Defiance and Motivational Postures Research Paper

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Motivational postures are the signals that people send to authorities, including criminal justice authorities, to indicate their liking for that authority and their willingness to defer to the authority’s rules and processes. These signals change in response to the actions of authority. Five motivational postures describe the way in which individuals and groups position themselves in relation to authority. The posture of commitment represents belief in the authority, its goals and purpose. The posture of capitulation involves acquiescing to authority because it brings the least trouble. Resistance is a posture of protest and anger about how an authority operates. Disengagement is a posture of withdrawal, of severing the relationship with authority to the point where the authority is irrelevant. Game playing challenges authority by circumventing rules and laws while appearing to do what is expected. These postures are openly shared and coexist. They combine to form a complex signaling system that authorities can read and respond to in an emotionally intelligent way to form a more effective criminal justice system.

Fundamentals

What Are Motivational Postures?

When authorities take action to create order or enforce law, individuals display a range of responses. The response of prime concern in criminology is whether people obey the law. Yet other responses also play a role in the success of an authority in crime control and prevention. These responses include whether individuals trust authority, believe authority is legitimate, or cooperate with authority. Motivational postures are related to this class of responses.

Motivational postures are socially shared thoughts and feelings that become organized into well-crafted signals to authority about different kinds of approval of and deference to authority (Braithwaite et al. 1994; Braithwaite 1995, 2003, 2009). The distinctiveness of the motivational postures concept revolves around their multifaceted nature, providing individuals with a suite of responses. They can be used within a single encounter with authority, across several encounters, or even across a range of authorities. Because motivational postures are outward displays of approval or deference, they can be used to communicate about the quality of relationships and negotiate new relationships with authority.

Social Distancing

At the heart of motivational posturing theory is the notion that people choose how much social distance they place between themselves and an authority, just as they choose how much social distance they place between themselves and another person (Bogardus 1928). Sometimes people may be prepared to approach an authority, to listen and be open to its message. Other times they may keep their distance, being wary of the authority’s purpose and turning a deaf ear. As people change their social distance, they are adopting positions that best protect them from an authority’s power. In Harris’s terms, individuals distance themselves from authority in such a way as to protect or enhance their ethical identity (Harris 2011). At the same time, authorities want individuals to position themselves closely, particularly when an authority wants the public to be responsive to its message (e.g., during a natural disaster or security crisis). Motivational postures are the signals that are sent by individuals and groups; they can be read by authorities and can be used to establish better working relationships.

Some motivational postures signal alignment with authority; others are oppositional. Within most of us, postures coexist. Early socialization teaches us that authority has the power to both help and hinder as we find our way in the world. Authority maps out paths of safety and success. Authority also hinders through rules and their enforcement. Authority in this sense always poses a potential threat to our freedom to act as we want. In response to that threat, we feel ambivalence. We see value in positioning ourselves closely to signal we are in accord with the authority. Then, as we observe the authority acting in ways with which we disagree, we increase our distance as we become less certain that our thoughts and actions are at one with the authority.

Five Motivational Postures

Five motivational postures have been identified empirically with some consistency across the domains of different authorities. Commitment and capitulation are postures that represent willingness to go along with authority. Commitment conveys a belief that the authority’s purpose is sound and that, in principle, the authority and its goals should be valued and supported by everyone. Commitment is a posture that enables individuals and groups to go beyond compliance, to do more than an authority expects or asks in the interests of furthering the accomplishment of shared goals.

Capitulation is the posture of doing what is asked, without necessarily understanding or caring about purpose and goals. Similar to McBarnet’s (2003) usage, capitulation reflects acquiescence to the powers that be. Capitulation in the posturing context also incorporates acceptance of the idea that authority has superior knowledge and knows what is best.

Commitment and capitulation are postures that signal alignment with authority and openness to cooperation, be it through shared beliefs or acquiescence. These are the most common postures in a healthy democracy. At the same time, however, people may respond with anger or annoyance when they are directly affected by the decisions and actions of authorities. Resistance is an expression of hostility toward an authority. When displeased with how an authority is performing, the posture of resistance communicates grievance, usually that the authority treats people in a manner that is unreasonable and unfair. Resistance is a posture that is less likely to take issue with the broader purpose of the authority and more likely to focus on the way the authority uses its power. Acceptance of the authority’s purpose gives rise to hope that the authority will mend its ways in the face of criticism.

