Dialogues with the absent Other: Using reported speech and the vocabulary of citizenship for contesting ecological laws and institutions

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.

been consistently patent around Natura 2000, a European Union (EU) multinational network of protected sites encompassing about 18% of EU land, where conserving biodiversity is a priority (see Blicharska et al., 2016).In Natura sites, new legislation decides what activities professional groups -for example, fishers, farmers -are (and are not) permitted for the sake of species and habitats (Blicharska et al., 2016).Such professional groups have contested many of these legal innovations, getting involved in 'battles of ideas' criticizing, for instance, disregard of their local knowledge and of how it can be vital for the development of joint strategies for resource protection (Beunen et al., 2013;Blicharska et al., 2016;Jentoft, 2000;Martin et al., 2016;Mouro et al., 2018).Yet very few psycho-social analyses have so far explored these conflicts from their perspective (Castro, 2012), with most being principally attentive to the general public, or to nonprofessional groups (e.g.residents in general: Batel et al., 2015;Devine-Wright and Howes, 2010;Hovardas, 2017;Mouro and Castro, 2016;Pecurul-Botines et al., 2014).This has failed to bring to the fore that many new such laws affect citizens as workers (Castro, 2012), and we consequently still need to know more about how they understand them and make claims about their rights and duties in a socio-political order that offers legal support to ecological options that remodel their professions.
The present article addresses this lacuna by analyzing interviews conducted with artisanal fishers working in a Portuguese Natura 2000 site and Natural Park where new laws impose limits to the amounts they can catch, define the places where they can fish and establish closed periods when they are not allowed to fish certain species (Castro et al., 2018).Such ecological laws -as all laws -provide these workers with 'desireindependent' reasons for altering their practices, whether they desire it or not, remaining in the profession means abiding (i.e.acting) by the laws.Yet, from a social-psychological perspective, these newly issued laws also request them as citizens to accept new meaning, that is, the new social representations and values that they incorporate, and which sustain the (now) institutionalized views of the ecological common good (Bertoldo and Castro, 2018;Castro et al., 2018;Elcheroth et al., 2011).The specific laws here considered furthermore express a dimension of citizenship recently added to the traditional ones (i.e. civil, political, social, as identified by Marshall, 1950; see Condor, 2011) -the ecological dimension (Condor, 2011;Dobson, 2006).This dimension, supported by the institutionalization of ecological concerns initiated in the late 1980s through the creation of treaties, Ministries, agencies and laws (see Castro, 2012), opened new dilemmas in which old and new values -for example, the freedom to fish and the protection of species -sometimes clash.It also opened 'battles of ideas' (Moscovici and Marková, 2000), that is, discursive 'fights' around (the always contestable) definitions of the good ecological citizen or the ecological common good that were institutionalized.
In the interviews with fishers, we noticed their repeated use of reported speech, the discursive practice of quoting Others or Self in one's own discourse (Buttny and Williams, 2000;Holt and Clift, 2007).Reported speech, by constructing what is said as independent of the speaker (Potter, 1996), offers it a kind of empirical robustness or 'factuality' (see Benwell, 2012), useful in warranting stances taken in a dispute (Svahn, 2017) or in criticizing others (Benwell, 2012;Buttny, 1997).Fishers seemed to frequently use it for quoting institutional-Others talking to them, and themselves talking to institutional-Others. We decided then to focus on these dialogues with absent Others -that is, with interlocutors that fishers rarely see but whose definitions of the common good bind them -for exploring how through them they articulated views of such definitions and of the new meanings they carry, and how they constructed representations of Self and Other.Therefore, we first examined how prevalent reported speech was in the interviews and then explored how it was used to build representations of the Other, the Self and their relations, and which values and dimensions of citizenship -old and new -it was used together with.
For these analyses linking the macro-level of institutions with the micro-level of discourse and communication, we integrate the approach of legal institutionalism (Deakin et al., 2017) with social representations (Marková, 2008;Moscovici, 1972) and rhetorical social psychology (Billig, 1987(Billig, , 1991;;Gibson and Hamilton, 2011).Next, we present the approaches and their integration.Then, we give methodological details and proceed to analysis.

