Fire Fighters, Neighbourhoods and Social Identity: the relationship between the fire service and residents in Bristol
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- Chapter Eight: Discussion and Implications
- Introduction
SummaryIn this chapter, I have considered two of the primary types of intervention that the fire service engage in, through the use of vignettes. As seen, the fire service often go out of their way to try to engage with people, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, and greater or lesser degrees of success. Understanding this relationship will help them to relate better to the most vulnerable communities that they serve, and this will be addressed in greater detail in the next chapter. Chapter Eight: Discussion and ImplicationsIn this chapter, I will draw together the findings presented in the previous three studies, looking at their links and wider implications. This forms the final chapter of the thesis. In the first section, I will present a general discussion of the work conducted so far, looking at the findings in the round and making wider comparisons between the linked studies. In the second section, and particularly linking to the literatures presented at the start of the thesis, I will look at how the original research aim, to examine the relationship between the fire service and residents in three Bristol neighbourhoods, and the research questions, have been answered. To an extent, these three sections link to the individual research questions, where the first question, looking at the roots of hostility and resistance, relates to the findings; the second question, considering social identity approaches, relates the findings back to the literature; and the third question, considering the extent to which current engagement mechanisms are effective, links the findings to the fire service and to the practical application of this work. As such, the subsequent section will consider the implications for the fire service from this programme of research. In the final, concluding, section, I will reflect on the experience of undertaking this research project, and suggest further research which could build on it in the future. IntroductionIn the first study, I introduced themes particularly related to the fire service. These considered fire fighter identity, formed in relation to fire and to traditional ideas of fire fighting. I discussed the idea of a social contract that fire fighters enter into, whereby they are available to the public at any time of night or day, but through which they expect to be treated with respect, and for the fire service to be held in high regard. Although fire fighters explicitly spoke of the need to undertake community fire safety work, it was hot fire work that was of particular interest to them, and which they joined the service to undertake. This type of work was available to them at busy stations, which represented the ideal work environment for many of my participants, whilst also presenting a tension, in that busy stations served busy neighbourhoods, which were held in rather lower regard. A number of fire fighters expressed an amount of contempt for residents of busy areas, associating them with high numbers of hoax calls and deliberate fires, which, although presenting them with opportunities for hot fire work, were not seen as deserving recipients of their attentions. Further, fire fighters drew distinctions between these ‘types’ of neighbourhood, and the types of neighbourhood in which they lived. In the second study, I went to three of these ‘busy’ neighbourhoods and conducted focus groups with residents there, looking at how they perceived their own neighbourhoods and others; how others perceived their neighbourhood and their experiences with the fire service. Although many residents spoke highly of the fire service, and the vast majority were overtly law abiding, there were many concerns about the way in which fire fighters behaved in their communities and in their homes, and participants did not speak entirely positively about the fire service. The majority of focus group participants lived in social or ex-social housing, and expressed wide ranging experiences of living there, with positive and negative experiences emerging of the same neighbourhoods. Participants were very particular about exactly where they lived, discussing their neighbourhoods with great precision both relating to where they lived and went, and how they presented this to outsiders dependent on context. Although participants did not think residents should be judged on their neighbourhood, they were quick to do so both about other neighbourhoods, and about where I live. They had complex expectations of different ‘types’ of people, both in relation to other neighbourhoods, and in relation to experiencing emergencies, which they explicitly associated with the fire service. Although a number of participants had encountered fire service personnel in non emergency situations, this was disregarded in a number of instances as not a ‘proper’ encounter, suggesting that participants, like fire fighters, have very fixed views on what fire fighters do in their work, and what they should be doing. The presence of fire fighters in communities was not seen as a universally positive experience, with a number of residents disconcerted by the presence and speed of fire engines, the lack of visibility of fire fighters and their associations with a wider discourse of health and safety. There was also a strongly gendered response, with many female participants holding a sexualised view of fire fighters, which was denied to male participants, who in turn held fire fighters as authority figures. In the third study, the neighbourhood context was discussed in greater detail. In this study, I observed the interaction between fire fighters and residents in a number of different situations. The neighbourhood context is set, particularly in these types of neighbourhood, by interaction with public services, of which the fire service is just one. Typically, these public services view residents as problematic and something to be tackled or dealt with, for example through crime prevention, public health or waste management. This is typified by a lack of respect towards these services, expressed particularly by public services and policy discourses about the public, but which also run in the opposite direction, where residents feel that public services are not respectful towards them. The physical presence of fire fighters in the community is part of this, where there is little subtlety or discretion in the fire service’s approach, and interventions are conducted very publicly, whether this is welcome or not. Further, a number of these interventions are characterised as somewhat intrusive, whether into the community as a whole or into people’s houses and lives at a more micro level. This seems to be the case whether deliberately, for example through home fire safety visits, or through the perceived intrusion of the noise of sirens and the presence of vehicles on the roads. Download 0.87 Mb. Share with your friends:
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