Abstract
Using ethnographic fieldwork among cannabis growers and dealers, I investigate how they adjust their self-proclaimed motives for growing to fit others’ normative expectations. Scholars have typically interpreted the motivational accounts of offenders as either reports of what really happened or as ideal types. To scrutinize the complexity of their motives, I use narrative ethnography to show how they are situationally constructed. In particular, I show how one large-scale cannabis grower provides four motivational accounts in four separate settings to illustrate how these accounts are artfully created and situationally conditioned. All four accounts include the topic and utterance of “helping friends,” but they are used to signify very different and even contradictory meanings. To analyze how people can tell different and even competing stories without compromising their sense of being self-coherent, I introduce the concept of “flexing meaning.” The term flexing is a verbification of the word flexible, and it enables us to analyze how people and accounts create coherency and credibility by adjusting—flexing—meanings of established utterances and expressions. Using this case study, I discuss how people can make sense of and live by different and conflicting accounts without experiencing that they are being inauthentic.
Introduction
Motivational accounts can be approached either as reports of the truth or as subjective interpretations (Klenowski, Copes, and Mullins 2011, 47; Presser 2009, 181; Presser 2010, 431; Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 178, 178). However, talk that explains behavior can also be viewed as linguistic devices that are situationally constructed for protecting identities (Scott and Lyman 1968, 67). This approach differs from the other two by emphasizing that meanings of accounts are properties of the situation they are made in and not of the person who tells them (Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 178). By viewing talk that explains action as being shaped by situations and interactions, our analytic views turn toward the processes of how stories and their meanings are actively created and circumstantially conditioned (Gubrium and Holstein 1998, 1999, 2009; Linde 1993).
In the field of criminology, motivation is the central, yet arguably the most assumed, causal variable in the etiology of criminal behavior (Jacobs and Wright 1999). Yet offenders often provide multiple (and different) motivational accounts for why they commit crimes, even when explaining a specific offense (e.g., Copes 2003). Self-reported motivations for crime are most commonly interpreted as reports of what really happened (Presser 2009). Another widespread analytic approach to motives is to construct typologies by correlating them with situational factors (Clinard, Quinney, and Wildeman 2015). These approaches tell us something about the diversity of ideal motives in a given culture, but they tell us less about the connection between culture and people. Hence, research on offenders’ motives could benefit from using more theoretically refined concepts such as the emerging concept of narrative criminology (Presser and Sandberg 2015). The narrative approach does also map the diversity of ideal motives that exist in a culture, and in addition it helps us investigate how people creatively draw on cultural repertoires to link themselves to a specific culture.
Construction of typologies has been the leading focus in research on motives for producing and dealing drugs (Potter, Decorte, and Bouchard 2011; Dorn, Murji, and South 1992; Ritter 2006; Pearson and Hobbs 2001). Cannabis cultivation researchers have produced several typologies of cannabis growers based on motives (for an overview, see Potter et al. 2011). The two main types of growers are described as cannabis ideologists (who primarily distribute to friends) and commercial criminal entrepreneurs (who deal to anyone they trust) (Dorn, Murji, and South 1992; Potter 2010). The suggested typologies include a variety of motives that combine ideology and commercialism in different ways, and, by so doing, they illustrate the diversity of people involved in cannabis cultivation. However, to further develop our understanding of cannabis growers’ motivations, we should investigate how growers draw on different motivational accounts when they narrate explanations for why they grow. This kind of approach implies that we should interpret the motives people give as socially constructed and, occasionally, conditioned narratives. Thus, it requires us to investigate not only how accounts are “artfully” constructed (Garfinkel 1967) and performed (Bauman 1986), but also how they are situationally conditioned by available cultural resources (Mills 1940) and interactional conditions, such as personal status and conversation tone (Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 178, 125, 149; Marvasti 2002; Linde 1993, 16).
The emerging approach of narrative criminology (Presser and Sandberg 2015) has urged researchers to use ethnography—and especially narrative ethnography—to investigate motivational accounts (Presser 2004) within their naturally occurring contexts (Presser and Sandberg 2015). I seek to interpret these accounts by illustrating how they are adjusted to situational conditions (see e.g., Presser 2004). Narratives have previously been described as flexible (Maruna 2001), elastic (Presser 2008), or interdiscursive (Sandberg 2009a), and Anderson (1999) famously describes narrative as switching between the “code of the street” and the “code of decency.” However, many situations call for a more sophisticated approach than a clear “code switch.” In these efforts, I introduce the concept of flexing—a verbification of the word flexible—to demonstrate how the linguistic practice of flexing meanings of established utterances and expressions are used to adjust accounts without appearing contradictory or inauthentic.
Situating Motivational Accounts
The research literature on how and why people adjust accounts to the situational conditions of conversations is rich and extends over several disciplines. Writers oriented toward psychology have usually approached the dialogical dynamics of conversations with theories and concepts concerned with the authenticity of “inner voices” (McAdams 1993). Using different approaches, researchers oriented toward ethnography, ethnomethodology, linguistics, and sociology have directed their attention toward interactional structures, such as impression management (Goffman 1959), turn-taking (Sackes et al. 1974), dialogism (Frank 2008; Bakhtin 1981), and the importance of local cultures, institutions, and organizations (Loseke 2007; Gubrium and Holstein 1998, 2001).
