Fire Fighters, Neighbourhoods and Social Identity: the relationship between the fire service and residents in Bristol
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- Theories of the crowd
- The St Pauls Riot
- Football and protest crowds
CrowdsOne sort of group of particular relevance to this programme of research is the crowd. Firstly, crowd situations most closely resemble the type of hostile intergroup encounter which, although not typical of every hostile encounter the fire service experience, make up the most high profile and most significant intergroup events. Secondly, research has looked, as I shall discuss below, at football and protest crowds involved in intergroup conflict with police officers. As discussed elsewhere, there are a number of similarities between the police and the fire service that make such studies of relevance here. Thirdly, there is a relevance of social identity approaches to fire, both with fire as a dynamic outgroup (Weick 1993) and as a symbol of the crowd (Canetti, Stewart 1984). By looking at the intergroup dynamics of social situations, we can better understand how fire fighters deal with fire, how this contributes to their identity and what likely outcomes there are from these encounters. This section builds on the social identity approaches outlined above, showing how they have been used in different research projects and also building on the theory towards the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM), which is discussed below. Theories of the crowdReicher gives three criteria which must be met for a group to be considered a crowd (Reicher 1984): firstly, group members must be present and proximate, secondly their situation must be ‘novel or ambiguous’ and, thirdly, ‘formal’ means of reaching agreement must not be available (page 4). Traditional analysis of crowd behaviour looked at crowds as separate from their social context. However, society and crowds are linked through identity and mechanisms of identity processes (Reicher 2001) and as such it is necessary to look at identity in terms of how it is shaped by society, as discussed above, and how it informs crowd action. Social identity approaches have proved to be particularly useful in this matter. Historically, it was suggested that crowds were largely irrational (Le Bon 1896 / 2006), with individual identity being subsumed by the mass, and primitive behaviour being unleashed, with the crowd representing a threat to social order. However, early researchers, such as Le Bon, were keen to understand the power of the crowd in order that they might harness it. Like fire (Canetti, Stewart 1984), crowds were capable of inspiring both horror and fascination. Le Bon’s conception of the crowd relied on the core concept of the submergence of the individual into the crowd. As such, individuals lost all sense of self and of responsibility and, because of the combined force of their disinhibition and their numbers, became unstoppable. Such conceptions of the crowd were entirely decontextualised, ignoring the social and political factors that had caused the crowds to gather in the first instance and any external inputs, such as violence from authorities, that they might encounter. In this conception, the crowd acts as an ‘off’ switch to individual norms, and in political terms this allows for the denial of the voice, the demands, of the crowd (Reicher 2001) as such collective action cannot be meaningful. Later thinkers on the crowd, such as Floyd Allport, disregarded the group mind proposed by Le Bon, instead asserting that the crowd accentuated individual tendencies and identity, although this was typified by instinct, and again, decontextualised crowd actions and social identity. Reicher (2001) describes how subsequent thought on the crowd came then from sociology, in the form of Emergent Norm Theory (page 192). As this suggests, these ideas propose that crowd behaviour is not pathological, but that collective behaviour is determined and governed by norms which emerge from the crowd. However, what this theory does not explain is the mechanism through which this occurs. As seen above, one set of theories that seek to link the group and society are proposed by social identity approaches, and a number of researchers have attempted to apply these approaches to the study of crowds and intergroup dynamics. Reicher (2001) suggests that crowd behaviour is actually rational and that, further, it is socially and historically contingent, being both shaped by society, and in turn, potentially resulting in social change. These links between society and the crowd are formed through psychological processes of identity (Reicher 2001), and to understand this process properly requires a ‘model of identity which explains both how society structures identity and how identity organises action’ (page 185). Reicher suggests that social identity approaches can meet this challenge, both experimentally and in the field. A number of studies of crowd participants have been conducted in the intervening years (Reicher 1984, Stott, Reicher 1998, Drury, Reicher et al. 2003, Drury, Reicher 2000), with the first looking at the St Pauls riot in 1980, and subsequent studies looking also at football supporters and environmental activists, leading to the development of the ESIM. Most recently, work in this vein has looked at slightly different sorts of crowds, examining the behaviour of those involved as victims and bystanders in the 2007 bombings in London (Cocking, Drury 2009 ). The St Pauls RiotCrowd members rely on inductive processes of categorisation, as described above, to understand the context of their behaviour. In this way, they come to understand what is appropriate in the context in which they find themselves, and as members of a particular category. The process through which this occurs is deindividuation, which has been studied in both lab (Reicher, Spears et al. 1995) and field settings. The first field study to look at identity processes in crowd situations was Reicher’s 1984 study of the 1980 St Pauls riot. The St Pauls study, which took data from a number of sources including official, police reports, eye witness interviews and media recordings, linked crowd behaviour to ideas of social categorisation (Turner 1982). Reicher suggests that in crowd situations, behavioural norms will be extrapolated from the behaviour of fellow crowd members if they are seen as belonging to the ingroup and are acting within the