Accountably Other: Trust, Reciprocity and Exclusion in a Context of Situated Practice

Abstract

The first part of this paper makes five points: First, the problem of Otherness is different and differently constructed in modern differentiated societies. Therefore, approaches to Otherness based on traditional notions of difference and boundary between societies and systems of shared belief will not suffice; Second, because solidarity can no longer be maintained through boundaries between ingroup and outgroup, social cohesion has to take a different form; Third, to the extent that Otherness is not a condition of demographic, or belief based, exclusion in modern societies, but rather something that happens to people otherwise available to one another in interaction, othering is a process that occurs over the course of interaction, turn by turn, not a set of beliefs or a state of mind; Fourth, othering may be supported by accounts and narratives, and these may exist before the fact -or be articulated after the fact. But, over the course of an ongoing interaction, beliefs and narratives do not explain what goes wrong with practices; Fifth, practices require reciprocity and trust. Therefore, practices require a more stringent form of morality -not a less stringent form -and more social cohesion -not lessthan traditional society.The second part of the paper illustrates these five points with an extended analysis of a cross-race interaction in which accounts are invoked, reciprocity breaks down, and participants are rendered as Accountable Others.

Racial Identity, Self-Esteem, and the Impostor Phenomenon Among African American College Students

“…The theory of othering posits that societal norms and expectations predicate who is made to feel and be powerful versus who is made to assume a place of inferiority (Spivak, 1985). Due to their historically disadvantaged minority status in the United States, African American college students collectively may be seen as the “identifiable other” (Rawls & David, 2005, p. 469) and regarded and responded to as an inferior group in higher education.…”

Managing Self/Other Relations in Complaint Sequences: The Use of Self-Deprecating and Affiliative Racial Categorizations

“…In this report, I contribute to this body of research by describing two complementary practices through which speakers orient to, and manage, the implications of their racial category membership for self-other relations 2 (cf. Dickerson, 2000;Rawls & David, 2006) when acting in the course of complaint sequences in which race is treated as relevant. The first of these practices involves speakers' use of self-deprecating self-categorizations, and the second involves affiliative ways of categorizing or referring to "racial others" (i.e., members of racial categories other than the speaker's own category).…”

An analysis of trust among globally distributed work teams in an organizational setting

“…The attempts by the company to encourage better understanding across the globally distributed teams through a cultural training program actually made the situation worse. This cultural training allowed the onshore workers to interpret the work of their Indian colleagues as a reflection of their cultural 'differences' (Rawls and David, 2005), which were invariably expressed as shortcomings. For example, lack of initiative (a national cultural trait they had learned about) was seen as the reason for the Indian team not being more proactive in asserting their views, rather than as a product of the situation in which they were new to the organization, new to the industry, and saw themselves as vendors rather than partners.…”