Examining Institutional Culture of First Responders as a Public Issue: Curtailing Fetishization of Psychological Explanations

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 9. Cultures of Work and Occupations

Abstract

This research challenges psychological approaches to social problems among first responders by highlighting the role of organizational culture. Utilizing my insider status as a member of a fire department, I analyze whether firefighters’ behaviors align with their durable, individualistic dispositions and prejudices or firefighting’s culture of egalitarian public service. I completed the requisite training and spent three years serving as a member of Monacan Volunteer Fire Department. In addition to ethnographic data, I completed thirty semi-structured interviews with Monacan firefighters. I applied the inductive logic of grounded theory to analyze these data. Many firefighters harbor individual prejudices, which persist in a state of tension with an institutional culture of egalitarian, public service. Around the firehouse and during down time, these prejudiced views may arise in jokes or discussions of various publics. Conversely, on the fireground and in encounters with community members, firefighter behavior aligns with the fire service virtue of equitable community service. In these formal encounters, the compounding influence of a fire service culture that exists at national, county, departmental, crew, and peer levels acts to suppress individual prejudices. Deep integration into an institutional culture of public service can mitigate discriminatory behavior. This suggests that a psychological, individualistic focus on overt prejudice and implicit biases does not account for the impact of social context or organizational culture. Instead of evaluating discrimination among first responders as a personal trouble, bias and its associated dysfunctions can be reframed as a public issue to be ameliorated through cultural reform.

Author

• Roscoe C. Scarborough, College of Coastal Georgia