Institutions -why they matter for battles of ideas
Institutions are of very different types but share the central features that follow (Deakin et al., 2017;Searle, 2005).Institutions are the result of collective agreements about a system of rules.This system incorporates options of inclusion and exclusion of certain values and also of prioritization of some values over others.It also assigns status functions, that is, functions which exist only because the collectivity accepts and assigns them.The agreements also create deontic powers (rights, duties, obligations) linked to the rules and status functions and providing humans with 'desire-independent' reasons for action (Searle, 2005).For legal institutionalism (Deakin et al., 2017), state institutions and the laws they produce assign individuals the status function of citizens of a nation, defining the deontic powers of citizenship.As a collective assignment, the power of laws is not only, and not primarily, a matter of obedience to rules: for laws to exist in a full sense, their enactment by citizens is a requirement, and in turn enacting the laws -even if in a 'desireindependent' way -is a requirement for being a citizen (Deakin et al., 2017).The power of laws is thus a matter of interdependence: citizenship is a collectively defined status, and state institutions and citizens are mutually constitutive (Searle, 2005).
The assumptions of legal institutionalism have implications for a social psychology of citizenship (see Andreouli et al., 2017;Condor, 2011;Di Masso, 2015;Gibson and Hamilton, 2011), as well for a better understanding of how the acceptance or contestation new laws -and their new meaning -can be expressed.They highlight the interdependence between individuals' agency and the institutional structure (Andreouli et al., 2017) constraining it and defining what is 'speakable, or practically achievable in any actual social context' (Condor, 2011: 199).These assumptions thus support conceptualizing citizenship as more than simply a process constituted in the practices of daily life (Stevenson et al., 2015), instigating researchers to neither view people as un-agentic subjects dominated by state laws nor as agents alone capable of bringing citizenship to existence, or able to contest definitions of the common good without being constrained by the collective nature of these definitions.
The assumptions further highlight that such collective nature implies that the refusal by single individuals to enact new laws is subjected to being devalued as illegality, and only refusal to (en)act them as a collective, or in its name, can be valued, for example as 'civil disobedience', as Arendt (1972) observed.They thus recall the need of being attentive to how in concrete social encounters -such as the interview -the delicate work of justifying individual refusal to enact a law might be accomplished.Finally, these premises highlight how, although the discursive contestation of a law and the new meanings it incorporates is a path open to individuals and collectives, there are specific challenges in following it.In most cases, the social representations and values sustaining the definitions of the common good incorporated in the laws of a nation are highly (collectively) valued (Bertoldo and Castro, 2018;Castro and Mouro, 2016;Elcheroth et al., 2011;Searle, 2005), which suggests that legitimating their contestation might require mobilizing other also highly valued values and representations.Among these, those already incorporated in other laws, helping define rights and duties of citizenship, central for establishing contesters as competent citizens (Gibson and Hamilton, 2011), feature prominently.This suggests analyses should be attentive to how, in concrete social encounters discussing new laws, the old and new values and dimensions of citizenship are mobilized, examining also if they are called upon for doing acceptance or refusal.
To explore how fishers discussed their laws and the new meanings they bring, we integrate the dialogical approach to social representations (Jovchelovitch, 2007;Marková, 2008) and the rhetorical psychosocial approach (Billig, 1987;Billig et al., 1988;Gibson and Hamilton, 2011).We turn to briefly summarizing how.

Researching battles of ideas -interaction and relation
The two approaches share assumptions central for researching how new meaning is accepted and contested: both view meaning as constructed with others in discourse and communication (Batel and Castro, 2018) and assume there is no radical 'discontinuity' between internal and external dialogue (Billig, 1987(Billig, , 1999;;Moscovici, 1988;Marková et al., 2007).The dialogical approach to representations focuses on how communication produces and transforms shared meaning-systems, that is, social representations (Batel and Castro, 2018;Jovchelovitch, 2007;Marková et al., 2007;Moscovici, 1972).It highlights how some of these meaning-systems, but not all, achieve stability in a culture (Castro, 2015;Gibson, 2015) and how institutions, particularly state ones, are a main stabilizer (Castro, 2012;Elcheroth et al., 2011).In turn, rhetorical social psychology (Billig, 1987(Billig, , 1999;;Billig et al., 1988;Gibson, 2011) focuses on discourse for examining how individuals 'actively wrestle with the contradictions of commonsense' (Dixon et al., 2006: 191), viewed as a reservoir of lived ideology, or cultural resources, harboring contrary themes and values (Billig, 1987).It explores the rhetorical organizations people use for dealing with the dilemmas opened by such heterogeneity (Billig et al., 1988;Gibson, 2011) and how they can help in settling differences (Billig, 1991), negotiating priorities (Dixon et al., 2006).Yet it also shows how sometimes people 'succeed in evacuating the dilemmatic aspects from their thinking' and discourse (Billig et al., 1988: 144), making one theme dominant.
