Fire Fighters, Neighbourhoods and Social Identity: the relationship between the fire service and residents in Bristol

What are the roots of hostility and resistance between fire fighters and residents?

However, the fire service do not tend to see themselves as one of a range of agencies providing services in a neighbourhood, viewing themselves instead as the sole provider of an important and unique service. This immediately presents a tension between their expectations of the public’s response to them, and the way in which the public perceive the same encounter. This is exacerbated by the likelihood of the encounter being a community safety one, viewed negatively by the fire service, and with suspicion by the public, as well as being, essentially, not dissimilar to a lot of other work which is conducted in the community, and which pathologises residents whilst instructing them how to behave. As such, this suggests the first of a number of roots of hostility and resistance to the fire service, where there is a disjuncture between how the fire service see themselves and how residents see them.

Secondly, and as will be discussed in the next section, a number of group processes exacerbate relations between fire fighters and residents. Social identity approaches suggest that individuals maintain a preference for their own group members at the expense of members of other groups, and will work to maximise difference and to enhance self esteem. The neighbourhoods in which this research project was conducted are typically those that are negatively viewed, both by public services (indeed, that is why two of them were chosen) and by residents of other areas. Residents of these areas have a more complex response, with an awareness that they are judged accordingly, but also with a degree of defensiveness about what is, after all, their home. For many residents, the reputation of the neighbourhood contributes negatively to their self esteem, and the comparison with an outgroup which holds itself in high regard can exacerbate this. This suggests a second root to hostility and resistance.

Thirdly, the behaviour of fire fighters and the fire service is not always exemplary in neighbourhoods, and this will be addressed in the implications section, below. Whilst emergencies are attended regardless of the neighbourhood, and priority is not placed on one over another in response terms, fire fighters are not always mindful of residents, or of how residents perceive them. Groups of fire fighters can be intimidating, and fire engines are large, loud and unsubtle, and although this is tolerated in emergency settings, for some residents there is a sense that their use is somewhat indiscrete and indiscriminate in non-emergency encounters.

Finally, the behaviour of residents themselves can also be far from exemplary. Where residents resist interventions, or cause problems for the fire service, the fire service may have stereotypes confirmed. In future interactions, these will be reinstated, and again, perpetuated. This causes a vicious circle of action and recrimination, often involving some of the most vulnerable in society. This is added to by historical enmities such as involvement (or not) in riots or public disorder; feelings that other neighbourhoods (rightly or wrongly) are prioritised or preferred or perceived linkages between the fire service and other agencies such as the police. Indeed, in other cities, the fire service actively works with the police, allowing them to use fire engines to ‘ambush’ groups attacking fire engines or committing arson. As such, the roots of hostility and resistance develop in a context of neighbourhood deprivation, fuelled by group processes and exacerbated by behaviours on each side. Although there are many implications for the fire service from this, it is to these group processes that I shall now turn.

How do social identity approaches explain this?

Social identity is predicated by self categorisation (Turner, 1982), the process through which group membership is assumed. For fire fighters, this process begins as soon as recruitment is successful, with an immediate distinction made between those who have successfully become fire fighters, and those who are left as civilians. This is emphasised in training and continued through work in the fire station, where much work serves to reinforce the distinction in a positive dimension between fire fighters and residents. In neighbourhoods, this happens at greater or lesser levels of abstraction (Haslam, 2000), dependent upon the micro-geographies that residents observe and perpetuate within their environment. Affiliation, experienced through these processes of categorisation, leads to comparison and feelings of similarity to the ingroup and distinctiveness from the outgroup, whether this is the fire service and residents or residents of different neighbourhoods in comparison with each other. Seen through the prism of social identity approaches, it is hard then for fire fighters to identify with residents, and vice versa, as their professional identity is premised on the distinction from those that they work with. Where the work is fire fighting, this distinction is maintained, however, where fire fighters are engaged in community or preventive work, this can erode the distinction between themselves and residents (or at least other service providers), thereby eroding their ingroup distinctiveness and social identity. Understanding these group processes starts to explain, through social identity approaches, how fire fighters and residents come to relate to one another through identification with their own group and comparison with other groups.

