UNIFORM MATTERS
within institutional environments. Manning (1997) and O’Neill (2005) broadly applied Goffman’s concepts but his work has also emerged in a plethora of other researcher’s discussions (see also Rubinstein, 1973; Young, 1991b; Crank; 1998; Mawby, 2014). Using Goffman to analyse policing led Manning (1997: 5) to claim that ‘policing was a masterful costume drama, a presentation of ordering and mannered civility, that was also dirty work’.
Goffman’s discussions around
performance and gender lend themselves particularly well to the work of Judith Butler (1993; 1999) and Malcolm Young (1991b; 1992) and their explorations of contradictory opposites. Butler argued that women, as a separate ‘group’, reinforces a binary view of gender relations in which individuals are divided into two clear- cut categories – men and women and contends that sex is seen to cause gender. Butler claims that ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (1999: 25). In other words, gender is a performance. A significant part of Butler’s and Young’s writings is the proposal that there are certain conceptual and theoretical opposites arranged in binary pairs. These oppositions are rarely discussed with equal weight and are often arranged in a hierarchical sense, something that Young (1991b) explored in depth. In this thesis, it is important to explore the negative and positive polarities
existing within these ‘pairs’ and examine the dependency of the ‘dominant’ or ‘positive’ term on its apparently ‘subservient’ opposite. For example, Young (1991b: 72-3) observed that separation and hierarchical binary pairs emerge amongst different police areas particularly distinguishing between officers that are ‘properly uniformed’ versus those who are ‘variously (un)dressed’ (for example, detectives, undercover officers and
“The findings reveal the prevalence of police dominant discourses linked
to gender, subculture and the uniform and illustrates the way that officers
view policing through different types of meanings and identities.”
other support staff). Butler’s (1993; 1999) binary pairs on the other hand, primarily references gender and the contested notion of ‘masculine’ versus ‘feminine’. The only way to approach these divergences is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge system embedded in policing culture that, on the surface, claims equality. The distribution of a ‘unisex’ uniform and increasing the recruitment of women does not result in equality. Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach concentrates on the way that people make sense of their ‘worldview’, and this framework is thus sensitive to how challenges and resistance works within the dominant gendered views of policing culture. Drawing on this approach
the research also focuses on the front and back regions (Goffman, 1959) of neighbourhood policing and examines the performances and relationships between discourses in context. Poststructuralism (to which Butler is mostly related) and Goffman’s dramaturgy both provide very different insights into the identity performances of police officers and yet deliver a complementary understanding of the world that officers occupy. Poststructuralist understanding of hierarchies of power, often shown in binary polarities (see also Young, 1991b) enables an enhanced understanding of the struggle against dominant discourses within policing (Butler, 1999). Dramaturgical theories are also heavily incorporated to explore the findings through the contextualised micro-interactions that officers routinely engage in. Using both these approaches will afford a more insightful lens to examine how the police construct their identity performances in neighbourhood policing through interaction with the occupation and their uniform with the various audiences. This study adopts an ethnographic methodology using participant observation to examine three integrated neighbourhood policing teams (INPTs) and a police training college (PTC). The analysis focused on the front and back-region contexts of policing through the lens of the uniform, and how aspects of gender, moral, social and physical contamination and a uniform not uniform can be examined within these contexts. The findings reveal the
prevalence of police dominant discourses linked to gender, subculture and the uniform and
illustrates the way that officers view policing through different types of meanings and identities. The police staff involved in the study were found to navigate their way around the ideas of ‘what it means to be a police officer’ within neighbourhood policing which conflicts with the traditional masculine dominant discourses. The findings and subsequent discussion of the thesis present a number of contributions about the construction of identities through the lens of the uniform, the influence of gender and, how contamination and the effects of ‘dirty work’ (Hughes, 1951, 1962) are dealt with, together with an appreciation of the challenge of integrating neighbourhood policing and PCSOs into the wider police family.
25 | POLICE | FEBRUARY | 2024
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