Both approaches thus view discourse as drawing on shared cultural meaning resources representations, valuesthat are used and transformed in situated interactions.Yet the dialogical approach also centrally assumes that situated interactions are always embedded in Self-Other relations that endure beyond specific, situated, instantiations (Castro, 2015;Castro and Mouro, 2016;Marková et al., 2007).It highlights too how people can adopt various communicative styles signaling different types of such relations (Moscovici and Marková, 2000).
Some of these styles signal perspective-taking (Gillespie, 2008) and can assimilate elements from different meaning-systems, helping to accommodate together positions of Self and Other (Jovchelovitch and Priego -Hernandez, 2015), or integrate new meaning.This can be done, for example, by concessive 'yes . . .but' formulations (Uzelgun et al., 2015) used for arguing that yes, species have to be preserved, but this requires the local knowledge of traditional professions, not just expert input (Castro and Mouro, 2016).Other communicative styles act instead as 'semantic barriers', that is, they signal that the Self is treating the representations of the Other as 'foreign bodies, isolated and quarantined from dialogue' (Gillespie, 2008: 388).This can be expressed by dichotomic, polarized, formulations that construct rigid oppositions between the 'right' ideas and actions of the Self and the 'wrong' ones of the Other (Batel and Castro, 2009;Gillespie, 2008).
In this regard, a powerful way of warranting these versions of Self and Other as independent of speaker, and enhancing their credibility, is reported speech 1 (Benwell, 2012;Buttny, 1998;Buttny and Williams, 2000;Mogendorff et al., 2014;Potter, 1996).Studies show how reported speech, rhetorically designed to make denial difficult (Benwell, 2012), can be used to warrant evidence claims in a dispute (Buttny and Williams, 2000), or how, offering vivid accounts with a scenic dimension (De Fina, 2003), it helps in soliciting support of the present interlocutors for a stance taken in a conflict with those quoted (Svahn, 2017).Often signaling a negative evaluation of the reported Other by using derision or ridicule (Benwell, 2012), the distance it creates between speakers and what they say helps simultaneously in safeguarding the competence of speakers when their negative or critical views risk presenting them under a negative light (Benwell, 2012).Views criticizing institutionalized definitions of the common good, such as laws, may bring this risk, and reported speech can be useful for the critical Self to avoid being seen as an incompetent citizen (Gibson and Hamilton, 2011).The relevance of reported speech thus lies not on the extent to which it accurately repeats what was said in the past, but on how, in the interaction in which the speaker is presently involved, it constructs the Other, Self and Self-Other relations being discussed (Benwell, 2012) and the functions performed in that interaction.Yet, and at the same time, these functions are not disconnected from the enduring relations that are being discussed and reported in the interaction -this connection being a central concern of our framework.
Drawing from it, we will now explore individual and collective interviews with artisanal fishers.First, we examine the prevalence of reported speech when they discuss their ecological laws and institutions.Then we focus on how they use reported speech for representing Self, institutional-Other and their relations and mobilize -through both reported speech and the discursive context in which it is used -the values, representations and dilemmas of the old and new dimensions of citizenship.We simultaneously pay attention to whether reported speech signals barriers to the values and representations of the institutional-Others, or openness toward them, taking these signals brought to the interactional context of the interview as relevant for understanding the relations of fishers with the policy-institutional sphere.

Participants
Participants were professional artisanal fishers (total n = 29) working in three localities of the Costa Vicentina, a Natura 2000 protected site and Natural Park on the southwest coast of Portugal, contacted at the small ports where they keep the boats.Their ages varied between 28 and 83, the majority had attended 4 years of school and they were all male (as there were no fisherwomen in the localities).They participated in long, open interviews (n = 16; mean duration 1 hour 24 minutes) and focus groups (n = 13; mean duration 1 hour 27 minutes) during 2014 and 2015, conducted by three different researchers.Interviews and groups were presented to participants as seeking to understand the experience of working as an artisanal fisher in that Coast, were audio-recorded with written permission and integrally transcribed.[AQ:1]

Analytic procedure
The analytic procedure had the following steps.First, all extracts from the transcripts mentioning institutions and/or institutional facts were collected (n = 146); then each extract was classified, in a bottom-up manner, according to institution mentioned (Government, Natural Park/Natura site, Municipality, Laws, a generic un-named 'They' and Marine Police).Second, in this pool, extracts that had direct reported speech were identified (n = 60).Third, each instance of direct reported speech was classified according to the prevalent direction of communication: (1) Other-to-Self, Self-to-Other or other situations (e.g.Self-to-Self, or mixed).Here, Other and Self can be individual or collective entities (e.g. the Self can be the fisher speaking, or fishers in general).Fourth, instances of reported speech were classified into one of two types (following the definitions of Mogendorff et al., 2014): (1) 'real' reported speech, reporting conversations made to seem real or prototypical and (2) hypothetical reported speech.Two independent coders developed the categorization, and the few discrepancies were resolved by consensus.The frequencies generated by steps 1-3 were used for understanding the prevalence of reported speech.
