Masculinities, Gender Equality and Crisis Management

Mathias Ericson, Ulf Mellström, Mathias Ericson, Ulf Mellström

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472477095
• eBook ISBN: 9781317099901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

The overarching mission of the rescue services comprises three main areas of responsibility: protection against disasters and accidents; crisis management; and civil defence. This mission covers a long chain of obligations in trying to improve societal prevention capabilities and manage threats, risks, accidents, and disasters concerning generic as well as individual safety. It follows a reactive social chain of threat-risk-crisis-crisis management-care-rehabilitation.

The authors in this book show that the interesting occupational characteristics of these societal duties are their connection to gender and crisis management in a wider sense. Gendered practices, processes, identities, and symbols are analytical lenses that provide a particular understanding and explanatory base that has received far too little attention in the academic literature. This book identifies four major themes in relation to a gendered understanding of the rescue services, and more generally emergency work:

• Masculine heroism

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• Intersectional understandings of sexuality, class, and race

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• Gender and technology

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• Gender equality and mainstreaming processes

This book shows how the rescue services constitute a productive ground for contemporary gender studies, including feminist theory, masculinity and sexuality studies. Its critical perspective provides new directions for emergency work and crisis management in a broader sense, and in particular for scholars and practitioners in these areas.

1 Masculinity, Sexualisation and the Proactive Turn in the Firefighter Profession

Mathias Ericson

The subject of this chapter is how firefighters negotiate the masculine aura and heroism that is associated with the profession. As previous studies of this profession have shown, male firefighters tend to have an ambivalent relationship with the expectations on them to express masculinity. It has been stated that male firefighters consider heroism and the masculine heroic image useful resources in some respects, for instance, by being respected and trusted when arriving at accident sites (Baigent, 2001; Engström et al., 2012; Ericson, 2004; 2011; Häyrén-Weinestål et al., 2011; Olofsson, 2012; Tracy and Scott, 2006). At the same time these stereotypes also make male firefighters vulnerable to being positioned as too concerned with masculine bravado and cultivating machismo, as if they are outdated and in desperate need of support in becoming respectable and modernised (Ericson, 2010; 2011). In other words, it seems that heroism and masculine idealisation could also position male firefighters as in need of social intervention, rather than the other way around.

This dilemma is important to acknowledge when accounting for the impact of recent institutional changes in the rescue service. Reformed legislation and training for firefighters, introduced in 2003, have pushed firefighters in Sweden to do and identify more with proactive work. This means that firefighters are supposed to be more open to and engaged in empowering the local community. But as openness becomes central to a new sense of professionalism this also implicates increased demands on firefighters to respond to public expectation and stereotypical images of their profession as masculine and heroic. Even if proactive work such as educating school children and students in fire prevention may seem less masculine than reactive work such as entering burning buildings, it seems that making use of the heroic and masculine shimmer of the figure of the firefighter is still, if not more, important when doing proactive work. Therefore, it is important to consider how masculinity, heroism and not least sexualisation may become resources as well as a distraction in doing proactive work. Based on ethnographic studies in the rescue service, I suggest that we should not make the mistake of just assuming that institutional changes towards more proactive professionalism would bring about destabilisation of institutionalised masculinity within the rescue service. Rather, we need to consider how such changes may be a matter of contingent and rather messy processes of masculinity construction.

Outline

The first part of the chapter presents the context of changes within the rescue service and firefighter profession in Sweden in recent years. It also discusses the material used in this study as well as the ethical implications of elaborating an interactive approach to ethnography. After this follows the empirical part of the chapter. The first section presents how firefighters are required to relate to and make use of their profession being subjected to heroic and masculine imagery in more public contexts. The second section shows that this imagery is not just a recourse in proactive work but may also make firefighters vulnerable and discomforted. The third section presents some examples showing that although it is evident that firefighters have to confront heroic and masculine imagery when doing proactive work, these aspects of their job are subjected to silence and taboo. In the concluding section it is argued that this silence may convey key explanations for the resistance to proactive work as well as for how masculinity may rather be reaffirmed than subverted when reactive professionalism is replaced by proactive professionalism.

