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Ideological Production: The Making of Community Mediation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Christine B. Harrington  and
Sally Engle Merry
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Abstract

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Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Law and Ideology , 1988 , pp. 709 - 735
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

We appreciate the valuable suggestions a number of people made on earlier versions of this paper. In particular, we would like to thank John Brigham, Peter Fitzpatrick, Robert Hayden, Robert Kidder, Austin Sarat, Susan Silbey, Adelaide Villmoare, and Barbara Yngvesson, along with the anonymous reviewers for the journal and the Amherst Seminar for its lively intellectual environment. This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Program 86-06023 and by the W.T. Grant Foundation.

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