Finally, a fifth step involved selecting from the (n = 60) extracts with reported speech some of the more illustrative ones in what concerns the variety of forms of representing the Other, the Self and their relations while making the selection also inclusive of the institutions involved, the direction of communication and the types of reported speech ('real' and hypothetical).These selected extracts -to be analyzed in detail -will be identified by number of interview or Group, locality (AR, CAR and MF) and institution mentioned (see Appendix 1 for the original version in Portuguese).

Analysis and discussion
Prevalence of reported speech.Overall, reported speech can be said to be rather prevalent in this material, as it is present in 41% of the extracts mentioning institutions.The 'Natural Park/Natura' (n = 38) and the 'Laws' (n = 38) are the most frequently mentioned institutions, and reported speech is intensely used when they are discussed: 45% of 'Natural Park' mentions use it and 37% of the mentions to 'Laws' use it, as shown in Table 1.
Having established that the use of reported speech for discussing institutions is indeed a relevant feature of these interviews, let us now see how it is employed.
Reporting Other and Self.The analyses that follow are organized in two sub-sections.The first is predominantly concerned with how the Other is depicted, and in the six extracts presented, Other-to-Self reported speech dominates.The first four show how 'real' reported speech is used for presenting a non-democratic Other, and the last two how it helps in sketching a desired, yet hypothetical, Other.
The second sub-section is concerned with how the Self is depicted, and in the four extracts presented, Self-to-Other reported speech predominates.The first two show how it presents the Self as a reasonable and competent citizen, and the last two, how it helps justify the -mostly hypothetical -entering of Self into illegality.

Presenting the Other as non-democratic
The three extracts below contain appeals to values (equality under the law; the right to participate) belonging to the civil and political dimensions of citizenship.That the 'laws should be equal for all', that is, affecting equally everyone in a nation, is implicitly suggested in Extracts 1 and 2; that citizens should be involved and consulted when new laws are being prepared is explicit in Extract 3: In all three extracts, the Other is reported as using non-democratic, authoritarian ways of addressing the Self, performing breaches to these highly valuable, culturally sedimented (Gibson, 2015) citizenship values.At the implicit level, this construction is thus also implying that these values are so broadly indisputable and shared that breaching them cannot but mobilize the interviewer -the direct interlocutor -for the cause of the speaker, as often happens with uses of reported speech (Benwell, 2012;Svahn, 2017).As the literature also remarks, exaggeration and ridicule are uses of reported speech for implicating certain critical positions regarding the Others, constructing them as negative (Benwell, 2012).This is also apparent in these extracts.In Extract 1, reported speech, with its repetition of the form 'from here to there' helps the interviewee to ridicule the generic institutional-Other it invokes, depicted arriving at the site to declare the spatial limits of the fishing restrictions.At the same time, highlighting the spatial limits imposed by the laws, it helps supporting the main argument -the spatial restrictions violate the principle of equality of all under the law, a major value of civil citizenship (Condor, 2011), since they only affect some fishers, not all.In Extract 2, the reported speech conveys the same hint of ridicule by animating an Other who divides the sea by rocks based on a piece of paper.Also, to be noticed in this extract is how the values of ecological citizenship remain values and goals of the institutional-Other in the way the sentence is formulated (if they want to protect a species) and are not linked to the Self.
Extract 3, in turn, explicitly places the institutional-Others under democratic suspicion through reporting authoritarian stances (We will do this) while also implicitly placing them under epistemic suspicion, when expressing that they do 'things that have no reason whatsoever', based on 'fixed ideas', that is, not on knowledge, or epistemic reasons.Here, the first instance of reported speech is thus oriented to show the Others disrespecting another political citizenship value (citizens need a chance to speak when new laws are made), whereas the speech of the (collective) Self that is reported at the end of the extract clarifies that they would have spoken to say, 'we don't want this'.In other words, the interviewee imagines (and reports) the group (the collective Self) entering a dialogue for refusing the proposals of the Other in a simple, dichotomic way, not for negotiating and accommodating positions, and so reported speech here functions as a clear barrier to the representations of the Other (Gillespie, 2008).
