This article examines how a professional group articulates views of the new laws and institutions that call them to accept new practices and new meaning in the name of the ecological common good. Drawing on a framework integrating the approach of social representations and rhetorical social psychology with legal institutionalism, we analyze in-depth interviews and focus groups ( n = 29) with artisanal fishers. We explore how fishers use reported speech, that is, the quotation of others or self in own discourse, for building representations of Self, institutional-Others and their relations, examining also the values and dimensions of citizenship they mobilize with it. We show how fishers consistently use reported speech for presenting a negative institutional-Other acting in disrespect of the civil and political dimensions of citizenship, and a positive Self acting as a competent citizen – although rarely as a good ecological citizen. We discuss how focusing on reported speech by drawing on a theorization of how the institutional dimension interacts with the micro-level of interaction and discourse extends current comprehension of how contestation of the new meaning embedded in new laws can be warranted and maintained.

Neoliberalism calls upon the social sciences to explore how legal innovations – new laws and policies – incorporating neoliberal values are presented to the citizenry. An example are investment visas, a new legal instrument regulating foreign residency. Investment visas reconfigure citizenship by prioritising neoliberal values, by privileging economic capital over labour and over place-and-community involvement in the host country. They also create sub-groups within a same migrant community. The press can present these changes by highlighting how they involve choices among competing values, stimulating debate, or it can hide such choices, offering a depoliticised coverage of the issue. This paper explores how investment visas were presented to the Portuguese public by the press, in connection with the Chinese, its main beneficiary community. The analysis is two-fold: first, a thematic analysis focuses on the representation of the Chinese in two newspapers (n = 525 articles), exploring whether it differentiates the investment visa sub-group within the Chinese community; second, a content analysis examines whether the law’s transformations to citizenship are presented in a depoliticised way (n = 164 articles). Findings indicate that the press shows Chinese investment visa beneficiaries as disconnected from other representations of the Chinese. Additionally, the investment visa laws are presented in a depoliticised way: one (uncontested) perspective is privileged, emphasizing their benefits. Conflicting values are almost absent, and the deterritorialised aspect of citizenship is left unproblematized. We conclude by discussing the implications of this type of coverage in shaping social debate and for the socio-psychological study of legal innovations and of citizenship.

Today artisanal fishers working in Natura 2000 coastal protected sites face two major types of change: in marine resources, and the governance of their professions. Such transformations affect fishers' livelihoods, identities and traditions, yet little is known about how these professionals elaborate on these changesi.e., as continuities or discontinuities-in the narratives they produce as a group. Interviews and focus-groups with artisanal fishers and shellfish harvesters (n=36) from the Portuguese Southwest coast were subjected to a two-step analysis. First, a textual analysis with Iramuteq helped select the themes directly related to marine resources and governance. Second, three main narratives-on algae, barnacles and fish-were reconstructed. These were then explored regarding: (1) narrative formats (stability, regressive, progressive, mixed); (2) whether/how these formats elaborated changes as continuities or discontinuities; (3) the roles attributed to Self and Others, and whether and how these legitimized the laws, opening avenues for change; and (4) whether narratives were unified or fragmented. This study illustrates how transformations are presented through various combinations of narrative formats, sometimes mobilized to resist and other times to legitimate legal institutional change. It shows how institutional change can be integrated into local narratives as a positive contribution through a process that implies reconstructing the collective identity and local traditions. Through a narrative approach, this paper offers an integrated examination of fishers' concerns towards their professions and the laws regulating them, and provides useful insight into how and when marine governance is more/less likely to be legitimized.

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