in front of your eyes. So why using these canons of rights and duties, that seem to me, come from the outside, they are imposed. Take “moral orders,” they are part of frameworks that may be helpful for some people; and yes, some of us work with these kinds of categories, and concepts. But I don’t, and I see no need for them - to insert them in a kind of a priori fashion from the outside into the relational business between people.

LVL: Well, it's becoming very interesting now. Because here I disagree again with Michael, in the sense that for me, the crucial, essential aspect of Positioning Theory, is indeed the reference to the rights and duties. And to the perceived right and duties. And yes, they can change. The claim is that, at any moment, in any situation, there are different sets of rights and duties that apply. I mean, for instance, at this very moment, I'm looking at you guys sitting in the room. It would be very inappropriate, and thus not done, if two of you would stand up, and start singing a song, or dancing, or playing cards, or whatever. But you don’t do that because we all know that, when you attend a lecture, you need to be polite and that implies to at least, do as if you're interested in what is told by the speaker. The point is now that this is not the only moral order possible. No, there are other moral orders that apply as well. One is that you're sitting on, on the chair, not on the table, not doing this, not that. So, there are always many rights and duties involved and experienced in a given social episode.

So, it’s the way in which we perceive the rights and duties, and the way in which we act accordingly, and how we try to do things that we think are appropriate and acceptable. Take for instance the way this dialogue is unfolding. We are polite and started by saying, yes, we’re doing great work, I’m doing great work, we all have similar ideas, and then gradually, we enter the space of, let’s say, disagreement. So, the initial moral order is emphasising agreement, but being scholars we also know it’s acceptable to disagree. And that’s how science should work. It would become a problem if I would say to some person “I think what you’re doing is just not good, it’s just bad”, or if I would say “well, your work is just stupid, it’s not really science”. That would be perceived as something that I don’t have the right to tell you, at this moment, because we are colleagues engaged in a friendly dialogue. But it could be possible that one of us gets upset by what the other is saying. And so, it goes on, and as the dialogue continues we move into other moral orders. Think of the famous debate on 25 October 1946 between Wittgenstein and Popper where Wittgenstein started waving a fireplace poker. Which apparently was perceived by Popper as intimidating. At one point Popper exclaimed that it is not ok to threaten visitors that come and give a lecture with a poker. On which Wittgenstein reacted furiously by throwing the poker to the floor and left the room, slamming the door.

Now the thing is that the set of rights and duties that are in play during a certain episode are constantly in flux. One of the problems I have with Positioning Theory and with the application of Positioning Theory, is that people seem to use it indeed in a way too static manner. Static in the sense that what we must realize is that at all times there are different moral orders that somehow apply to the situation. And this very situation we are now in, is a moral order of attending a conference that give you some rights and duties. But there are other frameworks that are applicable as well. And the thing is, as a scientist, you can see how people shift if they are moving from one moral order to the other. And that’s the kind of dynamic that I am missing in part of the Positioning Theory studies. So, in this sense, I agree with the last part of your intervention, Michael.

MB: I hear this objection occasionally, that what we are doing is a-theoretical and also just descriptive. And I think that needs to be addressed. But, probably not now, but it's a good point.

PH: Maybe going back to the potential problems what you mentioned, Luk, and also the variety of other frameworks available. Now, maybe taking this to a more grass root level: someone who is new to Positioning Theory, how should they get started, why get started with Positioning Theory, and what to do? What would be your suggestions?

LVL: I would say because Positioning Theory gives you instruments to analyze things that are normally studied in different disciplines. There is a possibility to study economic phenomenon from Positioning Theory's perspective, like, for instance, Tony Lawson (2023) is doing. In a similar way, there is a possibility to apply Positioning Theory in the discipline of criminology. So, we can easily jump over the fences of disciplinary boundaries. And I think that is a major advantage of Positioning Theory. In that sense, that's why I like to think that we could develop a general social theory based on Positioning Theory that makes obsolete all the disciplinary divides that we have now.

MB: I mean, there are people here in the room who are, you know, fishing, who are looking for ways of employing positioning. But why positioning? Exactly. And I think, again, you don't read the... I went on Wiki today, this morning, to look at what Positioning Theory is. And I talked with Luk briefly before that. If I had read that originally, I never would have gotten into Positioning Theory. Ok, so I think the way it happens more typically is that people come across some work, either in their field of interest, or, you know, kind of... having to come up because their committee members are asking them, look, you know, get some... get a framework within which you are operating, doing what you would like to do. And that's, I think, where people start reading. And they read abstracts, basically, right? And in the abstract, there's usually very little methodology. It's more on the topic.