Once hope is abandoned, the more socially distant postures emerge. Individuals conclude that change will not occur and that their interests – or those of others – would be better served without the authority. Through the posture of disengagement, individuals withdraw from having any relationship with the authority. They take no notice of what the authority says or does. The posture of disengagement communicates rejection of the authority’s goals and processes. Disengagement may be a posture of anomie (Durkheim 1897[1952]) where people have lost meaningful connection with the norms and values of the authority – and the authority with them. As a result, individuals live their lives apart from the authority and remain impervious to its powers.

While disengagement has a degree of fatalism about it (e.g., the authority will do what it will do and I am not going to have any part in it), game playing has a combative agenda. The objective is to outsmart the authority and assert independence over the authority while technically playing within the rules. It is the posture that gives rise to creative compliance (McBarnet 2003). The posture of game playing, while paying attention to the letter of law, shows little respect for the spirit of the law. In adopting the posture of game playing, individuals cleverly sidestep deference to the authority.

Using Motivational Postures And Signaling Defiance

We may move from one posture to another in response to what an authority says or does, or we may simultaneously embrace two or more postures. We may feel committed to the goals of an authority (e.g., preventing terrorism) but at the same time disapprove of how the authority enforces the law (e.g., abusing human rights). We may be prepared to capitulate to an authority in which we have little interest (e.g., paying tax) but fall into a pattern of game playing because it is the norm among our peers (e.g., signing up to tax avoidance schemes).

As postures wax and wane in response to circumstance, it is nevertheless the case that postures overall will vary in their salience. Authorities govern effectively in democracies because the accommodating postures of commitment and capitulation tend to be more salient and dominate the postures of resistance, disengagement, and game playing, at least for most people most of the time. On occasions, however, the oppositional postures of resistance, disengagement, and game playing may assume dominance over the accommodating postures of commitment and capitulation. Oppositional posturing represents defiance (Braithwaite 2009). Defiance sends a message to authority that communicates a state of overriding emotional and rational rejection of authority. Authority sees defiance commonly as one unified whole that needs to be squashed. Motivational posturing theory allows us to approach defiance with a more analytic and discriminating lens. Defiance can be resistant or dismissive. Importantly, the message of each type of defiance is different, as is the most appropriate response.

When the posture of resistance dominates postures of commitment and capitulation, resistant defiance is displayed (Braithwaite 2009: 113–115, 262–269). Resistant defiance is driven by grievance about how the system is working. Responding to grievance and improving the integrity of the system, particularly through procedural reforms such as dealing with people more fairly, respectfully, and openly, reduce levels of resistant defiance.

When the postures of disengagement and game playing take hold, a different kind of defiance emerges – dismissive defiance (Braithwaite 2009: 113–115, 262–269). Dismissive defiance is driven by the belief that the authority is blocking opportunity illegitimately. Dismissive defiance is not readily turned around because the authority is seen as unable to redeem itself. People who are dismissively defiant question the power held by authorities. Most notably, they question why an authority should exist. Dismissive defiance is not reduced by displays of procedural justice, as occurs with resistant defiance. Such displays are either likely to be ignored or considered insincere by the dismissively defiant.

Why Do Motivational Postures Matter?

There are three ways in which motivational postures add value to the array of social science concepts on which criminologists draw. First, motivational postures provide a more nuanced appreciation of an authority’s influence than singular concepts such as trust or legitimacy or cooperation. Seldom do people have only one posture. Individuals learn to adapt to institutional life through experiences in schools, religious groups, families, work, and leisure. In the process, individuals acquire the full suite of motivational postures.

The multidimensionality of postures is a reminder to authorities to consider which postures they wish to engage as they go about their business of crime prevention and control. What is more, a person’s suite of postures will not necessarily be in perfect alignment. Lack of alignment creates cognitive dissonance and room for deliberation. Engaging with the full range of motivational postures provides opportunity for resolution of differences through persuasion and dialogue. Responsive regulation (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992) and restorative justice (Braithwaite 2002) are approaches to crime control that recognize and respond to multiple motivational postures in those being policed or regulated. Through being able to read the posturing of individuals and groups and understand how postures can be shifted, authorities improve the likelihood that they will elicit cooperation and improve their effectiveness (Braithwaite et al. 2007a, b). They may avoid the escalation of unnecessary conflict, for example, through responding constructively to resistance while strengthening bonds forged through commitment and capitulation. Or an authority may increase its legitimacy and compliance with laws through refining its mission and improving its enforcement regime, thereby tackling game playing while building commitment to new shared goals.

