Drawing upon the notion of occidentalism, developed within cultural theory and critical ethnography, this article explores ways in which explicit and/or implicit assumptions about the West and Western self are implicated, in their conversational mobilization, to accountability management. The data analysed come from a study in Western Thrace (Greece), which included interviews and focus group with majority Greek educators about the Muslim minority historically residing in the region. The analysis presented employs tools from critical discursive social psychology. Building upon discourse analytic treatments within social psychology on the mobilization of national categories and accountability management in talk, it is argued that the banal indexicalization of national categories in talk opens the space for a critical interrogation of the banal indexicalization of an occidentalist cultural imagery that posits a hierarchical distinction between cultures of the West and the Rest.

This paper explores the discursive construction of immigrants' criminality in interview accounts obtained by a sample of Greek people in Thessaloniki (Northern Greece). Analysis, which adopts a discursive approach to stereotypes and category construction, indicates that fear and insecurity on the part of Greek people are represented as a sine qua non consequence of immigration to Greece. Two different lines of argument are used to account for the arousal of fear. According to the first, fear constitutes a corollary of a widespread stereotypical representation of immigrants as criminals. The stereotype of immigrants' criminality is considered to be ill-warranted and it is attributed to the media or to other unspecified people. According to another, more regularly used, line of argument, however, fear is predicated upon the sordid living conditions of immigrants in Greece which make the probability of them being involved in illegal acts particularly high. In this case, fear is seen to derive from a 'rational estimate' of the probability of immigrant's involvement in criminal acts. Nested within the discourse of 'risk' the stereotypical image of immigrants' criminality is sustained and used to account for the need to protect the 'ingroup' from 'immigrant groups' through immigration control and surveillance.

Prejudice reduction has been an important concern within social psychology both in theory and applied research. According to the premises of Social Identity Theory, redrawing of the category boundaries is often considered a necessary step in order to battle prejudice, because in‐group favouritism when the category boundaries change is diffused to the previously distinct identities. The present paper offers a review of the relevant research, and following a discourse analytic perspective argues that recategorisation can also be viewed as a rhetorical resource that people use in verbal interaction in order to achieve certain rhetorical ends. This point is exemplified using interview data from Greece with Greek participants who mobilise common in‐groups between themselves and the immigrants in Greece. Different common in‐groups were mobilised on the basis of common human nature, common ethnic descent and through the use of the common experience of migration that many Greek people have because Greece has been an emigrant sending country for the biggest part of the 20th century. Occasionally, these category constructions were used to differentiate between immigrants of different ethnic descent claiming that only certain immigrant groups can integrate to Greek society, whereas on other instances, these common in‐groups were used in order to inoculate speakers of accusations of prejudice. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

During the last two decades Greece has become a multicultural society due to the influx of immigrants mainly from the Balkans and East Europe. At the same time Greece became fully integrated to the European Community. Within this context the relation of Greek national identity to Europe and to the immigrant 'Οther' becomes a topic of everyday conversations and a focal point of social scientific research. This study following a discourse analytic perspective (Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996; Potter and Wetherell, 1987) attempts to explore the way Greek people construct Greek national identity in relation to immigration and European integration within an interview context. It is argued that participants strategically managed stereotypes about immigrants in order to avoid accusations of prejudice, while stereotypes about the Europeans seemed to be informed by the ambivalent positioning of Greece between East and West (Bozatzis, 1998; Herzfeld, 1987).

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge (epistemics) and power (deontics), normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying (not)knowing, while attending to concerns about (a)symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training.