Invoking the Complainer’s Past Transgressions: A Practice for Undermining Complaints in Therapeutic Community Meetings

ABSTRACT

This article examines how a person who is the target of a complaint can undermine the moral entitlement of the complainer to issue that complaint. They do so by invoking the complainer’s own past transgressions. By pointing out an incongruence between the complainer’s current moral stance, as reflected in the complaint, and their status, as evidenced in their past conduct, speakers orient to an expectation of moral status/stance congruence as a basis for the validity of a complaint. My data consist of complaints and rebuttals collected from recorded group meetings within therapeutic communities for the treatment of people recovering from drug misuse. Data are in Italian with English translation.

Notes

¹ I thank an anonymous reviewer for proposing this alternative analysis.

² An absent staff member.

³ Denis pursues his complaint several times later in the meeting (data not shown). It is in the context of one of these pursuits that Denis criticizes Sandro for not intervening in the reported episode. Denis does so by enacting the sort of response that Sandro could have appropriately implemented to defend him: “you could have told him (i.e., the member who nailed Denis’s cap to a fence) ‘what the fuck are you doing I mean leave him (i.e., me/Denis) alone.’”

⁴ Readers with knowledge of Italian will notice that some of Sandro’s morphosyntax departs from standard Italian. In this case, se would be correct, translated as “if,” but Sandro says si. This is because Sandro is a nonnative, albeit extremely fluent, speaker of Italian.

⁵ Denis says that it happened once, after he had been admitted to the community (lines 34–35), which may suggest that, as a newcomer, he was not fully aware of the rules; in data not shown, he goes on to admit that he appropriated an item belonging to a client called Adamo, and then Sandro contradicts him by reporting that Denis had appropriated other clients’ belongings as well.

⁶ This aspect is extensively discussed in discursive psychology as a dilemma of stake (Edwards & Potter, 1992).

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European’s Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement no 626893. The contents of this article reflect only the views of the author and not the views of the European Commission.