Position Exchange Theory: A socio-material basis for discursive and psychological positioning

Abstract

Dialogicality within discourse and the self has been widely observed and analyzed. But how does this dialogicality develop and change? And how is it related to society? We argue that people moving within their societies, specifically moving between social positions, which are institutionally sanctioned roles with situational demands, provides a social and material basis for dialogicality. Each social position sustains a psychological perspective, and thus people moving into a social position are stepping into the associated psychological perspective in a fundamentally embodied way. As people move between roles and situations in society they accumulate psychological orientations, and this, we argue, is the basis for the dialogical tensions within the self, discursive positioning, and also humans' abilities to orient to one another and empathize. We review literature on play, games, education, problem-solving, and life trajectories to demonstrate that exchanging social positions is an important developmental principle operating across the lifespan.