Educational Reforms and Proactive Turn in the Swedish Rescue Services

There have been major changes in local emergency services during the last ten years in Sweden. A new agency (Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency) was established in 2008. New legislation (Lag om skydd mot olyckor) came into force in 2003 and post-secondary vocational education of firefighters (Skydd mot olyckor) was introduced in 2003. These reforms are supposed to put emphasis on proactive work within an organization that traditionally has been focused on reactive work. This change is essentially an issue of how firefighters’ professional role could be broadened. Engaging firefighters in preventive measures is argued to be a prerequisite for implementing management by objectives and developing the emergency services’ ability to work proactively in accordance with the new legislation (Dekker and Jonsén, 2007; Johansson-Hidén, 2006). The reformed training is a key structural change that would enhance this process.

The actual content of proactive work varies, but it is in general a matter of meeting the public in circumstances other than accident sites and aims at empowering the local community in fire and risk prevention. The proactive efforts are sometimes delegated by managers, but also initiated and planned by firefighters themselves. One central concern that surfaces in these processes of becoming more proactive is the struggle to make the rescue services more open to the public and firefighters more engaged in their local community. A strong commitment to the local community is maybe not specifically new, as concern of being available and engaged has been put forward as central to firefighters’ identity and sense of professional honour (Baigent, 2001; Chetkovich, 1997; Ericson, 2004; Persson, 2013). However, the recent proactive turn institutionalises this sense of professionalism within the rescue service. What was once considered a matter of personal engagement is now under scrutiny by legislation, education, management and professionalism. That proactive work and being engaged in the local community should no longer be a personal but an institutional matter is something that not only legitimises this work, but also opens it to critique and auditing.

The training introduced in 2003 requires two years of full-time studies. It is school-based, with one semester of internship. Admission is based on grades from upper secondary school and a basic fitness test. The program is advertised as providing qualifications to work as a firefighter and in other occupations in the risk and safety area. The training is supported by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (SCCA). The agency has strongly defended the broad scope of possible employment, although they frequently use firefighters as a symbol in recruitment advertising. The reformed education is expected to fashion a new type of firefighter who is not set on waiting at the station for the bell to sound but rather is eager to engage citizens and empower their community in safety issues. A customer perspective is assumed as essential to the professional passion of the new firefighter. This also connects to developing a more effective utilisation of firefighters’ working hours and to increase self-control in relation to the objectives that are set by management.

Method and Interactive Approach

This chapter draws on a study (financed by SCCA 2010-2014) of how a reformed education for firefighters in Sweden challenges the masculine and homosocial culture in this profession. The reformed education directs that men can no longer actively recruit other men, as was common previously when the rescue service first decided who they wanted to hire and then provided them with training. This is one important factor that finally has brought a number of women into this occupation in Sweden, where the process has been particularly slow in comparison with other countries such as the UK and Northern America (see Baigent, 2001; Chetkovich, 1997). The key question in my study is how the reformed education’s emphasis on proactive work, also supported by new legislation, may challenge the traditional distinction between the (masculinised) reactive firefighters and (feminized) proactive engineers as well as the exclusive homosocial commitment developed in the intimate socialisation among firefighters during down times at the station.

To problematise how the educational reform may challenge institutionalised masculinity and homosociality, the study focuses on those considered as ‘new’ firefighters and who are supposed to become agents of change. I have interviewed fifteen full-time firefighters who have completed the reformed education of firefighters. Interviews were also conducted with one person who had completed the education but no longer worked as an operational firefighter but as a proactive risk manager in the rescue service. Individual follow up interviews were carried out with six of those firefighters and proactive risk managers. During the interviews with operational firefighters, I also presented the study to their work teams and, in six cases, members of those teams were interviewed in groups to follow up the initial presentation and to discuss preliminary results of the study. The study also includes two interviews with three firefighters with the previous training. One of those interviews was conducted with two firefighters who had collaborated much in proactive work, although one of them had received the old training and the other had completed the new training. Besides firefighters, I also interviewed two fire engineers, three fire chiefs and one proactive risk manager on their views on changes in the rescue services after the educational reform. Altogether I interviewed firefighters and other staff at ten different stations, mainly in the west of Sweden. The material for the study also includes notes and recordings of other occasions where I have presented the preliminary results to staff in the rescue services, such as at workshops, seminars and conferences.

