Re-thinking "behavior" in terms of positioning and the ethics of responsibility

With the increasing use of poststructuralist concepts in the social sciences in the late 80s, new possibilities emerged in our capacity to analyse gender and class (Davies, 1989; Henriques et al., 1987) and in our capacity to analyse social interaction. One of those new poststructuralist concepts was positioning, and in 1990 Rom Harrè and I set out to analyse that concept and to make it more accessible for use in making sense of social behaviour. In this paper I want to extend that analysis of the concept of positioning, and to use it to think about interpersonal conflict and management of 'behaviour' in schools. I will conclude this analysis with a reflection on the implications for teacher education where I suggest, with St Pierre (2000), that "we are ethically bound to pay attention to how we word the world" (p. 484).