Border officer training in Canada: identifying organisational governance technologies

Abstract

While recent scholarship has begun the difficult task of unpacking the sociology of frontline border policing, literature examining how frontline border officers are governed through training and organizational governance technologies is sparse (particularly in terms of how officers are trained to interact with and form perceptions of the public they serve). This article provides the first concrete examination of border officer training by conducting a Foucauldian discourse analysis of various officer training and other documents to determine the contours of organizational governance technologies and how they serve to guide border services officers (BSOs) employed by Canada Border Services Agency in interacting with and perceiving of members of the travelling public. Findings indicate that governance technologies include training documents, manuals, public policy, and a bifurcated agency governance hierarchy serving to enable, support, and constrain BSO frontline duties, public interactions, as well as potentially perceptions. Findings also reveal that officers receive very little training related to interacting with members of the travelling public on the frontline. Officers also receive very little instruction related to how they should prioritize their disparate duties related to interacting with the travelling public. Findings ultimately indicate that when training is present, governance technologiesalongside recent shifts in agency organizational governancecontain systematic biases that produce officer worldviews and social interactions that are rooted exclusively in security provision, while leaving BSOs without the tools necessary to handle other types of public interactions that regularly occur at the border.

Shaping migration at the border: the entangled rationalities of border control practices

“…Building on structuration theory, we see that organisations are realised and reproduced by the fact that their goals, rules and resources are used and referred to in and through the actions of the organisation’s members (Ortmann et al 2000 , p. 317). Accordingly, we should consider how organisational structures orient the actions of organisations’ members through formal rules, specific resources and organisational interpretive schemes that are transmitted through formal training and informal socialisation (Borrelli 2019 ; Lalonde 2019 ). However, this perspective further highlights that organisations’ members do not mechanically implement rules or decide in fully rational ways.…”

“…As such, the border is supposed to shield and protect ‘the inside’—the national population, territory, and order (Walters 2004 ). Studies have demonstrated that those guarding the border also perceive and carry out their job as a security task (Lalonde 2019 ). Unsurprisingly, security rationality also takes centre stage with the Swiss Border Guard and is at the core of its structure, as represented by the legal provisions regarding border control, how the organisation presents itself, and the SBG’s history, orientation, the professional training it provides, and its proximity to security professionals such as the police and the military.…”

Evaluation of a training program of African gendarmes' in Spain under the European Union GAR-SI Sahel project

“…This research means the first assessment of the GAR-SI Sahel program, specifically, identifying the degree of fulfillment of the objectives of the program based on information from trainers and participants. The relevance of this work lies not only on complete absence of evidence on the performance of this action, part of the EU-Africa cooperation, but also on the striking absence of research on the training of security forces in the Sahel region, which contrasts with our much richer understanding of these sorts of formative actions in other geographical areas (Bartkowiak-Théron, 2019; Donohue and Kruis, 2021; Herrington and Pope, 2014; Koerner and Staller, 2021; Lalonde, 2019; Rogério Lino, 2004). Furthermore, one should highlight that the main characteristic of the program resides on its interoperability as a key factor for a regionalization of the response, an element that has received increasing attention in the literature and that arouses special interest given the idiosyncrasy of the GAR-SI Sahel project.…”