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Summary This study investigates the experiences of social workers with tense and threatening situations in homeless shelters of the Salvation Army in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Clients intimidated and threatened social workers verbally, damaged property and, in some cases, physically assaulted them. The study is based on qualitative analyses of 18 interviews. Findings Social workers reported that such situations have intense emotional, bodily and mental impact. Their main concern is to manage overwhelming bodily manifestations of fear and tension to maintain work-related comportment. We demonstrate that social workers use emotion/body work in their attempts to control their own and their clients’ emotions. We also found that social workers’ emotion/body work is informed and supported by feeling rules that revolve around their identity as professionals. Being a professional social worker means to be in control of the situation and to regard the aggression and violence of clients from a distanced, sociologized perspective. Finally, social workers note the longer term emotional consequences of their experiences, but also of their emotion/body work, in the sense that some of them become habituated to violence. Applications The study concludes that more systematic attention should be given to the ‘emotion/body' work of social workers who are exposed to tense and threatening situations, in both academic studies and current prevention policies and practices. While the former tend to offer a disembodied view of work place violence, the latter do not give sufficient attention to sharing and reflection on the emotional and bodily experiences among social workers.

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This interview with Jack Katz offers an inspiring statement about how to study social life. It starts with a discussion of Katz’s three-dimensional social ontology; social life is constituted in embodied interactions in which people adjust to others and create transcendent meanings. Contrasting the ontology with anthropology’s ontological turn, we note that social ontology is about generating empirically accurate descriptions capturing the flow of social life. This leads to a critical discussion of sociology’s pre-occupation with explanans-driven theorizing. Touching upon macro–micro relationships, we consider what a phenomenology of collective emotions would look like. This brings us to emotional transformations, notably the notion of ‘falling’, an important theme in Katz’s work. The interview continues with advice of how to think beyond given categories, to consider the validity of ethnographic description and to look for the absurd. Finally, we conclude that ethnography has the potential to appeal to mass audiences.

While much scholarly literature on police ‘canteen’ culture focuses on police storytelling, there is little research on the effects of camera phone technologies on police behaviours, particularly in organizational settings. This article introduces the concept of showability to examine how police officers use videos in their everyday police life, and how this relates to police culture. Based on an ethnographic study of the Dutch police, it illustrates that officers show, share, and discuss videos of various policing acts such as arrests, car chases, and use-of-force events, and do this in various locations such as office spaces, squad cars, and on the streets. First and foremost, officers show videos to entertain and to educate themselves and their fellow officers. Second, showing videos is a new occupational practice that, like in telling stories, reinforces and refutes aspects of police culture, for instance, a masculine ethos. The article contributes to criminological scholarship on the era of ‘new visibility’ by demonstrating that showability is a form of inward visibility wherein officers generate a visual world that fits their professional vision. It also contributes to a sociological understanding of the ‘everydayness’ of police culture. I claim that showability is a key feature of policing practices, which is relevant in light of increasing pressures on the police to account for their work.

This article demonstrates how the broader social development to understand behaviour and personhood as shaped by neurobiology forms a predominant narrative among police officers. Drawing on an ethnography of the Dutch police force and 73 interviews with officers, I examine first how they use neurobiological terms to describe and account for their embodied sensations as well as civilian behaviour. Second, I describe the functions these narratives have, that is, why officers use them. Finally, I show how neurobiological discourses are learned and (re)produced during training. Results indicate that officers invoke neurobiology both as facilitator of and explanation for action. The latter raises questions as to what extent neurobiological discourse obscures police responsibility and accountability. A more thorough understanding of how neurobiological discourses are used to understand and account for actions is relevant, given the growing pressures on public professionals to legitimise their work.

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