0000000000234585
AUTHOR
Minna-leena Seilonen
Agency displays in stories of drunk driving: Subjectivity, authorship, and reflectivity
This study examined 30 stories of drunk driving (DD) recounted by repeat offenders in the early phase of a court-mandated counseling program. The focus of analysis was on displays of agency in the narrators’ portrayal of themselves as protagonists in the stories. The expressions of subjectivity, authorship, and reflectivity were considered as constructors of agency positions. In the analysis of the videotaped and transcribed stories, five story types of agency were found. They displayed the narrator-protagonists’ agency positions as either unconcerned, weak, egotistical, akratic, or disowned. The quality of telling is viewed as expressing the narrators’ problematic agency positions, readine…
Displaying agency problems at the outset of psychotherapy
In order to present him- or herself at the outset of psychotherapy as a credible client, the person needs to, on one hand, formulate a sense of lost agency in accounts of his/her life situation, and on the other, to present him- or herself as willing and able to take part in conversational self-exploration. In this study, we looked in detail at how one person, seeking psychotherapy, constructed accounts that served this double function. We sought to develop the usefulness of the concept of agency as an integrative theoretical construct of core processes in therapy and introduced a model of five aspects of agentic vs. non-agentic presentation, developed and applied in an earlier study on cli…
Constructions of Agency in Accounts of Drunk Driving at the Outset of Semi-Mandatory Counseling
Convicted drunk drivers, in accounts of their offenses, rarely display qualities of agency that would contribute to a favorable outcome in counseling. Instead, the discursive and rhetorical aim of the accounts is often to evade responsibility and ownership of the offending behavior. Such disclaim of personal agency can be achieved in various ways in the narration of drunk driving (DD) incidences. This study examined how five aspects of agentic presentation (reflexivity, historicity, intentionality, causal attribution, and relationality) were present in or missing from such accounts. It was found that a tentative model of (non)agentic display based on those five aspects could differentiate b…