But, when people come across, you know, whether stance or stance-taking or positioning or Goffman’s approach or other approaches that are out there on this free market, I think the persuasive power of the terminology of positioning is really close to our everyday language. That is, it is not theoretically so distant or different from how we make sense when we use these terms like story, storytelling, or moral order. Rather it is a type of terminology that is close to home, that feels I can relate to it, it doesn’t offend me or it doesn’t alienate me in what I’m doing.

So, I think that other kinds of connected issues for starting to look deeper into something that, now here at this meeting, runs under the notion of Positioning Theory. Yeah, and at that point, I think people say, “Ok, that’s something that I may want to try out”.

LVL: It’s certainly something that helps, let’s say the popularity of Positioning Theory, that people have a feeling of knowing what it's all about, because the term positioning is used in everyday life. But on the other hand, it can also hinder the application of Positioning Theory, because scholars might not bring in the complexities of a situation. I think it's the most fundamental issue of Positioning Theory, that it's about the different rights and duties, the perceived right and duties that we have. So, advantage, yes, but also a bit of a problem that there's a kind of tendency to use a very simplified way of Positioning Theory.

BAC: So far we've talked a lot about the advantages, but we should touch the issue of what the future developments could be in Positioning Theory. And hence implicitly also what are the disadvantages, so where are the blind spots within Positioning Theory we need to be aware of to develop it as well.

MB: Yeah, I haven't given much thought to this. You know, I mean, it is, things happen the way they happen, and in two years we'll get together again, and then we look back. But, you know, I mean, if the group of people who make use of positioning, the methodology or the framework – and I'm trying to avoid the term theory, you know – of doing work with, with positioning, positioning analysis. I mean, if it is everybody, if it is too many, then we have a problem. But right now, I think it's a good few, and hearing and reading those, and the meta-analysis that Mary [McVee] presented yesterday, shows that something is happening. So, I think, I have no idea. I'm definitely not a predictor of anything. So, things will happen, and I'm positive that they will, there will be more, and possibly also richer, and there will be then corrections of the way we think and talk about it.

But right now, I think I am definitely standing on the shoulders of others, and, of course, there are different branches, putting it the way Mary [McVee] has conceptualized different positioning traditions (McVee et al., 2019). There are different branches, and I have no way of, I have no idea of what these branches are branching into, and how they possibly can connect. I find it difficult to connect and wrap myself around the framework of rights and duties, moral order, storyline – to connect or translate that into the kind of positioning analysis that I am embracing. I also find it difficult to work the other way around. So, I think we do something different, and there’s nothing wrong with this. But you see what I mean, right? I’m looking forward, I’m positive.

LVL: I think you and I are on the same wavelength, but with different foci. I think it's a good sign. It is a sign of health that different branches of Positioning Theory are developing and indeed, why not? Except that people have different views on all of this. So not a problem at all. But on the other hand, what I also think is that people should be very clear about what kind of a view of Positioning Theory they are adhering to. Often I read articles, you know, that report empirical research, where for instance, what I consider the most important thing, the rights and duties, are not considered. Or that's not mentioned in the text. And I wonder then to some extent, if people really are reading the basic articles about the Positioning Theory. But then, of course, that was all before we had this wonderful handbook that is now on the market (McVee et al., 2024)

BAC: Michael and Luk, if you were to ask each other a question, what would that be?

MB: Yeah, I was thinking hard about that. I had a sleepless night last night thinking about what to ask Luk. Um, okay. Maybe I can also link or bridge this to something I am asking myself. There seemed to be an underlying ontology with regard to the person in Rom’s, but also in your theorizing Luk. And that is the assumption that when two subjects are ‘putting their heads together’, the reflection and the rationale of the person is the same, their rationality – that they are two rational entities, so to speak. And, I think this is part of our Habermasian, post-Enlightenment way of making sense of the person – across the social sciences, and particularly in psychology. But it is a Eurocentric way that is born during the Enlightenment, during a time that marked the beginning of slavery and colonialism – all happening at the same time. And they have to do with one another, they are not coincidental. So, what I'm trying to say is that our assumptions of the dialogue and ways of sense making are so rooted in assumptions about rationality and morality and our notion of the person as an independent and free subject. Feeding ultimately, you know, our belief that if we use our rationality and engage in rational dialogue, we will be able to put an end to wars , and live peacefully ever after.

So, there is this type of stuff that is part of, I think, and I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with it, but it is part of cultural conceptions within which we are caught up, where indigenous or other alternative ways of sense making have no chance to be heard. And that kind of thing is worrisome. So, the question that we would have to follow up on, is whether there are any alternatives. Are there ways to overcome our Western, you know, Eurocentric ways that were born during the Enlightenment and that are so much part of who we think we are, and that we think our “modern” sensemaking is so much superior in comparison to traditional ways of sense-making as for instance in traditional and indigenous sese making systems.