In Goffman’s (1959, 1961, 1963) dramaturgical approach, conversational interaction is governed by situationally performed impression management. Stigmatized people, for example, protect themselves from negative reactions by switching between defensive self-protection and bravado. This “two-headed role play” indicates that “normal” and “stigmatized” are not personal features, but rather perspectives that everyone can apply and utilize. This approach is an early conceptualization of what Goffman (1974) later describes as “frames,” a concept that is a first step toward postmodernism (Sandberg 2009b, 490).
Scott and Lyman’s (1968) classic work on accounts shares similarities with Goffman’s work on stigma management but emphasizes how language and accounts are used within social contexts. They describe an account as “a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry” (Scott and Lyman 1968, 46) for the purpose of protecting identities and selves by minimizing guilt, maintaining a positive self-image, and fighting labels and stigmas (Jenkins 2004). Accounts “are ‘situated’ according to the statuses of the interactants, and are standardized within cultures so that certain accounts are terminologically stabilized and routinely expected when activity falls outside the domain of expectations” (Scott and Lyman 1968, 47). People align their current speech with what they have previously reported to assemble an explanation that is consistent with prior and future actions and accounts, thus creating and maintaining a sense of being a consistent, moral character (Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 178). Hence, aligning actions with culturally accepted accounts reduces gaps between preferred identities and normative expected and accepted behavior (Stokes and Hewitt 1976)—which increases the adequacy of the account for explaining behavior and staging social identities and selves (Jenkins 2004).
Writers inspired by postmodernism have emphasized the flexibility of accounts and how they are coproduced in social interaction. Goffman’s two-headed role game can, in postmodern terms, be described as the presentation of different narratives of the self (Sandberg 2013). However, people are not free to switch or adjust their accounts to whatever cultural resources that apply in the situation. As aptly put by Davis, “Narrative models are not like cafeteria offerings, more or less equivalent and simply available for the picking and choosing” (Davis 2005, 531). Whichever narrative model or culturally accepted account we choose to align our actions with is guided and structured by a need to protect a sense of self-coherence (Irvine 1999; Linde 1993; McAdams 1995). According to the concept of “narrative identity” (Presser 2009), the sense of having a unified or coherent self is shaped when people integrate stories and accounts into the evolving story about themselves (McAdams 1993; Presser 2004; Holstein and Gubrium 2000). Hence, people are free to play with different and even conflicting accounts to find an adequate one, but the freedom is restrained by their cultural repertoires and needs to appear and feel self-coherent (Gubrium and Holstein 1998, 2009; Linde 1993).
“Flexing” Words and Expressions
I use the word flex in different forms to describe and analyze the flexibility of linguistic units such as utterances, accounts, narrative, and stories, or, put differently, flexing linguistic units implies that the speaker keeps the form of the linguistic unit but changes its content by attaching it to a different set of cultural resources. The word flex is a verbification of the word flexible. The verb form enables us to analyze how people change the acculturated meaning of utterances or accounts without abandoning these linguistic devises. Flexing is a collective term for analyzing how people can use a symbol to signify different and even contesting meanings. Structuralist, postmodernist, and discourse scholars have described this use in terms of a “floating signifier” (Levi-Strauss 1987), an “empty signifier” (Laclau 2005), and the “freeplay” of signifiers (Derrida 1978). When I use the term flexing, I am describing in a rather straightforward way the linguistic practice of adjusting meanings of certain symbols to make them fit the expectations of the situation. Flexing is thus an ethnomethodological tool for adjusting accounts to contextual criteria of “account adequacy” in a way that protects the speaker’s sense of being self-coherent. People’s capability to flex and play with different narratives rely on linguistic skills and cultural repertoires and positions (Holstein and Gubrium 2009), while the necessity to flex the meaning of linguistic devises comes from the stakes of the situation and the occasional conditions.
I use Mills’s (1940) concept of “vocabularies of motives” to conceptualize the shared cultural resources that people use to make sense of their worlds (Scott and Lyman 1968, 46). People’s repertoires of cultural resources are learned through participation in cultures, and reflect people’s history of cultural attachment through life (Gubrium and Holstein 2001). Consequently, people that are embedded in different and even conflicting cultures have rich and diverse cultural repertoire, which they can switch, mix, and flex (Gubrium and Holstein 1998, 180). However, I have changed Mill’s term to “vocabularies of accounts” to better fit the purpose of this study. The term “motives” connotes drives from within the person (Scott and Lyman 1968). Accounts, on the other hand, emphasize that motives are a type of acculturated stories or narratives. “Vocabularies of accounts” are culturally standardized accounts that offer plots, themes, and utterances that people can draw on to adequately explain action and protect identity (Lyman and Scott 1968; Gubrium and Holstein 2009). A vocabulary of accounts draws on the same sets of values that shape social codes of conduct, and to talk or act in contradiction to them will often require the actor to account for his action. To study how people flex linguistic units, we need to identify key signifiers and their different acculturated meanings and study how they are used to bridge gaps and create coherency.
