One more last working class hero

question is (if it is possible to avoid getting tied up in debates about other features not so central to firefighters’
masculinity), ‘if a women adopts (positive) masculine traits, is this necessarily negative?’ One reply, feminists may make
would be to suggest that female firefighters were being forced to adopt firefighters’ masculinity, or that they were deviant.
If this were so then feminists may be marginalising these women trailblazers in a similar way that men do when they say a
women “has balls”. More likely though feminism would argue that these women were like men using their own agency to
fit-in with (and become part of) firefighters hierarchies.
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6.6. REFLECTING ON THE RESEARCH
Reflecting back on the research process, I will start by arguing that it was just like firefighting. It was enjoyable,
frustrating at times and hard, it was very hard, in fact because it lasted for over 4 years it was much harder than
firefighting. However, it provided a challenge and as a man I am used to testing myself against challenges.
Unsurprisingly, so too are women; it is just that men do not always recognise this. I have found that capturing data at
source, from the lips of firefighters is a most enlightening process. When I returned home with the tapes in my pocket, I
did not realise how much information they held. I thought that collecting data was a simple academic process; one I had
to ‘get through’ on the way to my PhD. I did not really understand at the start of the research what ‘academic process’
meant, as I do now. Before transcribing the tapes, I played them in my car in very much the same way as people listen to
music. Some may think me sad, but I am still able to recall the voices of some of the firefighters and what they told me is
the story I have related. However, I have also been sceptical and subjected what I have been told to the academic gaze of
pro-feminist auto-critique. This has been a rewarding experience and it is my view that this report does actually make
visible some of the invisible aspects of men’s power, that Hearn (1994) asks for.
Throughout the data collection process and in handling the data afterwards, grounded theory has been an incredible
friend. It is my view that Glaser and Strauss (1967) was written specifically to enable me to produce a report that both
academics and firefighters can understand! My informants’ voices have a central place and to make the report available to
firefighters, I have used their voices as much as possible. I hope that firefighters do not see this as some academic trick,
but rather a genuine attempt to provide them with information through a medium they can empathise with and understand.
I am trying, as it were, to capture firefighters’ hands-on approach, because I recognise that they are more likely to accept
the main findings of this report if they can relate them to their world as they know it. I want firefighters to feel
comfortable reading this report and if they find my findings difficult, I hope they will not only see academic writing and
cast the report aside. I hope they can see what they said and maybe think again.
There is another reason why I have prioritised firefighters’ own understandings. The fire service does not have
much time for academia or independent researchers. In particular, the fire service does not have much time for sociology.
This I understand as a dislike for the theoretical in an organisation so geared to hands-on problems and immediate
answers. It may come as a surprise to firefighters but I argue the firefighting approaches are not a quick fixes. No one
else may have recognised it but the way firefighters prepare for fires by sharing knowledge and developing protocols, is
indeed a theoretical approach. One that firefighters develop, although they do so without bits of paper and pens. They
pass on their knowledge by word of mouth but nonetheless it is clearly an academic process. Therefore, it is sad that fire
service may not like sociology because had it done so it may have recognised just how academic firefighting and
firefighters are. They may also have learnt more about culture and how to implement their long-term commitment to
equal opportunities. What the fire service has done is to proclaim that the culture must change, they have ordered to do so,
but as with so many things in the fire service nothing is that easy. To be even more contentious, I might suggest that the
fire service does not really understand its own culture at all. But I would say that wouldn’t I, because I am a sociologist
carrying out independent research on the fire service.
My experience during this research has not been one of being welcomed back as an old boy, which I undoubtedly
am. Access has not been made easy, and I had extensive communication with two brigades, including several meetings
and one eventually refused me access, because of the, “large amount of cultural research going on in the brigade.” The
letters and meetings with the second brigade eventually dried up and having found other ways of getting my data I let the
matter drop. On the positive side, some doors have been opened to aid my research and as ever, firefighters have been
more than willing to talk to me. But in the main the structures of the fire service have not been welcoming. The Home
Office equal opportunities department ignored letters from my supervisor. When sometimes their replies arrived, often
after three months, they have given little if any assistance. Currently I am trying to negotiate a copy of the latest report on
leadership and I have just returned from a meeting with HMCIFS Meldrum. We got on so well that I am chastened by my
earlier remarks, but sadly it was all too late. So much more might have been done if our understanding had been found
earlier. But I do have the opportunity to say my research is in effect ‘independent’.
However, what the fire service is good at is creating an image to court public support. One of these images is the
public profile of the heroic (male) rescuer, sometimes covert, but often overt, like the male pinup calendar of firefighters
on sale at the Fire Service College in December 2000 and again this year (see Appendix 8). These pictures portray such
sexually provocative poses as to leave little doubt that the fire service is a place where women might expect to be made
welcome for sexual encounters, but not as work colleagues. It is this face of the fire service that has to change. No longer