Journal of Workplace Learning Emerald Article: Talking about tools - investigating learning at work in police practice Johan Lundin, Urban Nuldén
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Johan Lundin and Urban Nulde´n School of IT, Go¨teborg University, Go¨teborg, Sweden Abstract Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to show how professional tools trigger workplace learning. The daily mundane work of Swedish police officers has been studied to investigate how the use of police tools triggers learning through discussions in police practice. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected through a field study consisting of extensive observations and interviews. The interviews mainly took place in the actual practice of the officers. Situated learning and communities of practice served as an analytical lens. Findings – The study revealed how the use of specific police tools resulted in conversations among the officers. Theses conversations are claimed to be vital parts of the community, and thus the learning of the community of police practice. The paper shows how tools make the ways of working, i.e. police practice, available for discussion and collective reflection. Originality/value – The paper is an in-depth investigation of a relatively closed sector of society. The paper can inspire researchers to embark on similar studies of other practices. The paper provides novel ways of thinking about how learning takes place in everyday work, not planned and organized by management, but rather as a necessity driven by new tools, and how tools are involved in work. Keywords Social interaction, Workplace learning, Police, Sweden Paper type Case study
Introduction Tools and practices are mutually defining and co-dependent. Practice is upheld or contested depending on how we involve tools. Practice is remembered through the use of tools. In the use of tools lies the connection to the history of the community, the memory that helps to know how things are or should be done, and in this use there is also the possibility to question how things are generally done (Wenger, 1998). For instance, the police officer’s notebook says something about how competent police work is achieved. Only through repeated use in a social collective can tools acquire meaning; only through seeing the tools used and using the tools can they be mastered. However, the significance and meaning of tools are rarely transparent to the learner, but rather have to be negotiated amongst practitioners (Lave and Wenger, 1991). The knowledge of a community of practice, such as police work, is encoded within the tools of that practice. And through engagement with these tools we are able to enter into a new practice and become competent practitioners (Lave and Wenger, 1991). When entering into and participating in social practices, we familiarize ourselves with and learn how to master discourses, perspectives and skills that are considered Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 19 No. 4, 2007 pp. 222-239 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626 DOI 10.1108/13665620710747915
The authors would like to thank The Swedish Research Council and The Swedish Research Institute for Information Technology for financial support. Their thanks also go to the Swedish Police and especially to all the officers who agreed to be observed.
relevant and valid in the specific practice. The skills we learn to master are in this way inherently defined and connected to the practice in which they are learned:
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Learning surgery, bicycle-riding or physics are inseparable from learning to be a surgeon, a cyclist or a physicist, respectively; the community is all (Khan et al., 1998, p. 772).
In this way, learning and knowing are connected to and part of practice. This research focuses on police work. In police practice, various sorts of tools are used, ranging from weapons, police cars, radios, horses and dogs to computers and forms, such as warrants and reports. From the perspective of the police, it would be of interest to understand better how the specific ways of organizing work shape learning among colleagues. Police work in Sweden is organized in patrols. The patrols almost always consist of two officers working together – partners. Single-officer patrols are rare in Sweden compared to many other countries. Organizing everyday work in patrols allows limited access to the other officers on duty. A consequence of this is that learning through observation is limited, shared experiences of work are rare, and cooperative work is conducted with a limited number of colleagues. Much of the police work is on-demand – in 911 policing, for example, when citizens call for the police, they expect to be aided in the fastest possible way. This way of working allows only limited time for the planning of everyday situations at work. Thus, officers are expected to act by quickly applying set rules and standardized routines without the need for discussion with their partner in advance. In general, learning in the workplace has been paid less attention than learning in educational settings. One of the reasons for this is an understanding of learning as being dependent on teaching. As research on learning has been defined by focusing on places where teaching or instruction takes place, rather than learning, the school has been the main arena of inquiry (Lave, 1996). However, we have no reason to believe that learning environments outside the institutions where teaching is carried out lack qualities that make them less suitable for learning. The workplace, as well as the classroom, is a relevant environment to study when aiming to further understand how learning takes place (Billet et al., 2004). It is also true that the practices in which we engage afford a number of the qualities that assist learning, such as interactions with partners, tools and signs (Billett, 2000). Research on police training generally takes a relatively unproblematic approach to learning: learning is understood to be either the equipping of officers with knowledge as tools for carrying out work or it is described as being socialized into practice. However, previous studies provide little reflection on how learning actually and specifically is achieved within police practice, how officers engage in the transformation of practice, and their participation in practice. In the theoretical perspective applied in this paper, learning and knowing are perceived as integral parts of action, which cannot be separated from human activity (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Lave and Wenger (1991) situate actions in a world of social communities (communities of practice) and describe learning as framed and driven by increased social participation within these communities. In this way, learning is a transformation process that goes far beyond anything that can be understood as individual change. If learning is understood as being framed within communities of practice, the study of interaction among practitioners can reveal aspects of learning that are important for sustaining and improving everyday work. As organizations,