Cannabis and Commercial Culture
In this study, the most important cultural resources or vocabulary of accounts emerged from cannabis culture and commercial culture. Previous research on cannabis dealers and producers shows that they draw on two different sets of cultural resources that emphasize quite different values and operational practices (Sandberg 2009a, 2012a, 2012b; Hammersvik et al 2012, Hammersvik 2014, 2015)). The ideological cannabis culture and the commercial culture are based on different and even contradictory values (Sandberg 2012a). The cannabis culture is an offspring of the hippie culture and emphasizes values such as peace, community, nature, and ecology (Sandberg 2012b). On the other hand, the commercial culture pools on values and narratives from the criminal entrepreneur culture and the street culture (Potter 2010, Hammersvik et al 2012). These cultures are often described as the opposite of the cannabis culture, since they consist of values such as profitmaking and toughness, and are known for valuing violent as a symbolic resource (Sandberg 2012a). The criminal entrepreneur culture is assumed to have become the dominate culture within the world of drug distribution in the 1980s and 1990s (see Dorn, Murji, and South 1992). The two cultures are associated with two distinct vocabularies of accounts. The commercial vocabulary of account emphasizes “profit,” “risk calculation,” “business skills,” and “entrepreneurship.” The cannabis ideological vocabulary of accounts, on the other hand, includes themes such as “cannabis legalization,” “resistance against mainstream,” “anti-commercialism,” “solidarity,” “naturalness” (in terms of ecology), “peacefulness,” and “helping friends” (Sandberg 2012a, 2012b [Hammersvik et al 2012, Hammersvik 2015]).
“Helping friends” is a core utterance and topic in several narratives that are embedded in the cannabis culture’s narratives (Sandberg 2012a, 2012b). Within the cannabis ideological vocabulary, distribution of cannabis among friends and acquaintances is referred to as “helping friends” (Hakkarainen and Perälä 2011 ; Sandberg 2013). However, “helping friends” carries different meanings: it is a conventional phrase that reflect altruism values; it refers to a distribution model that is designated as “social dealing” in the research literature; and it can refer to a strategy for criminal entrepreneurs to build trustful relationships and reduce the risk of detection and frauds (Coomber and Moyle 2014; Zaitch 2005). Hence, the way cannabis distributors use the topic and utterance of “helping friends” when they account for their crimes signify and stage their subcultural attachment. The credibility of the “helping friends” account relates to the size of the business and motives for growing and distribution. A large-scale grower who makes a lot of money by supplying a lot of people will usually have problems with using the “helping friends” account. In the same way, a small-scale grower who uses accounts from criminal entrepreneur culture could easily be viewed as a poser or as a failed businessperson—at least in the company of large-scale growers. To gain insight into the artful staging of subcultural identity, we can investigate how cannabis growers talk about “helping friends” when accounting for why and how they distribute cannabis. The diverse meanings attached to the “helping friends” narrative and topic makes it a suitable case for exploring how people can flex acculturated meanings without appearing incoherent.
In this paper, I compare four motivational accounts given by one large-scale cannabis grower to illustrate how they are adjusted to situational conditions without compromising the narrator’s sense of being authentic. All four accounts emphasize the plot, topic, and utterance of “helping friends,” but the utterances have very different meanings in the four situations, depending on whom the grower is interacting with.
Method and Data
This study is part of a larger study that includes interviews and conversations with fifty-two indoor cannabis growers (Hammersvik et al. 2012, Hammersvik 2015). Of the growers, thirty-two were associated with one of the twenty-three observed grow sites. The two and a half years of fieldwork included spending time with the growers at the grow sites while they were socializing with friends and transporting and dealing cannabis. I also went to gyms, bars, concerts, and private parties with them.
The research participants would not agree to be audio-recorded because they feared that the police could acquire the recordings and use the recordings as evidence against them. It is common for ethnographic fieldworkers in drug-dealing environments not to use audio recorders (Sandberg and Copes 2014). However, this practice does not necessarily create a problem because the analytical object in this study is the thematic content of the account rather than its precise articulations (Holstein and Gubrium 2009). Conversations and observations were transcribed on either the day they occurred or the following day. Many of the transcriptions are very detailed. Some of the interesting happenings that occurred over a period of a few hours resulted in thirty to forty pages of transcribed field notes.
My main memorizing techniques during fieldwork were to write down key topics and arguments in a chronological order while in the field and then to write down details when I found the time. A four-hour observation session could result in twenty key points and one page of details, which I transcribed into detailed observations. Some of these points and pages were checked by the participants. My main memorizing technique during transcription was to visualize my stay in the field chronologically. I transcribed data I wrote down in the field in two different documents: a personal diary and field observations texts. The diary was a personal text, which helped me remember feelings and expectations I had in each situation. The observation notes were written as a chronologically ordered description of what happened. I started this process by describing in detail my surroundings, emotions, and expectations. Over the following days, I read slowly through the field notes, trying to remember more of what happened by imagining the conversations as a scene from a movie.
Bill is the protagonist in this article. He is the grower I spent most time with during my years in the field. At the time I started observing the growers, Bill was thirty-six years old, and he had a good educational background and a job. He did not have children or a steady girlfriend at the time of the fieldwork. According to Bill, he had not committed any crimes other than drug production and distribution. He had been a large-scale grower and hash dealer for twelve years and had never been convicted. During the fieldwork, he was involved in several large- (one hundred fifty to four hundred plants) and midsized grow sites (fifty to one hundred plants) in addition to selling Moroccan hash on a wholesale level (Hammesvik et al. 2012, 459).
Bill was generally careful about whom he talked with about his cannabis operations, and I was no exception. After two months of observing his partners, Bill finally began to talk to me. The first time we spoke was while Bill and his partner were harvesting cannabis plants. In this conversation, Bill described himself as a socialist and a sympathizer with what could be described as an alternative social movement that emphasizes green values. During the months that followed, we were gradually hanging out more often. Bill let me observe him almost daily for several months at a time, and we stayed in contact for two and a half years. The observations and conversations I present here are from natural-occurring situations and conversations, with different conversation tones and normative expectations, and from different periods of the fieldwork. I do this to illustrate how interactional relations and cultural resources shape accounts.
