Segunda Parte
Sesión 3: Corrección del comportamiento
Critical intercultural communication scholars see culture as ‘part of macro social practice contributing to, and at the same time influenced by, power and ideological struggle’ (Zhu, 2016, p. 11). Throughout this Chapter Two I have highlighted how questions of power and control, and their relation to language and institutional culture, are of fundamental importance in legal intercultural communication. In this context, power can be conceptualized at two different levels of the social order: ‘power includes both an individual’s power over other individuals gained in day-to-day interaction, and social power, manifested typically in social hierarchy and organizational structures’ (Gibbons, 2003, p. 74).
At the micro-level of the ‘interaction order’ (Goffman, 1983) of face-to-face interaction ('how people behave in one another's co-presence and co-construct their social worlds in everyday encounters’, Gordon, 2011, p. 72), Brown and Gilman (1960) define interactional power as follows: One person may be said to have power over another in the degree that he is able to control the behavior of the other. Power is a relationship between at least two persons, and it is nonreciprocal in the sense that both cannot have power in the same area of behavior. (Brown & Gilman, 1960, p. 255) Power at this level is conceived as a relationship, and is observable in communicative practices, as the various studies of interactional power in legal advice meetings discussed in section 2.3.1 illustrate. The findings by Sarat and Felstiner (1995), that in the divorce law meetings they studied, power shifted between lawyer and client and was interactionally-based, resonate strongly with this view. Power was evidenced by one person’s previously-held meanings fully or to a large extent prevailing as the mutually negotiated outcome of interaction.
Social power at the macro-level of the institutional order (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) is part of social relations and also part of cultures, as it is present in the interactions and exchanges by which group social norms (or ranges of norms) are created, maintained and changed (Martin & Nakayama, 2013). In conceptualising social power, it is helpful (following Blommaert, 2005; Thornborrow, 2002) to draw on Bourdieu’s theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1972), and later writings about how language fits into this (Bourdieu, 1991). Positioned on the dark side of social constructionism (Irwin, 2011), Bourdieu extended Marxist thought about power in society beyond economic relations of capital, proposing that power also resides in the possession of other forms of socially valued goods: social capital (personal relationships and networks) and cultural capital (personal knowledge, in embodied, objectivized and institutionalized forms). Linguistic capital (an individual’s linguistic resources) is a part of cultural capital. According to Bourdieu, in different social fields, different kinds of capital have differing social value, and individuals trade different forms of economic, social, and cultural capital in order to improve their positions in the social hierarchy of their own field. Individuals therefore have some limited agency to improve their own social standing, but this is constrained by their original position in the social hierarchy, limiting the overall amount of capital they can access (Block, 2013; Bourdieu, 1972). Symbolic capital (honour and recognition within a field – carrying with it the power to influence others) accrues to those who, through possessing large amounts of whichever other forms of capital are valued in that field, occupy an elevated position in the hierarchy.
The concept of symbolic capital can be used to understand the relationship between language and power in institutional settings (Thornborrow, 2002). Societal power is wielded through institutions such as government, legal systems, and education systems (Foucault, 1971) which are controlled by the dominant groups in society possessing symbolic power and whose norms and conventions are set by them (Roberts, 1996b). The powerful in each social field are able to define what forms of capital (including linguistic capital) are valued within the field. Thus, semiotic practices, indexing different forms of capital, are used as a means of evaluation of social worth or even of exclusion (Bourdieu, 1991). Language use is situated within the context of a macro-level ‘linguistic market place’ (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 66), where certain forms of language have more value than others. This is particularly evident with institutional cultures, within which identifying norms and practices are often used as mechanisms of control and regulation (Duchêne, Moyer, & Roberts, 2013a; Gibbons, 2003; Roberts, 2009; Sarangi & Roberts, 1999b). Within asylum processes, for example, such dynamics are manifest in the way that credibility is assessed based on the narrative properties of consistency and coherence, assumed by the dominant institution to be indicators of ‘truth’ in the applicant’s narrative (see Chapter One, section 1.1, and Appendix A).
The macro- and micro- dimensions of power are interconnected, since ‘one of the social resources on which power and dominance are based is the privileged access to discourse and communication’ (Gibbons, 2003, p. 199 citing van Dijk, 1993). The two dimensions also reflect the (problematic) conceptual distinction between talk and context discussed above – interactional power is exercised in talk, and social power is a feature of the context of talk. Linking this to methodologies for analysing discourse, and problematizing the micro-macro split, Thornborrow (2002) argues that the relationship between power and talk in institutional interaction cannot be accounted for simply through considering ‘pre-existing social relations of power which determine institutional discursive structures’ (p. 133) (the approach of critical discourse analysis), but nor can it be accounted for by any method that ignores these relations (such as the micro-analytic approach of conversation analysis). Thornborrow argues persuasively that an analytic approach is needed that takes both interaction and context into account, and she herself mixes techniques from conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and Gumperz’s (1999) interactional sociolinguistics in her analysis of power in institutional talk.
