Social and Critical Psychology

Discourse and Subject Position Laboratory

Six months in a fictional person's life, written up five times. The events are identical in every version. What differs is the kind of person the account produces, what she may legitimately do next, who is entitled to say what is happening, and where responsibility lands.

Fictional case - the person, the service and all five accounts were written for this activity

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to identify the subject position an account makes available, and say which actions it renders reasonable and who it authorises to speak.

About 30 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.

Two things this is not

It is not a word-frequency exercise. Nothing here depends on which words appear most often; what matters is the position an account makes available to the person it is about, and what that position permits.

It is not a claim that the events are made of language. The ledger of events is fixed and stays on screen throughout, and one of the entries in it is a budget decision that only the advocacy bulletin states outright; the commissioning report acknowledges a reduced-hours model but recodes it as implementation performance, and the remaining three genres have no field for it at all. Analysing how something is written up is not the same as saying that only the writing is real.

How to use this

  1. Read the ledger of events. It does not change.
  2. Commit to an answer to the question below.
  3. Choose an account. It stays pinned beside you while you answer four questions about it.
  4. Read the feedback, then choose another account. The comparison builds as you go.
  5. Analyse at least three, then read the synthesis.

The ledger: what happened

A fictional community day service, and six months in the life of a fictional woman referred to throughout as R. Everything below is agreed by everyone involved. No account disputes any of it.

    R, the service, the assessment and all five accounts are invented for teaching. No real person, service, record or document is reproduced, and nothing here is a clinical description of anybody.

    First, a judgement

    Five accounts of the same six months are about to appear. What is the most important thing that will differ between them?

    Challenge - four short extracts

    Each extract is one sentence somebody wrote about R. For each, say what it does to her: what position it puts her in.

    What this demonstrates

    An account produces a kind of person

    "Non-compliant", "service user exercising choice", "self-advocate", "person taking ownership of her recovery" and "customer" are not five words for R. They are five positions, and a position comes with a specification of what someone in it can reasonably do. Somebody positioned as non-compliant who writes to a manager is escalating. Somebody positioned as a self-advocate who writes to a manager is doing the thing self-advocates do. The letter is the same letter.

    Legitimacy is distributed by the description

    Notice how the same act - starting a peer group in the library - appears in the five versions. It is disengagement, it is unmonitored risk, it is community organising, it is recovery-oriented self-management, it is a customer taking her business elsewhere. Each of those makes a different response by the service obviously appropriate, and only one of them makes asking R what she wanted obviously appropriate.

    Every account authorises somebody

    Accounts do not only describe; they nominate whose description counts. A case note authorises the clinician, a risk register authorises the safeguarding lead, an advocacy bulletin authorises R and people like her, a recovery narrative authorises R in a carefully bounded way - she may narrate her journey, but the service still decides what a journey is. Asking who is entitled to say what is happening is often more revealing than asking what is said.

    Responsibility moves without anyone moving it

    Between the case note and the recovery account, responsibility for the six months travels from R's illness to R's choices. In neither version does it arrive anywhere near the decision, in ledger entry 2, to halve the programme's hours. That decision is in the ledger and is not disputed by anybody, yet only the advocacy bulletin states it outright; the commissioning report acknowledges a reduced-hours model but keeps neither its cause nor its consequences; the case note and the recovery account, like the risk register, have no place for it at all. The most consequential thing a discourse does is often not what it says about a person but what it has no place to say about anything else.

    Language, institutions and what can be done

    None of this is about wording in the sense of politeness. The positions are held in place by forms, templates, review meetings, funding conditions and the professional training of the people who write them. That is why changing the vocabulary alone rarely changes very much, and why the recovery account - which changed the vocabulary comprehensively - can leave the distribution of authority almost exactly where it was.