Some critics may say that government is neither flexible nor insightful enough to be responsive to motivational posturing in the way described here. In an era of regulatory capitalism, however, agents of government are doing more of the regulating and enforcement and can invest in understanding how to read posturing, build commitment, deal responsively with resistance, and find ways of reining in disengagement and game playing. Restorative justice is an approach that operates on such principles.

Postures provide useful social cues for improving communication between authorities (or their agents) and individuals at the micro level. They are also useful at the macro level. Motivational postures add value through providing insight into how well an authority is engaging with the public. Motivational postures can be measured and aggregated to give an indication of the social distance between an authority and the communities it serves. An analysis of an authority’s motivational posturing profile within and between different communities provides insight into how an authority is falling short in its bid to win public confidence. Authorities that have good relations with the communities they serve and are achieving valued social goals should attract high levels of commitment and capitulation, some level of resistance (an appropriate countermeasure to an authority’s power in a democracy), and low levels of disengagement and game playing. Problems in engaging with communities can be identified through departures from this profile. High resistance signals that authorities need to listen more and be responsive to concerns. Unusually high levels of disengagement or game playing signal a more fundamental problem in which authorities have become disconnected from the norms and values of a substantial segment of the community. Reversing the situation involves critically assessing the authority’s mission, the moral purpose that underpins it, the laws and rules that supposedly reflect purpose, and the authority’s capacity to enforce laws and rules in a respectful way.

The third insight provided by motivational posturing theory is recognition of the two types of defiance: resistant defiance which does not challenge the purpose of the authority but expresses grievance over the way in which the authority carries out its duties and dismissive defiance which challenges the existence of the authority and undermines its effectiveness. If authorities are to show emotional intelligence in how they deal with lawbreakers, it is important that they don’t misread the defiance they are dealing with and its consequences, particularly mistaking the more benign form of resistant defiance for dismissive defiance. Resistant defiance is argumentative and annoying for authorities, but it can be turned around if the authority is prepared to listen to grievances and respond in a way that makes the system work more fairly and reasonably. Authorities that work at maintaining their public integrity will manage resistance routinely, allowing them to dedicate more resources to the challenges created by disengagement and game playing. It is the dismissive defiance associated with disengagement and game playing that is most difficult to address constructively because dismissive defiance places lawbreakers psychologically beyond the reach of influence of authority. Dismissive defiance in both taxation and occupational health and safety is associated most strongly with individuals failing to comply with the law (Braithwaite 2009: 270–272, 2011; Braithwaite et al. 2007b).

Background

Motivational postures were discovered in the context of regulation (Braithwaite et al. 1994; Braithwaite 1995, 2003, 2009). Regulation to secure compliance with criminal law (e.g., policing) is a subset of regulation as it has been studied in the motivational posturing context.

As governments introduced laws to improve the standard of care in nursing homes, those working in the nursing home industry were preoccupied with making sense of how they would be affected and treated under the new laws. Change was inevitable, but with it came uncertainty and threat that they would not meet the standards and not receive the approval of the new authority. They adopted positions for dealing with the new authority – motivational postures.

Embracing the new laws involved accommodation to the new standards and processes and in principle commitment to quality care. Becoming reconciled to change and new inspection regimes that hopefully would be benign for those who tried to do the right thing manifested as capitulation. This posture reflected a sense of having no escape from the authority. Feelings of grievance and resentment over enforced change found expression as resistance to authority and the way inspectors used their power. Despair and dismissiveness toward the authority and its goals for better quality of care brought disengagement, most notably among those who felt their business would be untenable in the future. Subsequent research revealed that these postures were present in other regulatory contexts as well. Research in the field of taxation a decade later revealed game playing as a fifth posture at work. It has been replicated in other contexts.