The extract that now follows discusses how governmental institutions had turned in the last years an informal activity (barnacle catching) into a profession, creating a limited number of licenses for it and thus defining who can have the profession, as well as its new deontic powers -including here the duty of respecting closed periods: Extract 4 When we started the Association, he [a biologist from government] suggested a closed period: we could only catch barnacles two days a week.[. ..]We thought that was not possible, because, imagine the sea is rough the days we can, the other days it's calm and we can't work, it's not possible.'Then, if you don't want it this way, we need to come up with an alternative' and then we were forced to accept an alternative, and the alternative we did was to accept three months of closed period, it's what's now written, it's during a period of less demand and of reproduction.(E6, AR, Government) In Extract 4, the reported speech animates an Other formulating a sentence that suggests a negotiation process with the (collective) Self (we need to come up with an alternative); yet the next sentences are complex, showing signs of ambivalence: some indicate that the process is not taken as a negotiation by the Self (we were forced to accept an alternative), while others acknowledge that the period was jointly chosen (we did).This formulation makes both compliance and resistance evident in discourse (Castro and Mouro, 2016) while also acknowledging that the period chosen allows the barnacles to reproduce.This is however a mitigated signal of acknowledgment of the values of ecological citizenship, given the absence of any explicit agreement that respecting the period might be a good thing.
In sum, regarding the four extracts so far presented, in the interaction (with researchers), reported speech is used for making present negative institutional-Others, animated for doing themselves the negative work of breaching highly central values of civil and political citizenship.These values are assumed to be shared by researchers.They are also implicitly contrasted with ecological values, as it is rarely made explicit how they could be made to accommodate ecological goals.This reveals a communication that does not explicitly mobilize the ecological dimension of citizenship and puts barriers to the representations of the institutional-Other, suggesting conflictive relations.
Extracts 5 and 6 show hypothetical reported speech being used for animating a desired -but nonexistent -institutional-Other: Extract 5 . . .when they thought of doing this, inside their offices, they studied this well, but, first, before bringing it out, one has to come meet the Associations, like for instance here in Sagres, Sines, Vila Nova . . .these places where there are Fishing Associations.And talk to people here, ask them 'what do you think about this place?'Or maybe . . .'what do you think about putting something here, something there?Or should it be over there?' (E1, AR, 'They', Hypothetical) Extract 6 I am not saying: 'there should be a fisherman or a farmer there'.I'm not saying that.There are capable persons for that, people with more experience.Now, maybe Ministries should, for instance . . .together with fishing associations, farming associations, they should find in these associations an advisor that could tell them 'Hey!No way.You can't do things this way!' (E3, AR, Government, Hypothetical) Extract 5 once again mobilizes political citizenship themes: the importance of consulting citizens, coming to talk with 'people here' before implementing the 'ideas developed in offices'.This is re-enforced by using reported speech for voicing what exactly 'people' would like to be consulted about: their views regarding the restrictions imposed by the laws.Importantly, the 'people' who need to be heard are very clearly presented as organized in Associations, that is, as serious professionals with their own deontic powers, and civic bonds to a profession: the implication being that they are full and competent citizens and are not being treated as such.Also, to be remarked here is the use of a concession to the Other (they studied this well), for mitigating the criticism that follows (but they did not come to meet the Associations) which mobilizes the values of political citizenship, albeit again not those of ecological citizenship.The sentence could have continued to emphasize how people here and the Associations could help in protecting the species if consulted, but it ends without entering the realm of ecology.
Extract 6, in turn, opens with a non-dichotomic statement that seems to accommodate concerns of the Other, using a 'yes (there are people more capable than us, mere fishers, for speaking with the government), but (we have our own institutions with capable representatives that should be heard)' format.Yet it ends by imagining these (hypothetical) representatives performing a simple, dichotomic, opposition to the institutional-Other (You can't do things this way), not entering negotiation.