Such comparison can lead to stereotyping, whereby individual group members are seen as polarised prototypes (Hogg, Abrams et al, 2004), such as the archetypal ‘hoodie’ or the sexualised fire fighter, and these are viewed as distinct from more similar members of the ingroup. Further, the development of polarised prototypes also reinforces ingroup homogeneity. By viewing fire fighters and residents in this way, it is apparent that as one group draws a distinction from the other, that distinction is reinforced, and this can develop its own momentum, especially where the acceptance and promotion of such stereotypes, both within the fire service and amongst residents is an important signifier of group membership. As such, work which serves to reinforce neighbourhood distinctiveness can be seen to be somewhat counterproductive if the overall goal is to encourage permeability within communities.

Using social identity approaches allows stereotyping to be seen as a social act, and not one which is rooted in individual pathology. However, that is not to say that its consequences are unproblematic. For example, the typical stereotype of the ‘sexy fireman’ undermines the role of the fire fighter, whilst also inextricably linking it to physical work and not to more feminised community interventions. There are further problems with the stereotype of the sort of person likely to be involved in an emergency, where residents make a distinction between themselves and these other groups. Understanding this in social identity terms means that the fire service can then attempt to address these issues in comparable ways. Although not inevitable, stereotyping can also lead to bias between groups, especially in conditions where inequality is perceived in the status of groups, and social mobility is not an option – for instance in terms of fire service recruitment. Bias is also the requisite precondition for social conflict, although the degree to which this occurs is dependent upon context, as seen in some of the crowd studies (Reicher, 1984; Stott, Reicher, 1998; Drury et al 2003). For the fire service, it is key to understanding just what those conditions might be.

Tajfel and Turner (1979) suggest three preconditions essential for group comparison leading to bias and conflict. The first of these is that ingroup identity is sufficiently internalised to allow for comparison. This is clearly the case for fire service personnel, and although maybe less so for residents, within the neighbourhood context, it would seem that this identity does become salient. Secondly, the context must be conducive to comparison, and again, the neighbourhood does appear to provide this context, with fire fighters and residents making a number of assumptions and comparisons with residents of different neighbourhoods. Thirdly, there must be an available outgroup ‘who meet conditions of similarity, proximity and situational salience’ (page 60). As discussed above, residents tend not to discuss the fire service when they are not present or prompted, and typically, resentment comes up in relation to community safety rather than observed emergency work. This suggests that emergency work breaks this rule of similarity, although community safety work posits the fire fighter outside of their traditional role, and therefore as a more similar, more comparable figure. Proximity is accounted for by their presence in the community, which, similarly provides the context for situational salience. Further, similarities can also be noted in group settings as fire fighters are typically working class young (ish) men, and these are also the groups that they may experience in conflict situations. With regards to social conflict, social identity approaches present and explain a number of different factors then that are relevant to the relationship between the fire service and residents. Data from the studies demonstrates the internalisation of identity for fire fighters, and (although perhaps to a lesser extent) for residents. This is contextually contingent and linked back to society so that fire fighters make an association between resident and neighbourhood, and residents have perhaps different expectations of fire fighters dependent upon where they are encountered, and what they are doing. For instance, an emergency in their own neighbourhood would be tolerated, but community safety work would be seen as an intrusion. However, on ‘neutral territory’, for example in the city centre, community safety work might be viewed more positively – although it may well still be seen to detract from the core role and identity of the fire service. An exception would certainly, however, be made, where the resident is in charge of the fire, and here issues are raised over the right to the management of fire in the community – an issue as old as society itself (Goudsblom 1994). For fire fighters then, there is the potential for any situation to result in social conflict, however, group processes do not happen in isolation from the wider social context; nor do they predetermine conflict.

One of the advantages of social identity approaches is that they situate conflict beyond the realm of the purely psychological, observing also socio-economic and historical factors (Hogg, Abrams et al, 2004), which can include (perceived) rational and realist competition for resources. In the case of the fire service and residents, this has something of a primitive nature to it, where the competition can be over the right to control fire in a community (Bachelard, 1964; Goudsblom, 1994) or to receive the sexual attentions of female residents, again, building on the gendered distinction between male and female residents in their relationship with the fire service. Social identity approaches are particularly useful in this regard, linking the fire service back to their context as neighbourhood service providers, and reminding us that residents do not view them as isolated from this context, just as fire fighters do not view residents as distinct from the neighbourhoods in which they live. Further, the changing context in which the fire service operate, whereby they are increasingly taking on a preventive role, also impacts on this relationship. Social identity approaches then both explain the relationship between the fire service and residents but also can help to provide suggestions for how to improve them. This will be considered in greater detail in the section looking at implications for the fire service for this research. Suffice to say, it may be easier for the fire service to look in on themselves and attempt to change their identity as a group in certain situations, than to attempt the same process either on groups of residents, or on the neighbourhood context in which they operate.