Thornborrow (2002) finds that although asymmetry is ingrained in institutionally-defined interactional roles, carrying associated speaking rights, power relations are not necessarily fixed, and can shift and be redefined on a very local level. Power is ‘contextually sensitive ... a set of resources and actions which are available to speakers’ (Thornborrow, 2002, p. 8). Success in using
these will depend on who the speakers are and what the speech situation is. She observes that power can be exercised both structurally, through allocation of speaking rights (the distribution of turns at talk, and the type of space that speakers typically have in interactions), and
interactionally, through what speakers can effectively accomplish in that space through the
exercise of agency and control at the micro-level. Speakers can use linguistic forms as resources in exercising or resisting interactional power, but their function and effect will depend on the interactional context, partly defined by the (shifting) local talk and interactional relations, and partly by (fixed) asymmetrical institutional relationships (p.8). For this study, this implies that how the parties exercise and resist power within advice meetings will be context-dependent. Thornborrow’s (2002) study examined power in interaction in monolingual (albeit lay- institutional) settings. For this study, and in relation to multilingual and intercultural communication, Blommaert’s theorisation of what happens when linguistic resources travel and surface as practices in a new social location, within which they are often devalued or delegitimised, enriches the conceptual framework (Blommaert, 2003, 2009, 2010; Blommaert et al., 2005; Maryns & Blommaert, 2002). Blommaert examines how the symbolic capital of linguistic resources is transformed when resources travel into different spaces, particularly those of a legal and institutional character. For example, in their discussion of spaces of multilingualism, Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck (2005) argue that individuals who have access to less prestigious language varieties or use fragmented or truncated multilingual resources (see Chapter One, section 1.5) in their home spaces, such as migrants from many African societies, are routinely limited and incapacitated by Western institutional spaces of communication like the Belgian asylum interview, such that an individual will never be able to fully communicate. This is because: the particular environment organizes a particular regime of language, a regime which incapacitates individuals...a lack of competence to communicate adequately is...a problem for the speaker, lodged not in individual forms of deficit or inability but in the connection between individual communicative potential and requirements produced by the environment. (Blommaert et al., 2005, p. 198) The social value, or linguistic capital, attached to the form of a linguistic utterance varies according to the semiotic scales (Blommaert, 2010) – the linguistic hierarchy – operating in that particular time and space. The space of the Belgian asylum interview, with its associated monolingual linguistic ideology, either devalues or does not recognize the linguistic resources of migrants where these do not conform to its expectations of full fluency in a standard language variety such as French or English. Individuals are also negatively evaluated when they fail to show the ability
to use institutionally-oriented discursive strategies (such as chronological narration). Blommaert et al. (2005) point out that this itself is an exercise of power at the macro-level, impacting in a very real way at the micro-level. Individuals are silenced by the space in such circumstances, and (in an extension of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital to the global sphere) this is an effect of power in that it is those who control the space who define what linguistic resources are or are not acceptable. Applying this to migrant legal advice, Codó and Garrido (2010; see section 2.3.4) argued that the Spanish-dominant language ideology of the Catalan NGO disadvantaged some of its migrant clientele. This study explores whether any similar dynamic exists in a UK setting.
Summary
In this section 2.5, I have summarised the key concepts of (a) means of communication, (b) contexts of communication, and (c) power in communication emerging from the literature review undertaken in the preceding sections of this chapter, and explained how these key concepts frame the study’s main and subsidiary research questions. I have then discussed how I conceptualise each of these key concepts, drawing from the work of various scholars. Thus, this study’s approach to the research questions is underpinned by (a) Risager’s (2006) constructs of linguistic, languacultural and discursive resources and practices and their links to culture; (b) an ecological notion of context located in diverse spaces, times and places relative to an interaction and which may be brought along to, or brought about in, that interaction (Auer, 1992; Blommaert, 2005; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008; Whiteside, 2013); and (c) a conception of power as manifesting in communication at two levels, the micro-level of face-to-face interaction (Brown & Gilman, 1960) and also the macro-level of institutional structures and spaces (Blommaert et al., 2005; Thornborrow, 2002).
Chapter Summary
In Chapter Two, I have laid the foundations for this study by reviewing and drawing out key themes from existing research about legal advice communication, communication in asylum processes, and the role of interpreters in each of these communicative contexts. In this review, I have highlighted the lack of studies focusing on multilingual and intercultural legal advice communication and on communication in asylum and immigration legal advice-giving specifically. In the chapter I have also explored the prevailing ideology of legal advice communication as a participatory activity, and (in the view of some scholars) as an inherently intercultural form of communication. Finally, I have explained the theoretical grounding with which I underpin the key concepts framing the main and subsidiary research questions of this study.
In the following Chapter Three, I set out the methodological foundations of this study and explain how these support the investigation of the study’s research questions.