Learning the (hidden) silence policy within the police

Abstract

Many organisations declare that the ability for employees to speak out about organisational matters is important for organisational development. However, recent literature reports a widespread fear of retaliation among employees if they express themselvesespecially within the police. The point of departure of the present article is the tension and discrepancy between official policy and officers' accounts of the conversational climate within the police. Through empirical examples from data consisting of field studies and 33 interviews with police officers in subordinate ranks, this article describes how employees learn and reproduce informal norms that condition the conversational and working climate within the organisation. In contrast to official guidelines within the police, employees learn the informal cultural norms of keeping a low profile and remaining silent through everyday talk. Theories that stress how discourses, storytelling, and noisy silences accomplish social action are used to explain why these informal norms are given such power within an institutional setting. ARTICLE HISTORY

Challenging and destabilizing official discourses: irony as a resistance resource in institutional talk

“…Loftus (2009) labelled such safe places 'white spaces', looking at how in them derogatory and even directly racist police talk can be openly expressed, sustaining unequal power relations both among police employees themselves and in police encounters with minorities. In previous research, I have developed the understanding of the concepts 'safe places' and 'white spaces', bringing into relief the significance of the conditions of language used within different areas in the police (Wieslander 2014(Wieslander , 2018(Wieslander , 2019, see also Sefton 2011). I have used the term 'safe (discursive) spaces' to point at these spaces as contextualized and regulated beyond only race, and shown that language and humour are conditioned differently in relation to different people, groups, times, locations and occasions.…”

“…This form of routine resistance to the managerial discourse on freedom of speech constituted not only a counter-discourse of a suppressive conversational climate, but also characterized the management as sneaky, giving reprisals to the employees while proclaiming freedom of speech. The cynical punchlines served to inform other peers and me about the perceived working conditions, and thus also constituted a truth very few dared to challenge (see Wieslander 2018).…”

“…Scott 1985). The police organization is authoritarian and hierarchically ordered, entailing a strong perceived risk of severe negative consequences when violating the rules of organizational status or deviating from work assignments or managerial orders (for Sweden, see Stenmark 2005;Wieslander 2016Wieslander , 2018. In such an organizational context, irony can be said to provide a useful resource for police officers for negotiating institutional values and norms without the risk of being perceived as insubordinate or incurring disciplinary measures, such as 'ending up in the freezer'.…”

“…The officers termed such initiatives as mere organizational window dressing vis-à-vis the media and the general public, responding to them with open scepticism that only reinforced existing conflicts within their organization and led to further differentiation between its various levels of hierarchy (cf. Rennstam 2013;Wieslander 2016Wieslander , 2018. That way, the distances and tensions between the categories of employees associated with those levels (e.g.…”

“…Here humour and laughter can help to create and maintain the kind of solidarity required for the vital trust to develop. Secondly, there is a risk of 'ending up in the freezer' when challenging cultural norms or criticizing one's organization (Wieslander 2016(Wieslander , 2018. Together, these two features then call for an ability to engage in covert critique in 'safe spaces', away from higher-level managers and the general public.…”