The coherence and regularity of the five postures was identified through factor analyzing the responses of individuals to a motivational posturing questionnaire. These clusters of beliefs, attitudes, preferences, interests, and feelings have been assessed through some 30 statements rated on a five-point strongly disagree-strongly agree Likert scale. Postures have been studied in this way across a range of contexts including taxation (Braithwaite 2003, 2009; Hartner et al. 2008), environmental preservation (Bartel and Barclay 2011), occupational health and safety (Braithwaite 2011), policing (Murphy and Cherney 2012), and child protection (Ivec et al. 2011) as well as nursing home regulation (Braithwaite et al. 1994; Braithwaite et al. 2007a). Observational and qualitative analyses of posturing have been undertaken in research on small business taxation compliance (Harris and McCrae 2005), agricultural reform (Cartwright 2011), war making and peace building in Indonesia (Braithwaite et al. 2010), child protection (Harris 2012), and the resettlement of South Sudanese refugees (Losoncz 2011).

Research has shown that motivational postures are in part shaped by a person’s values, norms, and expectations and in part by the actions taken by authorities (Braithwaite 2009). The term “postures” was chosen to capture the socially shared and acceptable nature of these signals – they were not deep dark secrets. The term “motivational” captures their purpose of protecting the individual from the potential threat that authority poses to his or her freedom. Postures are part of the psychological armory that individuals put on to allay any fears they might have in their next encounter with authority.

Applications Of Motivational Posturing Theory

A study by Bartel and Barclay (2011) used motivational postures to demonstrate how interventions with farmers who were not complying with environmental laws could be designed in a more considered, targeted, respectful, and responsive way. Bartel and Barclay identified qualitative differences in the responses of Australian farmers to more stringent regulation and criminalization in environmental protection. One cluster of farmers aligned themselves with authority through postures of commitment and capitulation. They not only complied with the basic legal requirements but also went “beyond compliance” in furthering the objectives of the regulations and the authority. They felt positively toward government intervention, were involved in newer industries, and better positioned economically to cope with change in the management of their smaller properties.

Other farmers clustered into the defiant groups of resistance, disengagement, and game playing. Consistent with motivational posturing theory, the game playing cluster of farmers was the least likely to preserve land for conservation purposes, opposed change, opposed government, and the law. They were older, well-established farmers of their district, and less educated. The resistant farmers and disengaged farmers were more ambivalent in how they approached regulation. Bartel and Barclay (2011) observed defiance as being linked to jurisdiction and industry. The resistant and disengaged farmers tended to be crop growers, dealing with drought and pests and a threatened livelihood. For Bartel and Barclay, motivational postures provided a fine-grained analysis of types of opposition to environmental laws and reasons for that opposition, as well as spotting where entrenched forms of defiance may lie.

In the context of policing, the motivational posture of disengagement has been used to explain the limits of procedural justice in dealings with ethnic minorities (Murphy and Cherney 2012). Murphy and Cherney found that when ethnic minorities believed that laws were not legitimate, procedural justice was counterproductive in eliciting cooperation. Disengagement from authority was the factor that explained why procedural justice was proving counterproductive as a means of increasing cooperation. Disengagement by ethnic minorities from the police meant that police were unable to find a foothold to start building a cooperative relationship through procedural justice.

Tyler and colleagues have shown convincingly that procedural justice can build legitimacy of laws and elicit cooperation with authorities (Tyler 1997). However, when no relationship is in place, as reflected in a posture of disengagement, procedural justice provides an opportunity for game playing with authorities rather than cooperating.

Harris (2012) used motivational posturing theory to better understand the responses of parents to their first visit from a child protection officer. Child protection authorities placed importance on their officers using an assessment framework which was expected to deliver consistency in decision making and “court readiness” should there be need to remove the child from the family. Harris observed parents expressing greater defiance over assessment procedures than over the visit from child protection authorities. Harris’ thesis was that where assessment was experienced as being intrusive, good will on the part of parents to cooperate with the investigation was lost, and this was evident through motivational posturing.

Within Harris’s (2012) sample of parents receiving their first visit, some were predominantly positive about the assessment process. These parents were more likely to see benefits in the intervention by child protection authorities (commitment posture). Others were less comfortable with the assessment measures but accepted that the investigation would occur and were resigned to putting up with it (capitulation posture). A third group took offense at the assessment process and responded with criticism and anger over the investigation (resistance posture). A fourth group was equally critical, but instead of fighting, withdrew from the authority, expressing no hope that the investigation or anything flowing from it could help them or their child in any way (disengagement posture). Whether parents dealt with what they saw as unreasonable intrusiveness through actively resisting assessment requests or feigning cooperation, they successfully increased the workload of overly stretched child protection officers and undermined effectiveness in protecting children.