There is also another side to social identity approaches, whereby smaller groups are considered. In the literature review chapters, I covered a range of literature dealing with social categories and large groups, including crowds and riots. However, the actuality of the research demonstrated that fire fighters are more likely to experience small groups of residents in both neutral and hostile encounters, rather than larger crowds (although of course the recent riots remind us that this will not always be the case), and that even at crowd ‘events’ such as the Upperfield Festival, residents interact with the fire service within smaller groups.

Nevertheless, it is possible to demonstrate group identity when only a small number of group members are present (Hogg et al. 2004). On the one hand, this could be an example of smaller groups in proximity, for example ‘Number One Crew, Green Watch’ or ‘the Smith Family’, or, those present could be representative of a larger category, so that an individual fire fighter could still identify as a fire fighter, even with no other FRS staff present. Similarly, the family members could identify as, for example, Upperfield residents whether in an Upperfield crowd, or away from it. Although it is tempting to dwell on broad social categories, and exciting and dramatic crowd events, the reality of much of AFRS’s work deals with the mundane and quotidian interaction between small groups of residents and small groups of fire fighters. However, social identity approaches are equally able to deal with events at the latter level, and are not solely dependent on the former.

For example, there is a wealth of research using social identity approaches that covers, for example, organisational change (Haslam, 2004), small groups (Hogg et al. 2004) and sensemaking (Allard-Poesi, 2005), invoking the everyday and the mundane of group behaviour, rather than the unusual scenarios of crowd behaviour. Further, there is much within social identity approaches that points to the positive aspects of group behaviour, including links to social status and self esteem and the wider link between the group and society along a number of valued dimensions, including, at a large scale, ethnicity, nationality or gender and, at a smaller scale, occupational allegiances, neighbourhood identities and even sporting allegiances.

However, these types of identification can also lead to levels of resentment through, amongst other mechanisms, perceived iniquities in social status and the unlikeliness of social mobility. This is likely to take different forms, depending on the relative status of groups (Haslam, 2004) so for example higher status groups may employ latent or covert discrimination, or employ strategies to legitimise their higher status, whilst lower status groups use methods of social creativity to cope with the disparity. Haslam describes these methods as including comparing groups along a different dimension, changing the perceived attributes of the ingroup and finding different outgroups with which to compare (page 27). In this way, social identity approaches consider a range of different responses to social situations.

This is continued within contact approaches, where resentment and hostility between groups may have been expressed but not directly experienced. Although not unproblematic in and of themselves (Dixon and Durrheim, 2005), contact approaches have suggested a number of ways in which social identity approaches can be linked to coping with the dispersal of resentment in everyday situations, for example through decategorisation or recategorisation (Hewstone, 1996). In the former, individuals are encouraged to decategorise themselves from their group identities, viewing themselves and members of other groups as individuals. In the latter, members of different groups are encouraged to view themselves as equal members of a larger, superordinate group which incorporates facets of the smaller groups. However, these processes are both difficult to achieve in the laboratory (Pettigrew, 1998) and hard to manage beyond it (Dixon and Durrheim, 2005).

However, social identity approaches are not without their critics, and do have some limitations, as befit an approach with such a wide ranging scope. Historically, one of the particular critiques of social identity theory was its lack of attention to the process through which social identity was assumed by the individual. This was addressed by developments in self categorisation (Turner, Oakes 1989). A further area of critique asks why individuals choose to associate with identities that contribute to negative self esteem (Brown 2000a), and there are some wider ranging commentaries that question the very scope of social identity approaches, arguing that they have become over extended and lost focus and falsifiability (Hogg, Williams 2000) as a result. Whilst these, and other, critiques are valid, they also serve to invigorate debate around social identity approaches, and ensure that they are of ongoing relevance in the study of intergroup relations. In this research project, they have enabled me to view the relationship between fire fighters and residents in neutral terms, seeing hostility and resistance as a natural, if not inevitable, adjunct to group relations. In the next section, I will look at ways in which the fire service have attempted to overcome this group dynamic and promote more positive relations with residents.