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forms of employment and the nature of everyday work change, new concepts for understanding work, as well as new empirical studies of learning at work, are needed (Engestro¨m, 2004). Learning takes place in the interactions between the individuals and the environment – a context of rules and values, but also of tools, colleagues and ways of working (Svensson and Ellstro¨m, 2004). What colleagues talk about and how they talk about those things is of interest in this paper. We are specifically interested in how the tools of practice are brought into conversations, and regard this as a possible way of examining how practitioners learn to use tools. Talking about work has been identified as an important way of dealing with new tools (Griffith, 1999) as well as dealing with difficulties at work (Orr, 1996). This paper reports on a study focusing on how police officers talk about (police) tools and how they talk about the use of tools. Situated learning and communities of practice This section describes the analytical foundation of this paper. This foundation guides the methodological decisions made as well as the analysis of the interaction studied. In the analysis of collaborative learning activities in police work, we will employ the concept of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Learning that takes place in communities of practice should not be understood as a formal apprenticeship or even as informally organized apprenticeships, but rather as participation among colleagues with different experiences and different access to everyday practice. Apprenticeship is the generative tension that can be found when colleagues with different perspectives engage in collaborative work. Lave and Wenger (1991) describe learning as an integral part of the engagement in social practice, and point to differences among actors in a community as the main driving force of learning. Learning can be understood as increased ability in relation to the more capable person, but also as being dependent on these types of tensions in ability. The practitioner becomes more competent as more of the tools, discourses and ways of working are appropriated, and as a consequence taking on a more central role in the practice. The shared repertoire of a community of practice deals with the resources that have developed and been sustained over time. If learning is conceptualized as increased participation, it is dependent on further mastery of the shared repertoire of the community. The communities we take part in are part of a designed and artificial world, and we live in this world through and with its tools. Our actions are mediated through the tools we apply, tools that we have learned to master and appropriate through engagement in practice. Not only physical tools are of interest, but also (and particularly) intellectual ones, such as the concept of time, and standard ways of acting and language. When we involve ourselves in different practices, we learn not only how to use specific tools but also ways of talking and thinking. The repertoire lives through the constant actions of the practitioners in the community, and through their actions it is sustained and evolved. Talking about tools Putting ideas about work into words has been emphasised as an important aspect of learning from various theoretical perspectives (e.g. Argyris and Scho¨n, 1974; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Orr, 1996). Collective reflection or dialogue among colleagues
shapes concepts of and rules for conducting work (Ja¨rvinen and Poikela, 2001). Talking about work has the ability to both purvey general ideas and at the same time give the specifics of the situations. Illustrating an idea by dramatizing it with the properties of practice is generally more powerful than the articulation of the idea itself (Lave and Wenger, 1991). In research focusing on organizational perspectives of learning and knowing, telling stories about work is also understood to be of importance. However, in the tradition of organizational learning and knowledge management, it is not the everyday stories of the workers that are of main interest; rather, it is the possibility of supporting the construction of stories with specific elements and with specific intentions that is of primary interest. To engage in everyday work is to continuously produce different representations of the past, the present and the future. These interpretations of work enable the workers to develop their knowledge in practice and also allow them, as a collective, to revise and innovate how work is performed (Orr, 1996). Studies of how knowledge is formed and shared at work show how talking is the fundamental activity (e.g. Drew and Heritage, 1992; Boden, 1994). Through talking about the world with others, we articulate our experiences and in this way are able to contrast them with conflicting perspectives of the world. In conversations, workers engage in practice, and learn to become competent practitioners (Lave and Wenger, 1991). The significance of the tools involved in work cannot be understood in isolation from the social practice in which they are used. And as applied in social practice, they need to be negotiated amongst the participants. By interacting with and also talking about the tools applied, the practice is learned as well as contested and renewed: Workplaces provide interactions with human partners and non-human artifacts that contribute to individuals’ capacity to perform and to the learning that arises from their performance (Billet et al., 2004, p. 316). But the interactions with humans and artifacts are not just parallel activities; rather, they are interdependent. The ways of working and of involving tools in work must be talked about among practitioners. In this way, talking about work is essential for learning for both individuals and organizations. It introduces newcomers, sustains and distributes knowledge in practice over time and innovates the practice (Wenger, 1998).