Bartel and Barclay (2011) and Harris (2012) identified groups who were experiencing threat from authority at one point in time. Efforts to capture the dynamic possibilities of motivational posturing have been made by Robinson and McNeill (2008). They propose a model to examine formal, substantive, and long-term compliance with community penalties. Robinson and McNeill argue that when one form of compliance is privileged over others (e.g., formal compliance such as attending scheduled appointments), those serving community sentences may be more likely to engage in a form of posturing (e.g., capitulation to the system of surveillance) that does little to engender commitment to abiding by conditions of community sentencing (substantive compliance) or being law abiding in the longer term.

Robinson and McNeill (2008) propose that offenders with community sentences move between these different levels of compliance. Changes in levels are hypothesized as reflections of their interaction with various actors in the correctional system; different postures come to the fore in response to different experiences and treatment.

Some evidence in support of Robinson and McNeill (2008) proposition comes from qualitative research on how Australian tobacco farmers responded to government closure of their industry in a small rural community. The government turned its back on the tobacco growing industry as it struggled to compete internationally and as it fell into disrepute with the rise of the antismoking lobby. Government removed protective tariffs and imposed heavy taxes on the tobacco growers, seriously threatening their livelihood. Recognizing discontent in the region, buyers operating an illicit “chop-chop” market saw an opportunity to move into the community, offering to buy tobacco for a very attractive price while circumventing excise tax.

As government authorities cracked down on the chop-chop market, farmers were incensed that government could be so merciless in its treatment of them. Defiant postures emerged in response to the intrusive and tactical maneuvers of the authorities. The result was that growers distanced themselves from government officials and closed ranks in silence over what they knew about the chop-chop market. The chop-chop industry flourished. Cartwright (2011) documented the postures of resistance and disengagement of the community in her interviews and heard stories of game playing by growers who had thrown their lot in with the chop-chop buyers. She also observed widespread tempering of defiance with capitulation. Growers wanted to stay on the right side of the law and feared the coercive measures taken by chop-chop buyers who demanded a steady supply of tobacco from their suppliers.

In spite of police, customs, and tax officer presence in the community, authorities were unable to gain support. Their strategy was narrowly focused on threatening and catching growers and buyers of chop-chop. There was less evidence of authorities acknowledging the law-abiding postures of growers and helping ensure that those who were trying to stay within the law could keep their farms viable in the future. Interestingly, Cartwright (2011) could find no evidence of commitment to government authority or policy among any of her participants.

The dynamic of how postures can change over time as a result of how authorities are seen to be acting also has been illustrated in the context of tax compliance (Braithwaite 2009, Chapter 8). Perceptions of deterrence and procedural justice (integrity) have been shown to affect defiant posturing. The trajectory of change for resistant defiance is different from dismissive defiance.

An analysis of how resistant defiance gathered momentum over time identified two pathways that competed for dominance over a three-year period. One was a consistent barrier to defiance, a pathway of moral obligation that was theorized as representing a “moral” self – a self that was law abiding and that had nothing to fear from authority. Competing with the moral self was a pathway hypothesized as representing the democratic collective self. The democratic collective self saw unfairness in the system and expressed grievances, including disillusionment with the democracy and dissatisfaction over the tax paid given the goods and services that government provided. The democratic collective self-wanted improvements to the system and was prepared to protest in spite of the restraints urged by the moral self. This was how resistant defiance evolved over a three-year period.

Within these dynamics, deterrence played a dual role. It fuelled grievance in the early period, thereby boosting postures of resistance; but over time deterrence strengthened the value of being law abiding, boosting commitment, and capitulation. Procedural justice similarly was shown to have a mixed fate. Those who had distanced themselves from government and felt oppressed by the system were unlikely to acknowledge procedural justice (integrity) in the system. But once acknowledged, postures changed in a more cooperative direction. Over time, resistant defiance was lowered by perceptions that the authority honored its commitment to procedural justice.