So, I know I’m coming a little bit from left-field, but I think this is a challenge, not just to Positioning Theory, but to theorizing overall, but also for how to listen to and work with people, and then in particular to work with people like in Sri Lanka or India – for instance on issues of suicide, self-harm, and the like.

LVL: Yes, once again, this is getting boring: I totally agree. We have to take into account non-western conceptions of persons, of society, and everything. There's a lot to say about that. And it isn’t always easy, because language plays a dominant role here. But yeah, that's a road we have to take on absolutely. What else can I say about it? Well, nevertheless, I think that, and I'm not talking about superiority of rational thinking and stuff like that, but that the practice of science has shown that it's, until now, I would say, the best framework we have to manage progress, and to manage survival of societies of people in total. Which means, I’m convinced, that we need a kind of new renaissance that takes into account what you called indigenous perspectives. But that also should not throw away the realizations of rational thinking in terms of what we have in the doing, basically.

So, I think if you need – we talk a lot about the Anthropocene these days to the fact that the whole planet is becoming more and more affected by human behavior. If we want to control it, if you want to do something, it’s not religion that’s going to help us. And if it’s not religion, then the only system of thinking I see that stands for kind of progress, for doing things, is scientific thinking. But it’s this way of having a scientific attitude towards the world that I believe is very important. And I know you can debate for very long about this, especially if you combine it with going to a pub. But I would not be able to do that this evening. So that’s my statement.

Yeah, well, I was also thinking about this same question: What will I ask Michael? And basically, we have already been to some extent addressing that, because my question was something like why – I read your interesting article, obviously, in our [Positioning Theory] handbook. So here I go again, making some publicity for the handbook. – I was really struck by the fact that the notion of rights and duties did not appear once in your article. And I was wondering about that. But I think by now I know understand more about this. So don’t feel obliged to answer [laughter].

MB: I think I tried to address where and how rights and duties do not surface directly as terms. Because I think there is no need for these terms. But there are ways of making sense. Or there are ways of working with – Look, let me put it this way. I think the potential of our future work will be much more in participatory action work. That is, not just using interviews anymore, or just interviews, but being out there engaging with real folks in the world, and facilitating change. I think this is where positioning is taking on new forms, in new ways. So, we won’t position ourselves not as researchers anymore in a traditional sense. And I think this is also where theoretical assumptions will become more backgrounded. We don't have to justify what we do, because our success will be visible in what we do as intellectuals or whatever, when it comes to attract funding and also with regard to positions in the academy, or neighbouring fields. So, moving into this direction, that's kind of my hope. And I'm too old to fully throw myself into this, because it requires a good amount of planning and going ahead and getting involved in projects that some of you already are. That's where the future is. And I think if Positioning Theory really has something to contribute, or can contribute, then that's where it will become more influential and visible. I took your question to move in a direction that I'm not worried about because I think that there's some horizon here that is positive.

LVL: I actually have the same feeling. I think what we need is to link Positioning Theory to practices of action research. So, in that sense, I think we have a very similar view on the future of Positioning Theory, which is great.

Conclusion

As our enlightening conversation with Professors Michael Bamberg and Luk Van Langenhove draws to a close, we reflect on the profound journey they have shared with us. Their insights into Positioning Theory have illuminated the intricacies of this theoretical and analytical framework and underscored its pivotal role in the evolution of social sciences.

The interview highlights that, despite general agreement between the interviewees, interesting differences can also be identified. One such difference concerns the role of theory and its accompanying ontology and the implications this has for the methodological use of Positioning Theory. There appears to be a tension between, on the one hand, starting by assuming a theoretical description or understanding of the reality in which the Positioning Theoretical analysis is directed at particular elements. On the other hand of starting out by engaging in analysis first and seeing this as gradually providing opportunities for a more general understanding. This may imply a distinction between deductive and inductive approaches to the methodological use of Positioning Theory suggesting, perhaps, a more cautious understanding of Positioning Theory as an overall theory. It does present, however, a challenge for both current and future practitioners to work out the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and perhaps consider a way of either combining the two or developing an entirely new third approach.

As we conclude, it is evident that Positioning Theory will continue to evolve, driven by ongoing research and interdisciplinary collaborations. Professors Bamberg and Van Langenhove expressed optimism about the future of positioning analysis, envisioning new applications and theoretical refinements that will further enhance our understanding of social dynamics. Their work stands as a testament to the enduring relevance of Positioning Theory in the ever-changing landscape of social sciences.

In closing, we extend our heartfelt gratitude to Professors Michael Bamberg and Luk Van Langenhove for sharing their expertise and perspectives. Their contributions have not only enriched our knowledge of Positioning Theory but also inspired us to explore the myriad ways in which theory can illuminate the complexities of human interaction.