Presenting the Self as a competent and reasonable citizen
We will now explore four extracts predominantly concerned with presenting the Self.In the first two, reported speech is used for presenting the Self as a reasonable and competent citizen: the Self knows the coast best and is willing to help by sharing this knowledge (Extract 7); the Self is attentive and reflexive regarding what is happening around him (Extract 8).In Extract 7, there is a mitigated form of presenting Self-Other disagreements: a 'yes (I'm not against the natural reserve, fine), but' (local knowledge should be recognized) concessive format, used for accentuating the competence of the Self (fishers know best) and suggesting the relevance of his knowledge for the ecological institutions: Extract 7 The men from the Natural Park [. ..] their vision is right, I am not against it, it's a natural reserve, fine.But they need to understand that fishers know best.Those in the office they have a paper in their hands and . . .they . .., three or four once came here talk to us . . .and . . .I had over there a map of the Portuguese coast, and my son went to get it and told them 'Nah, what you have there is wrong.This should be like this.From here to there and from there to over there'.(E1, CAR, Natural Park) Extract 8 And [he said that] the biologists had done studies and concluded that they had to do something for this place, or the fishing folks were going to destroy everything [. ..]There had to be closed periods for the fish not to disappear completely.[. ..]And they had created reserves so that folks would not fish here, would not fish there.And then I asked him: 'So, tell me, what do you have to say about . .., you are talking about species disappearing, the seaweed too, what do you have to say about the Sines refinery and the greenhouses up there?'And then he just told me: 'Look, about that no one is doing a thing, there's nothing we can do, that cannot be touched'.And that was it.(E4 -Group 2, MF, Natural Park) In Extract 8, the interviewee first reports a conversation he had with a biologist, highlighting ironically the biologist's premise that the fishing folks were going to destroy everything, hinting at its exaggeration.He then further contests this through reporting his own speech, providing an alternative argument to 'fishing folks' as the destroyers of resources by bringing forth other sources that endanger the species, namely the 'Sines refinery and the greenhouses'.Hence, the interviewee does not contest the main argument of his reported interlocutor (the need to create reserves or protect species): through the reported speech, he warrants his position that this is not being done in a proper way and uses it as a way to legitimize the contestation to the laws.It is used to show how his point is not that the scientists are unaware of the pollution caused by the industry (adjacent to the Park) and the greenhouses (within the Park), nor that they ignore the dire consequences for the marine species.It is that they are powerless against these economic (non-ecological) powerful others and that the Self is paying attention and is aware of this.In this way, the reported dialogue helps also to de-legitimize scientific expertise as the (single) foundation of the reserve, hinting at how ecological policies are intertwined with other political interests, not necessarily always ecological.
The two final extracts -below -illustrate how reported speech is used for helping construct the reasonableness of the Self even when the Self performs illegal actions, that is, acts as what the interdependence of citizens/laws defines as an incompetent citizen: Extract 9 Measures were taken (licenses for catching barnacles), and the resource (barnacles) recovered -and now it is failing again, because with this crisis, people started saying 'well, I am going (to catch) them without a license, I have to, I have to go because I have children, I have to live'.But, yes, the resource had recovered, thanks to the measures taken.(E4, AR, Laws) Extract 10 If you have the opportunity tell 'I talked with a guy there that worries about getting his stuff, but he also worries about . . .you know, protecting, protection'.Because I know that when I catch the last barnacle I will write, or ask someone to write a book for me 'I caught the [last] one!I caught the one!'That day will come [. . .].Because one needs to be very careful with things that are worth money, because the desire for them is immediately huge.And then when regulations, prohibitions, limitations start . . .they give people the urge to go 'men, I never used to catch them, but now I will, who do they think they are to forbid me?'You know what I mean?This is human behavior.(E4, AR, Laws, Hypothetical) In Extract 9, reported speech presents fishers solving the dilemma of choosing between, on one hand, maintaining their actions within legality, and on the other, feeding their children, a supremely valuable goal.The dilemma is solved by choosing the later.And in Extract 10, it helps justify their entry into illegality by constructing it as not a real dilemma, but an outcome brought about by institutions that fail to take human nature into account, that is, fail to acknowledge how people 'naturally' behave, that is, cannot help behaving.
Also clear in Extract 10 is how our interviewees respond to the research interview as an interactional event -at the outset, the interviewer is directly addressed as an intermediary to transport what is said to its institutional destination.The interviewee presents himself as a person preoccupied with both collecting barnacles and protecting the resource, signaling proximity to the representations of the institutional-Other.He then imagines the day barnacles will vanish at the site -quoting his own voice in an imagined future moment (I caught the last one).In supporting this, he indirectly explains that 'one' needs to be very careful with (prohibiting) the things that are valuable.The premise is that this is how reactions to prohibitions to access valuable things unfold: people will rebel, it is human nature, and supporting this, he reports a (hypothetical) speech by (generic) fishers talking to themselves: 'who are they to prohibit me?' In this extract, the interdependence involved in citizenship is visible in communication in two ways.One is how human nature, that is, something people cannot help, is used to absorb the blame (Potter, 1996) of an entry into illegality.The other is how the potential blame is anyway pushed away from the Self (Castro and Mouro, 2016): in the speech reported, it is not the actual Self speaking to us that is defending the entry into illegality, but an abstract Self, or 'people'.In sum, in both extracts, reported speech is used for presenting illegal behavior as something that in that situation cannot be prevented: because it arises from a major imperative -parenthood -or from natural limits that human laws cannot override; it thus performs the function of mitigating the blame of the individual exit from the constrains of citizenship.