A similar but simpler story emerged for dismissive defiance. A weak pathway represented the moral self that upheld ideals of doing the right thing and meeting tax-paying obligations. The stronger pathway fuelling dismissive defiance represented a desire to achieve, particularly aspirations for social standing or wealth. This is referred to as the status-seeking self. At first, the status-seeking self was high on grievance, but within a short time span, this turned into interest to find ways of avoiding tax without breaking the law. Aggressive advisers became the ideal “alternative authority” for the status-seeking self. Only two avenues emerged for keeping dismissiveness in check. First was the weakened moral self. The second was deterrence. Again, deterrence initially fuelled grievance, and only in the longer term did it reduce dismissive defiance and bolster the moral self.

For tax authorities, this study emphasized the importance of system-wide coverage of procedural justice because it is a way of ensuring responsiveness to the posture of resistance and to resistant defiance. Just as important, however, is critical scrutiny of the law, enforcement strategies, and penalties that are necessary for dealing with the less common, but more substantial problems that arise when postures of disengagement and game playing assume dominance and manifest as dismissive defiance. Authorities need to be watchful of the postures developing in the community and adjust their enforcement strategies to preserve a “firm but fair” regime.

Key Issues And Controversies

Motivational posturing is purposely an amalgam of more basic psychological concepts such as attitudes, beliefs, norms, expectations, and needs. The advantage of an amalgam of more basic concepts is that it is more accessible to practitioners. Motivational postures provide a scientifically sound yet practically useful tool for criminologists and others involved in taking communities with them in developing or implementing policy. Yet there remain questions around theorizing change and potential controversy about the normative aspects of posturing.

Theorizing Change

Research has shown how postures can be shaped by individual characteristics such as values, worldviews, and circumstances (Bartel and Barclay 2011; Braithwaite 2009). They are also responsive to the actions of authorities – the rules they enforce and how they enforce them (Braithwaite 2009; Braithwaite et al. 1994). The actions of authorities are shaped, in turn, by jurisdictional laws, administrative instruments, and enforcement cultures (Bartel and Barclay 2011). All three – individual characteristics, actions of authorities, and the regulatory system – vary across domains, for example, policing, peacekeeping, nursing homes, taxation, occupational health and safety, and the environment. While postures have been shown to operate across all these domains, they do so differently. Understanding changes in how postures operate across domains, systems, and cultures requires further theoretical development.

Normative Value Of Postures

If postures are responsive to characteristics of the person, the authority, and the jurisdiction, what then constitutes a desirable posture? From the perspective of an authority, commitment and capitulation are the signals authorities want to receive, while resistance, disengagement, and game playing are less welcome. An argument has already been made for why authorities should embrace resistance as essential feedback on performance. But the important normative questions to address are the following: Are postures of disengagement and game playing necessarily undesirable? Are there not occasions when dismissive defiance is necessary to overcome oppression and bad government?

Why Do Authorities Fear Postures That Promote Dismissive Defiance?

In the broader context of establishing law and order from local neighborhood policing through international peacekeeping, it is important to recognize that authorities create defiance through their very existence. Defiance is not just something that offenders experience and display because they are overly emotional or lack self-control. When authorities make their presence felt in the lives of individuals, individuals must manage the experience of intrusion on their freedom – they must manage the fact that they are expected to obey the authority even if they don’t want to or believe what is being asked of them is morally wrong.

Low trust in governments, rising individualism, plural societies, and/or cultural heterogeneity (LaFree 1998) mean that it is easy to deal with the threat posed by authorities through demonizing them as not worthy of respect and rationalizing defiance as the only way forward. Whether the problem is child abuse, domestic violence, gang violence, street protests, tax evasion, or financial crimes on Wall Street, defiance, once widespread, undermines the morale of law enforcers and eventually the authority’s public legitimacy. The global financial crisis revealed how the financial crimes of the powerful can be engineered with such defiance that neither government nor their regulatory authorities could or would effectively challenge practices and avert disaster. Authorities have reason to fear defiance. And there is good reason for thinking that dismissive defiance may not serve the public well.