This also relates to collective reflection in practice, understanding reflection as the intervening process constituting a link between how work is understood and new experiences of work. Knowledge is created in the midst of solving problems, collectively, reflecting on how ways of acting, other persons and tools in work are interconnected with each other. Reflection is initiated when something does not proceed in accordance with the general practice – it is triggered by our own surprise. And most of the core aspects of reflection are dependent on interaction (Ho¨yrup, 2004). Work can allow for more or less opportunities for learning at work since the possibilities of interacting and the quality of those interactions are different. In this sense, the tools make interaction and reflection on work possible; they are one of the things that create opportunities for practitioners to reflect on practice. This perspective is far from being a simplified view of learning in the workplace as mere socialization or enculturation. Learning in interaction with other practitioners is about creating new perspectives, new knowledge and new ways of collaboratively engaging in practice (Billet, 2004). Work is dependent on the tools involved in practice. And learning in
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work is in many ways dependent on the conversations among people concerning their experiences of working (Sense, 2005). Learning how to police Learning how to become an officer and to conduct police work has mainly been researched from either a police academy perspective or an in-service training program perspective. Little attention has been paid to the learning that takes place in the everyday mundane police work. One example is a study of the Dutch police investigating what kinds of work domains officers appear to learn (Doornbos et al., 2004). It suggests that work-related learning should be understood from more of a work perspective than an educational perspective. In other studies of learning in work, the focus has been on the negative aspects of sustaining and disseminating unwanted police practice. This section will briefly discuss pre-work training for officers and in-service training for active officers. Comparative studies of basic police academy training show that in different countries, there is considerable variation in length of training as well as curriculum and focus (e.g. Haberfield, 2002; Lord, 1998). Training to become an officer ranges from a few months in some countries to several years in others. Studies evaluating the success of police academy training tend to focus on how well equipped newcomers are when entering police practice. This critical preparation of officers is discussed by, for instance, Marion (1998) who claims that on the job learning is potentially dangerous since it is on the job that officers learn attitudes not valued by the academy. Furthermore, Marion (1998) shows how the academy fails in teaching the officers how to avoid the negative sides of practice. In a discussion on attitudes, she reports: The University Academy is lacking, however, in its ability to transmit the proper attitudes for new police officers [. . .] Those recruits, who are learning how to act and think like police officers, will absorb those attitudes [sexism and elitism] and begin to act and think in a similar manner (p. 74).
