•Ethnographic study of a high-security prison.•Social interaction between frontline workers and clients associated with risk.•How social interaction impacts on the use of safety rules should be ...recognized when standardizing risk assessments through rules.•The interface of safety and security.
This article explores how prison officers carry out safety rules, drawing on ethnographic data from a Norwegian high-security prison. Taking prisoners’ status as a potential risk as the starting point, it analyses the ways in which social interaction between prison officers and prisoners affects how rules are implemented. Although several safety rules were complied with due to the highly rule-regulated work, the analysis highlight situations where social dynamics resulted in some disturbances to this compliance, when: (1) Situational human dynamics made rules inexpedient in specific situations, resulting in adaption and deviation; (2) Social strain in face-to-face interactions with prisoners made rules strenuous, leading to an avoidance tendency; (3) Human unpredictability made rules stabilising in uncertain situations and seemed to support compliance. Based on the results, it is argued for the importance of understanding and predicting social interaction when standardizing risk assessments through rules, where prison officers need to trade different kinds of considerations against others, rule compliance being only one of several considerations. Prison officers’ situational sensitivity to human dynamics is an important part of safety work in both normal operations and crises, as well as the prison can implement uncertainty-reducing rules in particularly uncertain cases. The study complements existing research on safety rules by providing an ethnographic approach to the real-time use of safety rules within a new context, making interactionist perspectives highly relevant. The possible intersection of the concepts of safety and security are also addressed.
Abstract Based on an ethnography of work in a high-security prison, this article explores how safety practitioners develop specialised sensing skills through close engagement with their ...socio-material work environment and how they use these skills in constructing their understandings of what is going on in everyday work. The results make visible the potential role of the senses in how workers keep systems running, how they maintain safety in situations where quick reactions are needed and for the fast transition to more deliberate forms of sensemaking for early intervention. However, despite the importance prison officers ascribed to the use of the senses for their ability to work proactively, certain technologies seemed to reduce access to sensory inputs and thereby the ability to notice weak signals. This indicate challenges regarding embodied and tacit safety knowledge when more visible representations of safety are implemented. The article aims to contribute to a theoretical framework for understanding the role of senses in safety work through the concept of sensemaking as an embodied, socio-material process.
Researchers engage in increasingly complex relationships with society and business in the process of conducting research. Can qualitative research produce high-quality results when there are close ...ties between the researchers and those being researched, or between research institutions, those who commission research, and user groups? This is a question that researchers should actively address, but which many are not always aware of. With examples from qualitative studies in healthcare, policing, bureaucracy and politics, the anthology’s contributors provide a comprehensive presentation of challenges researchers face when they are close to those they are researching, as well as tools that can be used to contend with certain challenges. Proximity to Professions, Work and Politics will be of particular interest to students and researchers working with studies of professional life, organisations, work and politics, either through commissioned research or other research projects.
Forskere inngår i stadig mer komplekse relasjoner med samfunn og næringsliv i gjennomføring av forskning. Hvordan kan kvalitativ forskning produsere kunnskap av høy kvalitet når det er tette bånd mellom forskerne og de som forskes på, eller mellom forskningsinstitusjoner, oppdragsgivere og brukergrupper? Dette er et spørsmål forskere bør forholde seg aktivt til, men som mange ikke alltid er seg like bevisst. Med eksempler fra kvalitative studier innen helse, politi, byråkrati og politikk, gir bokas bidragsytere en samlet fremstilling av utfordringer forskere kan møte når de er tett på dem de forsker på, samt hvilke verktøy man kan ta i bruk for å håndtere gitte utfordringer. Tett på profesjon, arbeid og politikk henvender seg spesielt til studenter og forskere som arbeider med studier av profesjon, organisasjon, arbeid og politikk, enten gjennom oppdragsforskning eller andre forskningsprosjekter.
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