The size of Bill’s business, and the many situations I observed him in, makes him a suitable case for investigating how people adjust accounts to situational conditions without losing their sense of having a stable, moral self. Bill differed slightly from the other large-scale growers in that he used the ideological vocabulary more often than they did. Other large-scale operators did also mix, switch, and flex ideological and commercial accounts, but most of them used commercial accounts more than Bill. Bill did business, as well as associate, with both ideologically and commercially oriented growers and dealers. Moreover, he was an excellent storyteller, with good linguistic and narrating skills. Being a good storyteller, and associating with ideologically and commercially oriented growers and dealers, probably made him more skilled in mixing and flexing ideological and commercial accounts than the other large-scale operators. This makes Bill the most situated case in my sample for exploring and illustrating how people can flex, switch, and mix accounts, while retaining the sense of being authentic.
To study how accounts are adjusted to situational criteria of account adequacy, I focus simultaneously on the work of storytelling and on the circumstantial conditions of storytelling (Holstein and Gubrium 1998). This focus requires an approach that attends to the process of making accounts adequate for explaining behavior and protecting identity. Narrative ethnography is the ethnographic study of stories, and it involves the scrutiny of circumstances, actors, and actions in the process of creating and communicating accounts (Holstein and Gubrium 2009, 21–25). The approach combines ethnographic sensitivity to surroundings with insights from discourse analysis to analyze how people link experiences to culturally approved discourses. Ethnographic sensitivity to the surroundings is obtained through participant observation. Participation helps us access hidden social codes in terms of gestures, expressions, and utterances by enabling us to observe how accounts are shaped as ongoing social interactions and concerns (Gubrium and Holstein 1998).
Narrative ethnography can help us to explore the consequences of storytelling along or across situationally appropriate and adequate accounts. By comparing accounts given under different situations, we can identify similarities and differences between accounts and make sense of them. To explain differences, we need to determine what is at stake for the storyteller and listeners when presenting or responding to accounts in distinctive ways. To explain similarities between accounts, we need to ask what role they play in the speaker’s ongoing story about his or her moral self.
Flexing Accounts to Match Cultural Conditions
The findings are divided into two sections that illustrate how motivational accounts and their coherency are shaped and performed according to situational criteria of adequate explanations, and used to protect identities at stake. Each section starts with presenting the relationship between the interlocutors, the subcultural attachments, and tone of conversation, before I present the conversation and then the identity at stake. I then analyze how Bill adjusted his accounts to make it an adequate explanation for his actions. The first section presents two situations in which Bill’s motives were adjusted to fit the cultural resources that applied in the situation, while the second section presents two contexts in which his account was adjusted to fit interactional conditions.
Accounting to a Cannabis Ideologist: “I Am a Heroic Cannabis Activist”
Jon was in his early forties, highly educated, and financially well off. Bill and Jon had known each other for six years and had operated several grow sites together during that time. At the time of the conversation, they co-owned a grow site containing one hundred fifty big plants. Jon was additionally involved in four smaller grow operations, and he would occasionally sell small quantities of high-quality hash to his friends. Bill was involved in other small and large grow sites, and he sold hash on a wholesale level. Jon was according to himself and his friends a “real cannabis ideologist” who never worked with commercially oriented operators. The small profits he made were only used to cover production and operation costs.
The conversation took place at Jon’s place. After listening to them talking about their business, I asked them to tell me about different types of grow-operation. Jon described cannabis ideologists as being concerned with cannabis legalization policies and helping friends to use cannabis without exposing them to the dangerous risks created by the prohibition, such as violent criminals, polluted products, and police detection. This led to a discussion about what constitutes a “real ideologist.” The tone of the conversation and style of narrative editing was direct, but more collaborative than confrontational. Bill nodded as Jon talked, and he used himself as an example when he edited or elaborated on Jon’s points. This made it appear as though they were both running ideological operations. After Bill claimed for the second time that he did not care about money, Jon interrupted him:
—you must be doing it for the money, as large as you operate [points at Bill]. You are somewhat commercial, even though you pretend to only help your friends [Jon and I laugh].
Yes, if not, I’d be stupid . . .
But real ideologists only help their friends to smoke cheap. Everybody knows that.
. . . If you grow and sell small amounts to cover your own smoking, I guess it’s okay to only help your friends [selling cheap to close friends], but if you move large amounts, then you are just being stupid. Those guys get easily exploited, right. And if someone fucks you up, you will get in a lot of trouble if you do not have money in reserve. It’s plain and simple; you need money to run a business. To drive large operations without [financial] backups on instalment is just stupid. Everyone knows that. And, that’s what happens if you run large and only cover the operation costs and the shit you smoke. It’s nice to help friends and all that, but you are doing them a service by selling to them, so it’s just fair that you get a little for it, right, for the risk.
So, you two run your operations in quite different ways then.
Yes.
But you are not that concerned with making a lot of money, or what?
No, but I need to earn some money.
But what about your political projects—like the communist shit and antimaterialism and all that bullshit? [Jon and I laugh]
It costs to run political activities, especially when it is as dangerous is this
[everyone laughs]. I cannot keep doing this without a large capital that ensures my safety, in case something goes wrong, right. If you understand. Like, there are limits to how much I bother to sacrifice myself [giggles]. But I cannot just help my friends. You know, all smokers are kind of friends or “comrades,” so whom would I not help when I have the possibility to help them all?