The study further builds on observations of proactive work done by firefighters. The choice of observations was made in dialogue with the firefighters being interviewed, as I asked during the interviews if it would be possible for me to attend and observe proactive work. I suggested that we could then follow up the interviews and observations with joint discussion with the participants and, if possible, with the rest of their teams. I later came to the conclusion that this approach did not work out in all cases and therefore decided to focus on those firefighters who openly expressed interest in furthering their participation in the study. This part of the study includes four of the ten rescue services. With the help of these contacts, I observed proactive activities such as safety walks in the city centre on summer nights, interaction with pupils at schools and preschools, representations at LGBTI-festivals such as PRIDE, study visits at fire stations and training courses held by the firemen, for example in systematic fire protection. During these observations I took notes and on some occasions added photographs to these.

The design of this study rests on my experiences from previous studies of masculinity construction in the rescue services in Sweden. In my previous study, I did more traditional ethnographic fieldwork with firefighters at work, following them during their work hours (Ericson, 2004; 2011). I conducted interviews with firefighters and observations in all-male work teams in 2003 and 2004, during which time there were almost no female firefighters in all of Sweden and when gender equality was very much debated. By using ethnographic methods, it was possible to challenge and problematise the dichotomy of firefighters as reactionary and managers as progressive that dominated the public debate. Rather I found that the male firefighter I met would resist such a view, and I argued that we needed to consider that it is not enough to change the male firefighter’s attitude, since it seemed that the men I met were already invested in dis-identifying with the masculine heroism and machismo that their profession was associated with. In fact, this dis-identification seemed to even strengthen the bonds between men in the profession and should be viewed as part of reproducing homosocial relations (Ericson, 2011). But this conclusion was the product of many years of solitary deskwork that, according to Van Maanen (1988), is vital to ethnographic studies. When I was done, I was not sure how or if my conclusions mattered any longer to the people in the organisations that I had spent so much time thinking about.

Based on these experiences, I decided that in this study I wanted to develop a more interactive approach to ethnographic research by including workshops on preliminary results, combined with working out a design for presenting results and reflection seminars with the participants concurrent with the fieldwork. A reason for this was to try and avoid being positioned as a distanced and isolated researcher by insisting that fieldwork is not separated from analysis and text production. But it also had to do with the fact that some of the people I would interview and meet during field observations might know of and have things to say about the conclusions in my previous studies. I anticipated that I would be caught up in discussions about, or even volitional silence on, my previous conclusions and the claims I had made. This led me to the conclusion that the study had to be designed to encourage discussion of preliminary results and elaborations of possible useful research questions with the participants throughout the project and make this the central part of the ethnographic work.

In this chapter I will make some points about my elaboration with a more interactive take on ethnography, discussing how firefighters and other staff responded to preliminary results. That I chose to elaborate on an interactive approach was not because this methodology was more ethical, as is sometimes argued (Aagard Nielsen and Svensson, 2006; Gunnarsson, 2007), but rather I think that this approach may confront the researcher with other kinds of ethical dilemmas (Ali, 2006; Zavos and Biglia, 2009). For me, developing an interactive approach has been a struggle, considering that it may not make research and knowledge production any less violent, since the final account is still in the hands of the researcher (Van Maanen, 1988). But as I will discuss, the interactive approach may have provided me with a more unruly or less tidy material to work with, as well as providing some reflection on how research may be used to make interventions or risk reproducing the very power struggles that it aims to dismantle. In this chapter I will focus on firefighters’, team managers’ and fire chiefs’ expressions of ambivalence in relation to the sexualisation of their profession. This poses questions of how such anxiety could be apprehended by thinking about how research can inform gender equality work and how gender research is made intelligible in the organisation.

Male Role Models

The stories and responses during interviews with firefighters who had completed the new training and who could be expected to represent a new sense of professionalism made it apparent that as ‘new’ firefighters it was important to make use of, and aspire to live up to, the more traditional and stereotypical figure of firefighters. As one of the firefighters expressed, it was a hindrance in the proactive efforts if one should come across as working just proactively and not being a ‘real’ firefighter:

It feels like you lose people’s attention, they become disappointed if you can’t say that ‘I am a firefighter’. That is my impression. […] That ‘Oh well, she probably doesn’t know much about this then. She hasn’t got the know-how’. But if you can step out and say ‘I am a firefighter’, then you get their attention right there [snaps her fingers]. Then it’s like ‘Oh wow, here is a girl who works as a firefighter. How interesting. Now I really have to listen to what she has to say.’ It gives you so much for free, right away. It is always like that, regardless of the situation. If one can say that you are a firefighter you have people’s interest.

