Policing Work: Emotions and Violence in Institutional Work

Abstract

We merge research on institutional policing with the growing interest in violence in organization studies to explore how citizen enforcement of regulations can evoke emotion and even, under certain circumstances, turn violent. We draw on long interviews to explore how fly fishing guides enforce catch-and-release fishing regulations in the absence of the state. Our primary theoretical contribution is the development of the policing work construct, including a typology of different policing tactics. Therein, we unpack how emotional thresholds explain shifts away from peaceful enforcement tactics fostered by everyday emotions and towards violent tactics reinforced by extraordinary emotions and a desire for vengeance. We also reflect on the constitutive role of violence in policing work, shedding light on vigilantes as a veiled yet crucial line of defense for enforcing institutions. Finally, we show that institutional custodianship can be claimed by ordinary citizens, motivated by their deep connection to and guardianship of an institution’s integrity.

Cracking the box or stretching its walls? Exploiting institutional plasticity in Iranian creative advertising

“…Following previous work on microprocesses of institutional change (e.g. Creed et al, 2010;Leung et al, 2014), we sought an explanation for the factors that allowed advertising professionals to accomplish institutional change. We compared activities, outcomes and multiple interactions between institutional actors across campaigns as an ongoing process rather than isolated instances.…”

“…Research adopting this incremental perspective on institutional change has posited a number of cognitive, practical and discursive microprocesses through which the institutional rank-and-file affect significant changes in institutional arrangements (Powell and Colyvas, 2008;Reay et al, 2006). For example, Leung et al (2014) showed how the everyday identity work of Japanese middle-class housewives brought about changes to the institutionalized professional roles of women in Japanese social enterprises (see also Creed et al, 2010). Smets and colleagues (2012) found improvisation and subsequent justification of practices in a recently merged Anglo-German law firm to result in the hybridization of field-level logics.…”

“…To answer this question, we draw on the recent work on the antecedent microprocesses of higher-order institutional change (Creed et al, 2010;Vaccaro and Palazzo, 2015) by examining the strategies and tactics through which challenger actors identify and leverage plasticity toward incremental change. To this end, we use an ethnographic study of Iranian advertising professionals formulating and pitching ads to government regulators.…”

Entrepreneurial imagining: How a small team of arts entrepreneurs created the world’s largest traveling carillon

“…Experiencing involves perceiving and thinking, which are often separated in analyses, but in practice, they also intertwine, resulting in a continual interaction between the gathering and the processing of information (Arnheim, 2004). Indeed, as entrepreneurs perceive the surrounding world-which includes institutional and business environments (Crawford & Dacin, 2020;Dolmans et al, 2014)-they are thinking. Their thoughts influence what they see, and what they see influences their thoughts.…”

Long Interviews in Organizational Research: Unleashing the Power of “Show and Tell”

“…We begin by briefly describing our own experiences using long interviews in three studies in order to provide context for the subsequent sections on our data generation and results (Table 1). Brett's study inductively developed types of policing efforts as institutional work, including the use of violence, that fly fishing guides performed to enforce environmental regulations and support their vigilante roles (see Crawford & Dacin, 2020). His study included 21 long interviews lasting eight to twelve hours each, using a "wayfaring" approach (Cunliffe, 2018) to foreground embodied experience by "moving in the landscape" alongside the guides as they policed remote rivers and enforced regulations.…”