Institutional Speech: Social Norms and Social Roles

Abstract This paper sets out to defend the intellectual potential of a relational view of speech by considering the nature, value, and limits of free speech in a domain in which it is seldom examined: social institutions. The latter consist of work organisations, universities, churches, political parties, trade unions, campaign groups, charities, sports teams, and so on. The paper’s argument sits on two pillars. First, I contend that institutions consist of interlocking roles, orientated by an over-arching institutional purpose. Those roles consist inter alia of social norms, including rights and obligations, which have a deontic character and enable mutual accountability. Second, I defend a relational view of speech centred on our need to be recognised, by our interlocutor, as a participant in discursive practices in good standing, where each person also recognises others through their speech. With those in mind, the paper’s core argument is that speech within institutions recognises and makes real the constituent roles of those institutions, including their attendant normative demands. Indeed, much institutional speech involves, precisely, the exercise of institutionally defined rights, obligations, and other norms to which members may hold one another to account. Speech which fails to respect institutional norms, rights and duties, and, in particular, which undermines an institution’s purpose, may legitimately be subject to sanction. The latter decentres the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality, usually seen as essential to free speech.