ALEX GILLESPIE

”Examples of social positions within everyday social acts include: speaking/listening, buying/selling, winning/losing, giving/receiving, requesting/helping, attacking/defending, leading/following, questioning/answering, lending/borrowing, and commanding/obeying. Social positions also exist in play: children enjoy enacting the social positions of buying and selling, of feeding (usually a doll) and being fed, of giving and receiving, of chasing and escaping, of teaching and learning and so on.”
Gillespie, Alex(2006) Games and the development of perspective taking. Human Development, 49 (2). pp. 87-92.

”..., each social position, given its social and structural configuration of affordances and constraints, sustains a perspective. The social position patterns the occupant’s experience. Being, for example, in the social position of receiving can sustain experiences of joy, indebtedness and even resentfulness. The complementary social position of giving, on the other hand, can sustain experiences of loss, vicarious joy, and superiority, amongst others. ”
Gillespie, Alex(2006) Games and the development of perspective taking. Human Development, 49 (2). pp. 87-92.

”..., people frequently exchange social positions within social acts. Sometimes people give and sometimes they receive; sometimes people command and at other times they obey; sometimes people buy and sometimes they sell, and so on. Children, when playing, change social positions with particular frequency.”
Gillespie, Alex(2006) Games and the development of perspective taking. Human Development, 49 (2). pp. 87-92.

”Through taking the social position of many others, in play and actuality, the child cultivates the diverse perspectives that are sustained by social and institutional structures. The child becomes, in an embodied sense, a buyer and a seller, a care-giver and a cared-for, a teacher and a learner, a doctor and a patient and so on.”
Gillespie, Alex(2006) Games and the development of perspective taking. Human Development, 49 (2). pp. 87-92.

”Consider the social act of giving/receiving. In the course of development children move between the social positions of giving and receiving innumerable times. Indeed, sometimes young children and their caregivers play at simply giving and receiving things. Repeatedly and rapidly moving from the social position (and thus the perspective) of the recipient to the social position (and the associated perspective) of the giver could, potentially, differentiate and integrate the perspectives of the giver and receiver. Having thus integrating these two differentiatedperspectives, the child is able to take the perspective of the receiver while being in the social position of the giver and vice versa (Gillespie, 2005).”
Gillespie, Alex(2006) Games and the development of perspective taking. Human Development, 49 (2). pp. 87-92.

”Additional social acts in which frequent position exchange occurs include: buying/selling, giving/receiving, suffering/helping, grieving/consoling, teaching/learning, ordering/obeying, winning/losing, and stealing/punishing.”
Gillespie, Alex(2007) The social basis of self-reflection. The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology. pp. 678-691.

”The theory of position exchange assumes that each participant within a cooperative activity has a distinctive perspective due, in part, to the distinctive social position they occupy within the cooperative activity. This is one source of divergences of perspective: each participant experiences different situation and role demands. The theory posits that routine and frequent exchange of social positions within cooperative activities occurring during child and adult development are a basis for the development of perspective taking (Gillespie, in press).”
Gillespie, Alex and Richardson, Beth (2011) Exchanging social positions: enhancing perspective taking within a cooperative problem solving task. European journal of social psychology, 41 (5). pp. 608-616. ISSN 0046-2772