According to Jon, a “real” cannabis ideologist is motivated by “helping friends” to get cannabis for personal use without risking harms caused by the cannabis prohibition. Jon’s views on what constitutes a real cannabis ideologist reflect motivational accounts commonly reported by ideologically oriented small-scale growers (Decorte 2007, 2010; Potter 2010; Nguyen and Bouchard 2010). However, accounts from the ideological vocabulary are rarely accepted as adequate explanations for large-scale production and distribution because such production involves a great deal of money that needs protection (Hough et al. 2003; Potter 2010). Hence, Jon’s views on “real ideologists” and the size of Bill’s business put Bill’s ideological identity at stake and obstructed his use of the ideological vocabulary. Jon’s statement put Bill’s activities to valuative inquiry, creating the need for Bill to account for the accused discrepancy between ideology and practice.
Bill started his reply to Jon’s question by stating that “money is important” and that “helping friends” is not an acceptable distribution strategy for large-scale operators. He abandoned his attempt to make his and Jon’s businesses appear to be similar, but when Jon confronted him with his past accounts about not being concerned with profit, Bill continued to use the “helping friends” utterance and account. However, the meaning of the word “friends” was broadened to apply not only to his personal friends but to cannabis smokers in general. This modification made it possible to link the account to the word and plot of “political activism” and to the rationale, “the more people you help, the greater your activism.” Thus, Bill transformed the “helping friends” account into a heroic account. The heroic plot protected Bill’s identity as a real cannabis ideologist, and it even staged him as a more important cannabis ideologist than Jon.
The account was made into an adequate explanation for protecting Bill’s ideological identity when Bill used ideological vocabulary to renegotiate and redefine the ideological meaning of “helping friends.” The ideological meaning and account were flexed from being about merely friendship to being about political activism. The heroic nature of the activist account protects identities by staging “moral worthiness” and “moral conformity” (Hochstetler, Copes, and Williams 2010; Presser 2004, 2008, 2009; Sandberg 2010a). For heroic accounts to be believable, listeners must accept the dangers the hero claims to be battling. Bill knew that Jon accepted the ideological vocabulary of his account and the heroic activist account. This knowledge, together with Bill’s linguistic creativity, enabled him to protect his identity by using the ideological vocabulary of accounts to adjust the ideological meaning of “helping friends.”
Accounting to a Commercial Dealer: “I Am a Skilled Businessman”
A year into the fieldwork, Bill invited me to join Harry (thirty-four years old) and him for a few beers at Harry’s place. Harry and Bill were childhood friends and had run many operations together over the years. Harry had little education and worked as a salesman. He spent most of his spare time cultivating and dealing cannabis. Most of the cannabis he sold came from Bill. Harry had a reputation for being a commercial operator who charged high prices—even to good friends—and for selling cannabis to anyone who his customers would vouch for. He rarely smoked, and he viewed cannabis mainly as a tool for making money.
Bill and Harry talked for a long time about a business project they were planning. The conversation “activated” (Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 41) a discussion about how a dealer’s motivation affects business strategies. Their conversation style was direct and sometimes dismissive, but they were able to keep a friendly and playful tone. The somewhat heated discussion began when Bill stated that most dealers are stuck to the cannabis trade by social ties and status, which he believed made them more concerned with what he referred to as “helping friends” than with making a lot of money. Harry objected:
But I don’t care about that shit [social dealing and friendship]. I’m not looking for friends or trying to save the world. I’m doing this to make money, and to only sell to friends is bad for business. You charge for the risk, right, so you can charge more from strangers.
Yeah, but, eh, this business is full of idiots and losers. So, if you don’t want to get caught, you need to know who to trust. That means you got to learn how to spot the trustworthy guys, right; you got to pick your clients, don’t let them pick you. They need you, right, you don’t need them. As soon as they think you need them, they start thinking they can demand things from you. Then you are fucked—if your goal is to have control. You see, dealing with strangers is much more uptight [looks at me], and you kind of need to have violence to fall back on in case someone fucks up. I don’t have to do that. I rather play on my customers’ bad conscious for trying to hassle me when I just try to help them. And look, I make much more money than you do [looks at Harry]. I have been in the game longer, and I have never been caught. While you, you run a cute little unsafe business; it doesn’t give you much money, you act like a Jew [both of them laugh], and, and you take a lot of risk by dealing to strangers. It is better to stick with helping your friends. You just need enough of them to make money. It is safer, and by charging less, they buy for their friends, and thus you increase the product and money flow—so you don’t have to stack it for too long [which decreases the risk].
Harry dismissed the ideological vocabulary of accounts by rejecting the altruistic meaning of “helping friends.” The topic and utterance of “helping friends” was cast within a commercial vocabulary and plotted with a risk–profit rationale. This shift in conversation transformed the account’s meaning from implying “solidarity” to meaning “risk strategy.” The conclusion was that “helping friends” is a poor excuse for not daring to take risks that yield profit. Harry’s criticism of the “helping friends” account implicitly criticized Bill’s motives and distribution strategies, which could put his reputation as a skilled cannabis economist at stake.
