Embodied performance of operational work in a highsecurity prison

Abstract

This dissertation explores how frontline workers maintain safety and security in organisations, based on an ethnography of work in a Norwegian high-security prison. The primary focus is on how prison officers and operational senior officers carries out operational work, which in prisons involve safety and security related tasks. Operational work is characterized by a continuous navigation of uncertainty, predominantly influenced by social determinants, where prison officers operate in close physical proximity to people associated with risk. Making sense of what and who represents risk, and how danger will (possibly) materialize, is often a complex task. The fluctuating nature of operational work introduces potential tensions to rationalised logics of work, embedded in high-security prisons as bureaucracies concerned with control and regulation of frontline work. Recognizing the disparities between implicit assumptions of work inherent in formal structures and the actual execution of situated work has prompted a call for a greater emphasis on observations and descriptions of work practices in safety research. To move beyond formal depictions of work and explore practices as they unfold in real time, participant observation over time proves to be a valuable method. During five months of fieldwork in a Norwegian high-security prison, I participated in prison and senior officers’ daily work, where both observations and field conversations were crucial to understanding how the work was performed. The overall research question in this dissertation is how operational work is carried out in a high-security prison, and based on observations of prison officers’ work, this general question is addressed with the following questions: How do prison officers accomplish operational work as an embodied competency? And, in what ways do formal representations of work appear incompatible with the accomplishment of operational work? The three articles and the introduction illustrate how prison officers accomplished operational work as an embodied competency in engagement with the prison environment, provided with a certain orientation towards risk and danger. The articles detail how prison officers made sense of weak signals by sensing that ‘something is wrong’, how they relied on their embodied judgment of safety and danger to take precautions in the social prison environment, and how senior officers created capacity by skilful adjustments in the face of disruptions. Additionally, the articles demonstrate how representations of work, including safety rules, staffing plans and building design in some ways appeared incompatible with how work was actually carried out, or at least with how the officers wanted to carry it out, thus seeming insufficient to prison officers’ ability to be aware of and solve safety-related problems. The dissertation contributes to prison research concerned with safety and security by providing descriptions of everyday work, complementing retrospective studies of full-blown prison riots seeking causal explanation. Moreover, it makes three main contributions to safety research. First, the dissertation theorises how operational work is accomplished as an embodied competency and how this contributes to keeping people safe through specialised knowing developed through experience. This challenges ‘thin’ rationalised understandings of work in both research and policy and complements a common focus on how people think to solve safety related problems. Second, the dissertation offers empirical insights from ethnographic fieldwork data in a highsecurity prison context, a novel setting in safety research, where safety and security are coupled. Consequently, the scope of risks broadens from previously studied technology and natural forces to encompass people, where work is carried out in close physical proximity to those associated with risk. Third, the bottom-up and in-depth empirical descriptions of work involved in the daily maintenance of safety and security are important in a field of research where abstract theoretical concepts and normative, rationalistic research tended to dominate. It highlights how deficient assumptions about operational work, built into organisational and material structures, can shape situated practices in ways that unintentionally work against objectives of safety and security.