Co-constructing a virtuous ingroup attitude? Evaluation of new business activities in a group interview of farmers

Abstract

Acts of evaluation and their meaning-making functions have been approached from a variety of perspectives, under a range of disciplines and conceptualizations. In the field of social psychology, for example, the concept of attitude is predominantly interpreted as fairly stable, enduring inner dispositions of the individual. However, when the perspective is shifted to encompass the communicative and relational aspects wherein evaluative acts are embedded, a variety of crucial functions, beyond the signaling of individual preferences, becomes visible. The article presents a communicative approach for analyzing contextual and relational aspects of attitudes. Through a qualitative analysis of argumentation and social interaction it demonstrates how construction of attitudes in a face-to-face group interview situation can be accounted for as an interplay between sequentially organized stance taking, relationship regulation, and definition of common social identity. In this way, at first sight puzzling observations become understandable: culmination of attitude expression can be accounted for with respect to the emergence of a common social identity, a virtuous ingroup.