Discussion
This study focused on how new ecological laws and institutions were discussed and made sense of by professional artisanal fishers working in Natura 2000 areas.We specifically explored how they used reported speech -a discursive strategy designed to make denial difficult (Benwell, 2012), seeking to mobilize the agreement of the present interlocutor regarding the interactions and/or relations being reported (Svahn, 2017)for representing Self, institutional-Other and their relations and mobilized the intrinsically heterogeneous (Billig et al., 1988;Castro and Mouro, 2016;Condor, 2011) values, representations and dimensions of citizenship.
We first established the high prevalence, 41%, of reported speech in extracts mentioning institutions, particularly present when the Natural Park and the fishing laws -the institutions more often mentioned -were discussed.Afterward, we found that most instances of reported speech brought forth vivid presentations of negative institutional-Others. Constructed under the constraints of the interdependence and mutual constitution of citizens/laws (Searle, 2005), such negativity was made to emerge as an accomplishment of the Others themselves, by reporting them actually performing breaches to citizenship, thus helping distance the Self from the risks that such criticisms may bring in the interactional context of the interviews.In particular, the Others were presented as ignoring the basic rights (e.g.justice) and guarantees (e.g.professionals must be taken into account in making new laws) of citizenship's civil and political dimensions.Selfquotations, on the contrary, presented a positive Self acting as a competent citizen: knowledgeable and helpful to institutional-Others, making reasonable citizenship requests.Even when reported speech conveyed the Self as breaching the imperatives of citizenship by entering illegality, it also helped in mitigating the blame for the breach through appeals to 'human nature', a 'force' recognized as hard to oppose, or to the very high value of feeding one's children.Nevertheless, depictions of illegal actions are rare, with the constraints of mutual constitution patent in how usually fishers' uses of Selfreported speech maintain them fully within the realm of civic and political citizenship values -and legality.The overall pattern was hence that reported speech emerged as a consistent form of presenting the self as a competent citizen when criticizing what is institutionalized as the common good.
The pattern was often accompanied in the extracts presented by a dichotomic form of dealing with the representations of the institutional-Other, rejecting them and posing barriers (Gillespie, 2008) to their new meanings.Yet some examples also exist (e.g.Extract 5 or 6) in which de-dichotomization through 'yes . . .but' concessions is used to accommodate biodiversity protection as a concern shared by Self and Other.However, the instances in which fishers give center stage to the ecological dimension of citizenship are rare.They rarely develop arguments stating, for example, how and why they are, as artisanal professionals, indispensable for ecological protection, how their activities are less impactful than industrial fishing and can be vital for the development of a joint strategy for marine resource protection (Jentoft, 2000), namely due to their extensive knowledge of and their concern for marine resources.Instead, in several instances where they devalue the ecological knowledge and concern of 'experts' by using reported speech as a barrier to their representations, they simultaneously leave ecology and marine resources at the periphery of their concerns and capacities.Sometimes they even move to warrant their positions by expressing suspicion of ecological goals as the real motivation for the laws, highlighting (as in Extract 8) how against economic interests (of the refinery or the greenhouses) ecology loses importance for the institutions, accentuating their suspicion of the representations of the Other.They, hence, perform both compliance with the values of citizenship and resistance to them, repeatedly using reported speech for erecting barriers to the Other (Gillespie, 2008), appealing to the support of interlocutors (Benwell, 2012;Svahn, 2017) for vivid (De Fina, 2003) negative depictions of the Other that are easy to repeat in the community -and may in this way be instrumental for helping maintain conflicts alive.
In sum, the new laws regulating fishers' professional activities help define a new dimension of citizenship -the ecological one -by defining the common (ecological) good and the ecological citizen in specific ways (e.g.designating certain places as offlimits for fishing), and our findings suggest that in these interviews, fishers mostly concentrate on presenting this new dimension as contrasting and conflicting with the old ones.They are skillful in using the older vocabulary of (civil, political and social) citizenship and in mobilizing the dilemmas it opens as opportunities for criticism and contestation.However, they seemed less skilled and capable of mobilizing the heterogeneity of ecological values, that is, of making clear how the choices of priorities embedded in the laws also opened up new internal dilemmas for ecological protection, as is always the case with choices of priorities (Billig et al., 1988;Searle, 2005).In other words, they seem less skilled in discussing how other equally ecological choices could have been made -and how they could gain from their own contribution.