Bill began his reply to Harry’s negative perception of the “helping friends” account by accepting the commercial vocabulary. However, he dismissed Harry’s interpretation of “helping friends” as a bad business strategy for making money and rather described it as the least risky and most profitable strategy for dealing drugs. Profit is heavily emphasized, while friends are described as customers who need to be controlled. Thus, helping friends was not described as a goal but rather as a tool for making large and safe profits. Bill’s analysis of the risk involved in dealing to strangers staged him as a skilled businessman. The account is given authority or credibility when Bill links his argument to his experience as someone that moves large quantities of cannabis, makes a great deal of money, and has never been detected gave his account authority and credibility. It even staged Bill as a more skilled and experienced cannabis economist than Harry.
The account was made adequate for explaining action and protecting Bill’s business identity by casting the “helping friends” account within the commercial vocabulary of accounts rather than within the ideological vocabulary, which activated the discussion. The shift in vocabulary altered the meaning of “helping friends” from relating to solidarity to relating to sound business strategy. In criminal entrepreneur cultures, business strategies are important symbols of skills, intelligence, and creativity (Gambetta 2009). Cannabis ideologists, however, tend to interpret business skills as a representation of criminal entrepreneurship (Sandberg 2012a, 2012b; Hammersvik et al. 2012; Hough et al. 2003). The shift in vocabulary made Bill’s account adequate for explaining why “helping friends” was a good strategy for large-scale operators. This shift contradicted the claim Bill made in the conversation with Jon about “helping friends” being a poor distribution strategy for large-scale operators. However, in this situation, the commercial vocabulary of account enabled Bill to use the “helping friends” account to protect his reputation and business identity.
Bill’s artful skills in adjusting accounts, by flexing accounts, topics, and utterances within and between vocabularies of accounts, reveals that he is embedded in both ideological and entrepreneurial drug cultures and that he knew what vocabulary of accounts each of his interlocutors would accept. This ability enabled him to stage different parts of his “multiple self” (Presser 2004, 4). Bill’s ideological vocabulary was used to construct accounts that protected and staged ideological identities, while his commercial vocabulary was used to stage intelligence and business skills in conversations with commercial growers. Consequently, and as we shall see in the following section, conversations with strangers require speakers to work harder to construct coherent and adequate accounts since they have to identify which cultural resources that are available in the situation.
Flexing Accounts to Meet Interactional Conditions
Strangers have to identify each other’s cultural attachments to construct adequate accounts, while good friends need to include information from previously uttered accounts. The interactional conditions for storytelling relate to social status and relational distance (Gubrium and Holstein 1998). Relational distance affects the information one possesses about a conversation partner’s normative expectations and cultural attachments and thus what cultural resources are needed to construct situationally adequate accounts (Linde 1993, 222; Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 157). In this section, I present two situations that illustrate the ways in which adequate accounts are tailored in accordance with interactional conditions. The first conversation was from the second time Bill and I spoke together, while the second conversation occurred eighteen months into the fieldwork.
Accounting to a Stranger: “I Am a Moral Decent Cannabis Ideologist”
Bill did not talk with me during the first few months of the fieldwork. He later explained that it was because he initially viewed me as a “boring academic” with conventional and stereotypical understandings of drug dealers. Moreover, he worried that I did not know the codes of conduct in the illegal world. If his assumptions were true, then telling the wrong account or story could have put his reputation, business, safety, and identities at stake. My strategies for gaining Bill’s trust were to accept his accounts as adequate explanations and to collaborate on his argument. Still, Bill seemed uncertain about my views on large-scale drug dealers, and hence the risk of telling me about his business and motives. While we were talking about law enforcement and the risk involved in drug dealing, I asked him why he operated on such a high level. He hesitated before answering:
[silence—thinking] Why do I do it? I don’t know, I have asked myself the same question [short laugh]. I guess I have been doing it for a long time, and my friends depend on me. And I guess it is much better to produce weed than to sell imported plastic hash from organized criminals and terrorists, right, who are in it to make money off the prohibition. I would rather say my weed is a nice alternative to those guys. [I nod my head as if I agree.] And of course there is some money in it. I discover that each time I harvest. But, like on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think about money. I’m more concerned with helping my friends free their minds, or fill up their hungry brains—as I call it [laughs]. Also, I get to smoke for free, eh, and that is the least you can ask for when you are helping friends, right?
Yeah. I see. So, you are among those who don’t care about money? [Said with an enthusiastic tone.]
Yeah, absolutely [said in a matter-of-fact tone]! You see, the whole thing started when my friends and I began to smoke. We wanted a steady supply of good shit [slang for hash], so we pooled together money and bought a few hectograms that we split. But since the shit became cheaper the more we sold, we all ended up selling our shares in a few days. So then everybody started purchasing 100 grams for themselves. Later that became kilos, and then—yeah, you get the picture. But it was all about friendship and smoking as much as we could [laughs].
My friendly and collaborative conversation style invited Bill to use whatever account he saw as appropriate, but the relational distance made it difficult for him to know what vocabulary of accounts I would accept. An inadequate account could have staged Bill as a stereotypical and cynical dealer, trying to excuse his large drug business. To construct an adequate account that protected him against the stakes of the situation, Bill had to identify what vocabularies of accounts I would accept as adequate explanations.