The paradox of being a professional firefighter and having to mimic the stereotypical figure of a firefighter in order to make that professional identity accountable was also expressed in a talk I had with a female firefighter while observing how the profession was being represented at a LGBTI-festival. She described how she had experienced conflicting thoughts about making use of tools that symbolise the more traditional role of a firefighter when she attended the Swedish Pride Parade. She said that she felt she had to wear a breathing apparatus (BA) throughout the parade just to show that she really was a firefighter. If she had not carried the BA in the parade, people might not have taken any notice of her at all. Or maybe even worse, people might have assumed that she was an engineer or administrator representing the ‘other side’ of the rescue services, thus confirming the belief that there are still no gay or female ‘real’ firefighters. But by being noticed for carrying the BA, she would also be taking part in reproducing a certain way of perceiving firefighters that she was highly critical of. She said that she received a lot of attention and admiration for carrying the BA, but that this frustrated her since it silenced the fact that the struggle for her and other women is more about harassment and confronting the very assumption that women would not have what it takes physically. The paradox was that carrying the BA said nothing about her efforts to become a firefighter; yet by being noticed for carrying the BA, she challenged the assumptions that women could not perform this profession.

That firefighters have to respond to and make themselves accountable in relation to the more public, heroic and masculine symbolism of the profession was expressed as a rather prosaic matter, not least when related to the men in the profession. When I presented the research project to managers and/or interviewed them on their thoughts on proactive work and the broader role of firefighters, they sometimes stressed that firefighters need to make sure that they cultivate the good image of the profession and should not be afraid to act as male role models. This obviously androcentric way of claiming that (male) firefighters should rely on such stereotypes when doing proactive work is of course a problematic way of encouraging and legitimising proactive work. It might however be more complex, as these expressions could be viewed as part of a rather ambivalent relation to the commonly heroic and masculine figure of the firefighter. After all, the statements were made because I deliberately had asked for reflections on how firefighters handled the heroic shimmer when doing proactive work. It seems farfetched to assume that firefighters could easily choose to do away with this way of perceiving firefighters. Rather we need to consider how it could be subverted and destabilised when being used and invoked by firefighters, for instance, when positioning them as committed to changing and establishing a new sense of less masculine and heroic professionalism. I suggest that the notions of the masculinity and heroism of the profession should be utilised to reformulate and represent how firefighters struggle to position themselves as reflecting modernised champions of social and institutional change.

At two of the rescue services included in the study, I noticed that firefighters and their team managers seemed to be very engaged in establishing and organising preventive activities that relied on collaboration with other officials from school, social work, police and public health. This was an example of a general trend in the rescue service to become more engaged in social issues and to develop rescue services preventing threats to society, urging that school burnings and fire settings in disadvantaged suburbs should be considered a consequence of increasing segregation and weakened social security (see Bartley and Ericson, 2014; Hallin, 2010; Persson, 2013). What intrigued me was that when proposing such collaboration, firefighters would quite successfully invoke the heroic status of their profession in an effort to put themselves forward as a unique resource for other authorities. At one of the rescue services included in the study, firefighters invited social workers and proposed a project targeting young people identified by social workers as being in the risk zone of violent, criminal, antisocial or self-destructive behaviour. At the meeting, the pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Masculinities, Gender Equality, Crisis Management and the Rescue Services: Contested Terrains and Challenges
• 1 Masculinity, Sexualisation and the Proactive Turn in the Firefighter Profession
• 2 Masculinity, Emotions and ‘Communities of Relief’ among Male Emergency Medical Technicians
• 3 Masculinities and the Dynamics of Labour and Power in the Watch
• 4 Institutional Patriarchy, Auto-critique and Resilience: A Comparative Gaze63
• 5 “Stray Dogs and Women are Prohibited in the Sentry”: On the Spatial Effects of Firefighters’ Homosocial Practices
• 6 Unpacking the Black Box of IDA: Standardisation and Disappearing Gender
• 7 Collaboration as a Tool for Implementing Equality Politics
• 8 Agents for Change?: Gender Equality Efforts in the Swedish Rescue Services
• Index