One more last working class hero

The evidence in this section does not support Willis-lee’s (1993) view that shared experience binds firefighters and
officers together. Officers lose the respect of firefighters when they leave the station (their class) to take senior desk
bound command: a position that firefighters feminise and distance themselves from. However, without questioning
firefighters’ apparent deference to visiting senior officers firefighters’ resistance may be obscured. At this time,
firefighters’ actions are difficult to reconcile with the powerful group that they appear to be in the rest of the report. After
the ‘game’ officers start by their ‘us and them’ behaviour (lining up firefighters and drawing rank at university) is
unmasked, it is easy to see firefighters’ deference on these occasions as partly an act. In Weberian terms, it is possible that
firefighters metaphorically keep dusted a Weberian iron cage of bureaucracy and then jump into it when an officer visits.
This is what firefighters would call a windup (see Chapter 4), because they are mirroring back to senior officers a
reflection that senior officers want to see: a reflection that ‘proves’ officers’ superiority and officers have believed it. In
answer to any question about who is managing the fire service, it must be considered that firefighters may be as much
managing their officers, as the other way around. This may be an extreme example of ‘image management’ by a group
who are supposed to be subordinate (see Goffman 1959, 1961, 1997c). However, officers do not seem to recognise what
is happening and argue they are in control so convincingly that they appear to believe their own argument: a situation that
becomes real in its consequences (see Thomas 1909; Janowitz 1966: 301). Or that is how I put it as a sociologist; as a
firefighter I would have suggested bullshit baffles brains 189 !
To help understand why firefighters are able to resist their officers I have drawn from the notion of resistance
through distance (Collinson 1994). Firefighters’ arguments largely echo the views that proletarian workers have about
office workers (Connell 1989, 1995; Collinson 1994). One particular example of this relates to officers behaviour on the
fireground, an area where there is supposed to be shared understanding. However, there is little shared understanding in
the way that firefighters vehemently distance themselves from those officers who they define as academic and who they
do not trust at fires. Some explanation of this vehemence may be possible if one recognises the possibility that firefighters
and officers have (or always had) different agendas, and that firefighters do not recognise this; choosing instead to believe
that officers had the same agendas as them but are now reneging on what firefighters considered were joint
understandings. In this event, officers are, in the eyes of firefighters, denying their roots and acting as if traitors to
firefighters professional ethos (see Hollway and Jefferson 2000). Whilst it is public orthodoxy that firefighters and
officers share common understandings about their professional ethos (that officers are presumed to hold before being
promoted), firefighters recognise (in private) that officers are denying this. Again, following Thomas (1909), once
distance is acknowledged by firefighters, the consequences for officers, especially in the way firefighters stereotype
outcomes, can become ‘real’.
86
5.4. WHO IS IN CHARGE?
Foucault argues that in the military “the machine required can be constructed” (Rabinow 1986: 179). Any visitor to a fire
service training centre may be forgiven for believing that during initial-training, firefighters are almost machines in the
course of construction. Despite the fire service making a real attempt to move away from military styles, what current
officers see as a softening of approach is contextual. Young trainees still believe that the fire service is ‘disciplined’,
something they quickly find out during training. Then having orientated themselves to the type of behaviour through
which they fit-in at the training centre, the trainee has to change again on posting to a station where they realise that
training is a false picture of the fire service. The vulnerable/disorientated trainee then comes under the influence of
firefighters’ informal hierarchy. This does not mean that firefighters will forget all the lessons of basic training, but they
will learn a new approach to how things are done. Amongst things their new peers (the experienced firefighters) will
teach them, is that when confronted by visiting officers set on proving their importance, a firefighter might find it
expedient to reflect back the image that officers want to see. The new firefighter quickly learns this potentially humbling
situation can then be reconciled against the end gain, because once officers have left things can return to normal.
Firefighters can also laugh amongst themselves at how they have woundup the officer.
5.4.1. How the watch organise
However, one other group are present and witness firefighters’ behaviour towards senior officers, the watch-commanders.
They are in an ambiguous situation, they work day-to-day with firefighters and they must operate (at least appear to)
within the formal hierarchy: a delicate negotiation. The successful watch-commander also requires two contrasting
management styles — on the fireground, they must be directive (authoritarian) and at the station, they must be able to
participate and work with the firefighters (see Davies 1980: 52). Alternating, at a moments notice, between these two
worlds and styles of management cannot be easy, nor can most officers expect to excel in both styles. The following
extract from Graham (1992: 18; see also LFCDA 1995; Baigent 1996) does not surprise me in the least:
189 At these times firefighters might well be seen by Goffman (Lemert and Branaman 1997; see also Ditton 1980), as skilled interactionists who pit their
wits against the observation powers of officers (see Hassard 1985: 180). In slightly different terms to the way it is reported elsewhere in this chapter,
firefighters might call this a successful windup. The way officers have reacted to believe what firefighters have shown them, might not be a traditional
success in the way firefighters seek to get a reaction from their colleagues, but the intention to get a reaction is the same (made all the funnier when an
officer does not realise it).