Bill replied to my question about his motives by listing at least six themes from accounts within the ideological vocabulary. The list was not logically structured and did not follow a clear plot or point. The lack of an explicit point made it difficult to understand how the list of reasons was supposed to explain his motives for running a large drug operation. However, my collaborative conversation style did not demand him to merge the six reasons into a narrative coherent account with a clear plot. Instead, all of the reasons collaborated into an account by suggesting what I assumed was its main point: Bill did not care about profit. Bill responded to my assumption by confirming my interpretation of this account as his main point, which he then used to construct a sequential and logically structured account. Moreover, he bridged the commercial and ideological account by claiming to be motivated to deal drugs by the freedom it gave him to smoke as much as he wanted. Bill assumed that I held conventional and stereotypical understandings of large-scale drug dealers and hence cast his experience into a conventional vocabulary of accounts, such as being socialized into crime, and aiming to avoid contact with criminals. After all, subcultural vocabularies of accounts can be viewed by outsiders as inadequate explanations and poor excuses for drug dealing. Conventional accounts, on the other hand, offer guidelines for “doing moral conformity,” and are hence effective linguistic devices for performing moral conformity (Presser 2008, 134).
Bill made the account adequate for protecting his moral identity by determining my moral positions and identifying the vocabulary of accounts that I would accept as adequate explanations for large-scale drug dealing. This appraisal was necessary because social distance made us unaware of each other’s cultural attachments. The list Bill constructed did not explain why he operated on a large-scale level, but it did help him to identify my moral position and cultural attachment and thus the guidelines he needed to construct an account that I would believe. The conventional vocabulary of accounts transformed the “helping friends” account from a subcultural account to a conventional account about being “socialized into crime” through friends. The way Bill used a conventional account to explain his actions and to stage moral decency is considered common when account makers assume that the listeners are critical of his or her reported actions (Maruna and Copes 2005; Presser 2004, 2008, 2010).
Accounting to a “Close Outsider”: “I Am an Illegal Fair-Trader”
After hanging around Bill for more than one and a half years, I was dragged into a situation that I perceived to be a large and unnecessary risk. By this time, our relationship had become much tighter than it had been in our first conversations, and we had developed an honest and direct tone with each other. The situation started when Bill collected and transported fifteen kilos of hash in the car without me being aware of what he was doing. I realized what had happened after we reached our destination, but I did not confront Bill that day. However, a week later, Bill told me that he had borrowed the hash from those he termed “organized criminals” and that he had problems with the deadline. My biggest concern was that the owner had seen me and might have assumed that I was the buyer. He had given me a look that scared me. I had by now learned that many dealers used the ideological vocabulary to stage moral decency, and the commercial vocabulary to stage black market skills and cleverness, so I knew the lines between commercial and ideological operators were blurry. However, I still got disappointed by what I saw as Bill’s betrayal of my trust and his previous stated beliefs about ideology and friendship. I discussed my concerns with Bill with a confrontational tone and an annoyed expression:
What do you mean? Don’t you just deal with the nice guys [referred to as ideologically oriented “old-boys”]? [Bill smiles wryly and scoffs while shaking his head.]
It is not that easy. . . . I usually work with the old-boys, right, but they are not as stable suppliers as these guys. Some of them live [abroad] and only come back here to set up a new operation a few times a year. But, they have been slow the past few years. They are getting old, right, so they are not willing to take the same risk as they used to. And when they are all out, I have to go to the other guys. And, this time, one of my partners got a good deal from them, but the deadline is short—so he needed my help . . . you know I have to help my old friends. That’s what it’s all about.
Yeah right [said dismissively], but these guys don’t care about that [helping a friend]!
True [laughs], but you don’t run from your partners.
But don’t you think it is uncomfortable to support those you call organised criminals and dangerous?
It is not ideal, but there are no problems as long as everything goes as it is planned.
What about the cannabis ideology stuff; that you don’t like to support the criminals and stuff like that? [said aggressively]
What about it? [Bill wrinkled his eyebrows and looked annoyed.] I said I don’t like it, but that does not mean I don’t buy from them if I get a good deal. But I still stick to the old-boys, as long as they are operative. If I don’t do it, a lot of people will have to go to other dealers, and yeah.
[interrupting him with a dismissive tone] So, you see it as your responsibility to help them all [who smoke], like to help them get weed from a friendly dude?
Maybe; I don’t see that as my responsibility, but people complain if I cannot help them, and then they will find other dealers. I think that I do business in a nice way, so I know my friends don’t need to get their drugs from criminals. You know about fair trade, right? [I nod affirmatively] It’s like that. I am an illegal fair trader. [He starts to laugh—and his artful play with accounts causes me to follow suit.]
My confrontational conversation style required Bill to bridge what I saw as a gap between accounts and actions into a coherent motivational account. Moreover, our shared history forced him to include previously given accounts. Failing to bridge gaps between experience and local normative expectations can challenge social identities and the sense of being a stable, moral person (Scott and Lyman 1967). To create an account that protected him against my accusation, he had to construct an intertextual account, in the sense that it included past, present, and future accounts (Gubrium and Holstein 2009).
Bill began his account by claiming that he needed to stay supplied to run his business, and that those he usually termed “organized criminals” are steady suppliers. The account is constructed with an economic rationale. Bill continued to use the topic of “helping friends,” but this time it carried the meaning of helping an “old friend” to conduct risky business with people who had a reputation for using violence. To protect the consistency of his moral self, Bill had to bridge the gap between “helping friends” and “fighting organized crime.” He did so by returning to the ideological vocabulary and rationale of being socially obligated. However, the social rationale was not used to exclude the economic rationale but rather to account for his somewhat conflicting interests in cannabis ideology and profitmaking. For the account to be adequate for protecting Bill’s economic identity and his sense of having a coherent self, he had to merge the two rationales into one coherent account.