understood attributes of that group. In St Pauls, this behaviour was seen to limit the geographical reach of the riot and the actions of the crowd who, for example, refrained from attacking locally owned businesses. In one instance, Reicher describes one stone thrown at police being followed by a volley of other stones, but a rioter throwing a stone at a bus being told to desist by fellow crowd members, demonstrating contextual social norms. Of particular relevance to this study are anecdotal reports that although the police were chased from the neighbourhood, fire engines were allowed through. Reicher concludes that ‘not only is crowd behaviour moulded by social identity but conversely, crowd behaviour may mould social identity’ (page 19). As such, crowds give individuals a sense of power which enables them to express group identity even in the face of opposition. Football and protest crowdsFollowing studies then looked at the escalation of violence (Stott, Reicher 1998) in the context of football crowds, utilising these social identity approaches. Much attention had been paid in the past to football violence and ‘hooliganism’ with various explanations being given for it. These studies viewed fans (blinkeredly) as not actually violent (Armstrong, G and Harris, R 1991) or (reductively) as expressing their working class masculinity (Dunning, Murphy et al. 1991). However, these studies tended not to pay much attention to the actions of the police, and as such did not socially contextualise the violence which they purported to study, just as other studies of attacks on fire fighters have not looked at the role they play in these encounters. Stott and Reicher demonstrated that crowds, including football crowds, are made up of many, mostly non-violent, sub-categories. However, the police tend to view them homogenous, and as homogenously violent or threatening. Importantly, the police then have the operational and organisational capacity to treat the crowd as violent, and as such they are able to act on their view of the crowd. In such conditions, crowd members would come to see the actions of the police as illegitimate, and so their own actions are seen as self defence. This would have the effect of altering the self categorisation of many crowd members, ironically turning the crowd into the homogenous and hostile crowd that the police had so feared – a process seen to full effect in the student fee protests over late 2010. This study came a long way to explaining crowd situations as an intergroup dynamic, but the researchers admitted that due to lack of access to the police in this and previous studies, it was necessarily partial – an issue that the same group came to explore in greater depth in a later paper (Drury, Stott 2001). A subsequent paper (Stott, Reicher 1998) introduced the police perspective by studying material from a poll tax protest. The culmination of this work was a reformulated version of social identity approaches, which came to be known as the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM), and which served both to develop approaches to the crowd and social identity approaches per se (Drury, Reicher 1999). The ESIM suggests that outgroup power is closely related to ingroup identity, and that the link between the crowd and society and socio-political factors is reinforced. This is because outgroup power, such as in the case of the police, creates the context (page 383) in which ingroup members categorise themselves as homogenous. Further, the crowd situation does not just provide the inclination to resist the demonstration of outgroup power, it also presents the means through which this can be expressed. A further example comes in the case of environmental protestors (Drury, Reicher 2000). In this situation, the protestors felt that their cause was legitimate and their means non-violent. However, the police supervising the event saw them as law breakers (for impeding bailiff action) and acted in violent ways towards them (page 590). Many of the protestors had previously seen themselves in a ‘neutral position’ with regard to the police, but the police treatment of them as a group caused them to challenge this idea. As such, the intergroup context of the police encounter caused them to reconsider their identities, and to see themselves as more ‘radical and oppositional’ (page 596). This demonstrates the link between identity, intention and consequence, where police actions came to be seen, by mostly previously law abiding residents, as representative of police action as a whole, and there are certainly implications for the fire service in such reconceptualisations, where they, like the police (Drury, Stott et al. 2003), have the legal sanction to act on their perceptions of crowd identity and intent, and to influence the context in which they find themselves (Reicher 2004) – linking also to Skogan’s (2006) thoughts about asymmetrical views of the police. Over the years, a greater emphasis has come to be placed on football crowds (Stott, Reicher 1998, Stott, Adang et al. 2007, Stott, Hoggett 2007), as researchers have firstly been granted access to the police perspective (Drury, Stott et al. 2003) and have then been sponsored in their research (Stott, Hoggett 2007, Stott, Livingstone et al. 2008). An advantage of this model is that not only does it describe and account for behaviour, it also suggests ways in which behaviour can be changed. This is taken up by Stott and colleagues looking at football crowds, and has seen changes in operational tactics. These theories have also been applied to look at emergency situations, for instance the 7/7 bombings in London, concluding, once again, that crowds can be rational and impact on social identity (Cocking, Drury 2009), bringing the research focus back to the fire and rescue service and the potentially growth areas of responding to terrorist attack. In this section, I have looked at how social identity can lead to conflict in theoretical and crowd situations, forming the basis to addressing the aim of this research project, to come to a better understanding of the relationship between the fire service and residents. However, social identity approaches are not just concerned with explaining conflict, but also in challenging it. This is covered in the next two sections, on contact theory and community engagement, which start to consider the context in which these relationships occur.
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