The Other Side Of The Argument: Dismissive Defiance Brings Change

But defiance, even dismissive defiance, in itself is not necessarily undesirable. Healthy democracies value and embrace defiance among their citizenry: Failure to do so undermines democracy (Durkheim 1961). Defiance may lead to injustice being challenged through formal processes including the courts. Or it may lead to a challenge on the streets, involving law-breaking and criminal arrests (Lovell 2009). Suffragettes were arrested as they battled for equal rights for women. Rosa Parkes spearheaded the US Civil Rights Movement when she was arrested for refusing to obey a bus driver who directed her to give up her seat for a white passenger. Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid activists too were punished harshly by authorities for their defiance in fighting for freedom and justice. The Arab Spring has revealed the courage and defiance of ordinary people fighting for democracy. Lovell (2009) has provided a sympathetic analysis of “seasoned activists who are willing to transgress the law in the pursuit of social justice” (xi) and who carve out their niche at the poorly researched intersection of politics and criminology.

We can only conclude that the normative value of defiance depends on its manifestation and its purpose and the change that it brings to society. As Arendt (2000) points out, we may hope that change will be for the better, but it is not something of which any of us can ever be sure.

Future Directions

An important way of extending motivational posturing theory is to consider how these ideas operate at a group (community, national, or corporate) level as opposed to individual level and how posturing is used by authorities to control, rightly or wrongly, the communities that come under their influence. Such developments show promise in relation to three ongoing strands of work. Planned social change on a large scale requires the marshaling of collective hope (Braithwaite 2004). Marshaling the hopes of a few (the likes of Nelson Mandela or Osama Bin Laden) into collective hope involves building support around shared goals, engendering collective confidence that these shared goals can be achieved, and finding the pathways to progress the agenda such that individual efforts are coordinated to produce an outcome that is more than the sum of its parts (Braithwaite 2004). Such processes unfurl amidst numerous setbacks and hiccups, and arguably most fail. Motivational postures provide a framework for tracking the journey of collective hope in terms of its ascendancy, threats to ascendancy, or demise.

A second strand of work involves regulatory ritualism and understanding how organizations and nation-states can replace ritualism with more productive and authentic action (Braithwaite et al. 2007a). According to Merton (1968), ritualism means acceptance of institutionalized means for securing social goals while losing all focus on achieving the goals or outcomes themselves. In nursing homes, for example, new policies and inservice training programs may be introduced to respond to problems of noncompliance, but the new policy may never be implemented and the in-service training program may not address inspector’s concerns. Regulation has spawned many rituals of comfort but not of compliance for good outcomes (Braithwaite et al. 2007a). A regulatory regime that settles for postures of capitulation to the neglect of postures of commitment will be at risk of regulatory ritualism. When postures of capitulation dominate at the expense of postures of resistance, the likelihood of self-learning and self-initiated change becomes impossible (Braithwaite et al. 2007a). The dialogue and conversations that can unsettle conventional practice and move people out of their comfort zone do not take place, and ritualism prevails.

In a similar way, regulatory ritualism threatens the effectiveness of many international “social justice” initiatives particularly in developing countries. Such countries are urged to become signatories to international agreements for human rights or equity in education or health care, sometimes with rewards from donors once agreements are signed. Capitulation without commitment means that meaningful change is unlikely, replaced by token gestures and empty rituals (Charlesworth 2011).

A third strand of work focuses on the contribution of motivational posturing to the goal of crime prevention through strengthening communities’ efficacy and resilience. Within this agenda, sparks of individual defiance need to be harnessed and redirected toward goals that benefit communities. In such contexts, the posture of commitment within communities comes to the fore. Commitment gives rules and laws a sense of meaning and purpose beyond the situation people find themselves in. Commitment to ideas can drive out anomie. Anomie often prevails in communities that have declared “war” on authorities. Kolodziej (2011) has shown empirically that in Poland where tax authorities and taxes are held in low regard, commitment to taxation is related to being knowledgeable about the way the economy works. This understanding of the bigger picture enables individuals to adopt a more positive attitude to having a tax system and move beyond the complaints associated with a system that is not currently meeting public expectations.

Theoretical developments around hope, ritualism, and resilience require a synthesis of micro and macro social processes, the individual psychology of cooperative engagement and the mobilization of meaning and purpose on a larger scale. It remains to be seen how well motivational posturing theory can contribute to this synthesis. It also remains to be seen whether low crime societies manifest a politics of hope and commitment. Do they eschew the cynicism of ritualism, the lure of opportunity (Shover 2007) and gaming of law? That is a much bigger research agenda, one that we have yet to grasp.

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