The account was made adequate for explaining Bill’s behavior by bridging gaps between the three accounts he repeatedly used. Our social closeness and shared history necessitated the bridging. He bridged the gap, between his claims about being ideologically motivated and his commercial interest, when he creatively merged the word “fair trade” with “illegal.” While the word “trade” signifies the economic interests of the business, the term “fair” signifies the altruistic values that are attached to the ideological “helping friends” account. The word “illegal” signifies that he is operating in a market without legal regulations, which accounts for why he had to be creative in order to stay supplied and in business. Hence, the utterance of “helping friends” is attached to both ideological and commercial values. The utterance “illegal fair trader” can be viewed as an oxymoron; however, it bridges past and present accounts in a way that makes the account intertextually coherent and thus adequate for explaining behavior and staging a coherent self.
Conclusion
The findings present four settings in which Bill mixed and switched between cannabis ideological and commercial vocabularies to construct accounts that explain cannabis cultivation adequately for protecting his identities and sense of self-coherency. In the first situation, Bill protected his ideological identity by redefining the ideological meaning of “helping friends.” In the second situation, Bill protected his businessman identity by shifting to a different vocabulary of accounts to suggest a locally approved sense of “helping friends.” In the third situation, Bill staged himself as a morally decent person by determining my moral position before aligning his action within a conventional vocabulary of accounts. In the fourth situation, he protected his subcultural identities and sense of moral self-coherency by merging the diverse accounts he had given into one intertextual, coherent account. The diversity of Bill’s accounts illustrates that people do not simply have one account they stick with, regardless of the situation or audience. Rather, they have a repertoire of accounts that they draw from depending on the interactional conditions and the nature of the “valuative inquiry” (Scott and Lyman 1968, 46).
Having a large repertoire of diverse and conflicting accounts, and being able to situate them, enables people to stage and protect “multiple selves” (McAdams 2005, 79; McAdams 1997; Giddens 1991; Gubrium and Holstein 2001). Offenders can, for example, be both gangsters and victims (Sandberg 2009a), that is, hardened criminals yet sensitive to victims (Jacobs and Copes 2015). Bill’s skilful use of different vocabularies of accounts reflects that he is embedded in both commercial and ideological cultures, and that he has both ideological and commercial dealer identities. Being able to talk both talks and walk both walks, so to speak, created business opportunities among both ideologists and commercialists.
However, if accounts are adjusted to fit situational conditions and preferred identities, how do people make sense of these differences without compromising their sense of self-coherency? A repertoire of diverse accounts can be used to create self-coherency through the logic of having many good reasons for acting or living a certain way (Linde 1993). However, a stronger way to maintain self-coherency is to bridge different motivational accounts into one coherent whole that matches the continuity in moral self-stories (Linde 1993). I have shown that “flexing” the culturally attached meanings of account and utterances—such as “helping friends”—to fit circumstantial conditions can create a sense of continuity across different accounts. Hence, flexing meaning provides both flexibility and continuity to the ongoing construction of a moral self.
Switching between vocabularies of motives, or merging them together, reflects the actor’s interpretation of the stakes and tasks of the situation. Switching to a different set of social codes signifies that the actor adapts to the tasks of the situation (Anderson 1999) and to different audiences (Sandberg 2009a, 2009b). Switching vocabulary and codes of conduct is an important way to protect identifies and even personal safety (Jimerson and Oware 2006; Anderson 1998). The linguistic skills involved in framing experience within situationally approved accounts permits an association with people from diverse cultures, which again increases social mobility (McAdams 1999, 2005, 76). This flexibility might be especially true in the criminal world where personal credibility depends on reputation and behavior rather than formal work and educational background. Being able to give credible accounts for actions and decisions stages actors as reliable and hence as potentially good business partners. However, switching accounts or even vocabulary of accounts also presents a risk of being perceived as inauthentic (“a poser,” “a wannabe,” or “a fake”), which can threaten subcultural identities (Anderson 1998, 99) and even identities in general (Linde 1993).
While the term and concept of “code switching” is well established in linguistics (Auer 2013) and among symbol interactionists (Andersen 2002) and ethnomethodologists (Jimerson and Oware 2006), few researchers seem to have studied how people can switch between codes of conduct and vocabularies of accounts while remaining relatively coherent. This switching is interesting since one would expect flexing meaning to be more common than clear code switches. Flexing is more difficult to observe since it does not necessarily involve a breach of argument and logic. Hence, to observe flexing one will often require more in-depth knowledge about the discursive surrounding than clear code switching require (cf. “narrative linkage” Gubrium and Holstein 1998, 166; Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 55). This need implies that extensive fieldwork, which follows research participants in different social situations, is conducive to understand how they construct coherency and identities over time.
Many situations call for a subtler or a more hidden way to change vocabulary of accounts than a clear code switch does, and not only situations that involve offenders and stigmatized people. Flexing meaning is rather a general feature of both effective communication and impression management since it protects the coherency of arguments and staged identities. People switch between different sets of cultural resources when they adjust to local criteria of account adequacy. Some examples include when they account for career and career turns to different types of people (Linde 1993), when they play sports with different types of people (Jimerson and Oware 2006), or when they talk about personal experience in institutions (Gubrium and Holstein 1998). Flexing the meanings of symbols is hence a sophisticated and understudied way to adjust one’s accounts without jeopardizing one’s “realness” by appearing inauthentic. Flexing meanings of established utterances and expressions (e.g., “helping friends”) enable people in general to hide code switches and thereby protect their arguments and themselves from appearing inauthentic.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to give thanks to Sveinung Sandberg for sharing his insights, and commenting my text.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.