This pattern of findings thus lends support to the ideas that reported speech might be characteristically employed to signal the negative evaluation of the reported speaker's views (Benwell, 2012;Buttny, 1997) and together with polarized views (Svahn, 2017) of Self-Other relations, and less elaborated uses of new representations and dilemmas.Thus, it might not usually come together with the concessive, de-dechotimizing formulations of the type 'yes . . .but', which open the debate for dilemmatic contents and deliberations (Uzelgun et al., 2015).These 'yes . . .but' formulations -less vivid than reported speech, but more plastic and amenable to negotiation -might be more frequently used in more 'mature' debates, in which frequent previous Self-Other encounters have more extensively and dialogically transformed the interlocutors, producing more elaborated arguments (Mouro and Castro, 2012).It is a limitation of this study that it cannot clarify if this is a stable pattern, as comparative designs are necessary for this.
However, that the present article can raise such new hypotheses as those above for future studies to explore is also one of its strengths; moreover, these are hypotheses that express well a central original contribution of this article: the placing of communication -that is, the uses of discourse in the context not just of interactions, but of Self-Other relations (Batel and Castro, 2018;Castro and Mouro, 2016) -at the center of the quest for extending our understanding of social change and conflict.In this regard, a further strength of this article is that of showing how focusing on reported speech is useful for tackling the complex intertwining of interactive events (e.g.those happening in interviews) with Self-Other relations that happen at the societal level and affect groups with asymmetric power positions.In other words, the article has extended previous analyses of reported speech for showing how examining its prevalence and functions is also a way of finding in the on-going interaction the marks of the Self-Other relations occurring outside it, and of grasping what distance may exist between the representations of Self and Other.It is also a way for better understanding how conflict may be maintained alive over time, since reported speech can offer groups vivid sentences easy to remember and to repeat.
Furthermore, the study also extends psychosocial approaches to citizenship by showing that claims of citizenship do not always seek to expand rights, by applying old rights to new groups or creating new ones; instead, claims of citizenship can also be used to resist additions and transformations in old rights.The study also brings to the fore how citizenship is located not just in place (Castro et al., 2018;Di Masso, 2015;Dixon et al., 2006), but also in profession.It illustrates how the transformation of citizenship by the addition of the new values and duties of the ecological dimension, remodeling profession and work, has consequences for the psychosocial processes through which people as workers develop representations of themselves and their work, of other groups and of their relations with institutions.Therefore, these analyses also contribute to better demonstrating the importance of focusing on communication and discourse for understanding the two dimensions of a social psychology of legal innovation (Castro, 2012): how the institutions we create and stabilize re-create us back through their choices of priorities and rules.Through this, the study highlights the intertwining of the ecological and the psycho-socio-political, showing how they need to be understood together.
Finally, from an applied perspective, this analysis suggests that contrasting older citizenship values with new ecological demands, as fishers do here, may well not be enough for a strong negotiation position.Perhaps if fishers in fact had more actual dialogues with present institutional-Others, in situations allowing them 'the right and the opportunity to freely express criticism and alternative interpretations of given premises and facts' (Jentoft, 2000: 142), this could foster more reflection in bi-directional forms, and the representations of both fishers and their governing institutions might show higher reciprocal awareness and transformation.Perhaps if these participation situations were to fizemos foi aceitamos 3 meses de defeso que foi o que ficou escrito e agora está em vigor, que é uma época mais fraca de consumo e uma época de reprodução.(E6, AR).

Do you see that rock? It's not possible to go
We could divide this [fishing restrictions] among all, and then there's enough for everyone.Not like this, they arrive here with a piece of paper and 'It's here.[fishing]beyondthat rock'.(E1, AR, Natural Park) Extract 2 If they want to implement fishing restrictions, if they want to protect a species, why don't they do it nationally?Nationally, for everyone, that's how you protect a species, right?It is not just coming here and 'Look, from

here till there you can't, from here till there you can
[catch fish]'.(E5 -Group 1, MF, Natural Park)

Table 1 .
Frequency of extracts mentioning institutions and containing reported speech and percentage of the later, by institution mentioned.Restrictions upon restrictions, things that have no reason whatsoever.People that come here have fixed ideas 'We will do this'.And there's more, first they make the laws and only then do they let us know.Then we can't say 'we don't want this'.(E8 -Group 2, MF, Laws)