| In spite of sophisticated incident management systems, rigorous training procedures, and advanced fire protection technologies, an alarming number of U.S. firefighters are killed in efforts to save buildings that will be demolished the next day. The persistence of disturbing rates of occupational mortality in the U.S. fire service merely exemplifies dilemmas faced by organizations in a variety of occupational arenas. This ethnographic case study of one municipal fire department demonstrates that scholarly understandings of organized safety and security can be enhanced by greater attention to the intersubjective processes through which risks are managed in organizational discourse. Specifically, it explores several organizational tensions that enabled and constrained how firefighters attempted to achieve a satisfying sense of self in the course of managing an array of occupational hazards. These tensions culminated in a form of insecurity that further destabilized and made more elusive the satisfying sense of self toward which members would strive. As they went about the business of managing occupational hazards and presentations of self, members often preferred to define the identity-enhancing occupational hazards in opposition to clients and in strategically gendered terms. This organizational discourse drew upon and sustained broader discourses of power that constituted gender identities in relation to emotionality, rationality, autonomy, and speedy intervention. In the process of laboring to appraise the nature and extent of specific occupational hazards; firefighters amplified perceptions of risk by portraying occupational hazards as ambiguous, emergent, and novel. Members also attenuated perceptions of risk to themselves by minimizing emotional hazards, downplaying the dangers of traffic, and dismissing vulnerabilities that were invisible but familiar. Firefighters generally constructed the process of risk negotiation in individualistic terms, emphasizing a need for individual caution over collective heedfulness but also depicting a perceived excess of caution as effeminate. Thus, the search to secure self could also be seen in the entrepreneurial efforts of some members to break with training and standard operating procedures and negotiate hazards autonomously and through unbridled aggression. The study concludes with implications for scholars and organizational practitioners. |