The literature on learning police work often applies the metaphor of transmission of knowledge. Officers are given new conceptual tools to be later applied in practice. Breci (1997) uses the term “upgrade” to describe how well Minnesota police agencies train their officers’ skills in the transition to problem-oriented community policing. Palmiotto et al. (2000) discuss the equipping of officers with skills and knowledge. Learning to become a police officer is understood both as something that is achieved in the police academy, but it is also described as a process of being socialized into the practice. However, this aspect of becoming an officer is also seen as a danger, if the academy is where proper conduct is learned then it is among your colleagues that you learn to become a “bad cop”. Research points to how attitudes towards ethnic groups, sexism and elitism are upheld within the community and how newcomers are socialized into these attitudes (Marion, 1998). But, drawing parallels between police work and other practices, it is this small talk among colleagues that upholds the practice of policing (e.g. Orr, 1996), i.e. what it is to be an officer, good or bad. This brings to fore the issue of bad knowledge, of learning that can be understood as unwanted by the organization. Not all learning has positive outcomes: it can also lead to bad habits and dysfunctional practices (Tynja¨la¨ and Ha¨kkinen, 2005). Ekman (1999)
describes how little the everyday stories told about work among officers maintain norms of the police practice. Two police technologies that are frequently talked about in both the academy and later in practice are the patrol car and the weapon. Both technologies are carefully covered in training sessions in the police academy, and are common subjects in formal as well as informal talks among officers. A third technology frequently talked about is the cell phone, which is changing many of the patterns of communications in the policing domain. A consequence of the direct person-to-person links, to colleagues, superiors, prosecutors, and even to criminals, is a lively discourse among the officers. Research setting – the Swedish police Sweden has a national police force divided into 21 regional units with some local autonomy. There are approximately 16,000 officers in Sweden and all recruits undergo the same basic two and a half year training at one of the three national police academies. The first two years include the theoretical and legal aspects of policing and basic behavioural science. The recruits also undergo practical training, such as driving a police car, handling different weapons and securing evidence at a crime scene. During these two years of academy training, the recruits have the opportunity to follow officers in their practice for about 15 days. This takes the form of three five-day periods of field work, where the recruits take on a project initiated by the academy. For instance, during the first semester at the academy, the recruits carry out a project on traffic and drug abuse. The recruits observe practice in the traffic domain, document, analyse and present a report at the academy. From the perspective applied in this paper, where learning is understood as being situated in a community of practice, the practice that recruits in academy training are incorporated in is the practice of being a recruit rather than being an officer. They are becoming skilled at a number of different aspects that are important in police work, but learning to become an officer, and understanding what police work is about, is a process that mainly takes place among the colleagues in police practice. The formal apprenticeship structure within the Swedish police starts in the second year at the academy. When the new recruits leave the academy for their first “real” job, they are considered to be apprentices and a more experienced officer is assigned to work with them. After six months, and if recommended by the supervisor, the recruit is considered to be a police officer and can apply for a position as a beat officer in any of the 21 regional units in Sweden. Organizing practice The daily work of uniformed beat officers has to be organized. One central principle is the manning of a minimum number of patrols and officers in each shift. Every precinct is required to ensure that a given number of officers are on duty each shift. Uniformed patrol officers usually work three shifts. Usually, officers work according to a rolling schedule starting with a night shift (23.00-07.00), followed by an evening shift (15.00-23.00) and, finally, a morning shift (07.00-15.00), then two days off. With this rolling schedule, the same officers work together on most of the shifts and they meet the same officers before each shift as well as after each shift.
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Recently, period planning has come to be an alternative to the rolling schedule. Period planning is based on calendar months. At the end of the current month, a whiteboard with a matrix of the days of the month and the three shifts is used to negotiate who works when and with whom during the coming month. Each officer has his or her own magnets. The number of magnets is equivalent to the number of shifts he or she has to work the coming month. The officers then negotiate the schedule by attaching their magnets to the shifts over the month. If there is a conflict about who should be working when, the captain decides. Regardless of which scheduling principle is applied, most shifts start out with a roll call where the station sergeant briefs the officers on recent activities in the precinct, and what is planned for the shift. Here, all the officers are expected to get an overview of what will be going on during the shift, getting an idea of where the other officers will be, if they will be available for support, if there is something special to be on the look-out for during the night. Since the group will be dispersed in the precinct during the rest of the shift, this will be the only time until the shift is over to make any deals face-to-face with the group. After this, almost all communication with people working out in the precinct as well as with the dispatcher will take place by radio or mobile phone. However, during most roll calls, one or more patrols are dispatched to situations where a police presence is required. A consequence of this is that the briefing is kept to a minimum. From a perspective where learning is understood as being dependent on interaction with colleagues, the two forms of scheduling have different properties. With a rolling schedule, the officers work with a fairly small number of colleagues. Since the schedule is set by the sergeant and since it is easiest to just keep the schedule rolling, most officers work with a limited number of other officers. However, with period planning, the officers have the opportunity to adjust their working schedule in a number of different ways, i.e. who they would like to work with, private and family reasons, what kind of work they would like to do and other things. With period planning, officers choose to work with a larger number of colleagues, which means that more people interact with each other on a regular basis. Tools in practice Two categories of police tools are of interest as far as the purpose of this paper is concerned: (1) the artifacts that the officers carry on them; and (2) the police car, which is central to patrol practice. From the perspective of learning applied in this paper, the tools applied in work are of great interest. The tools are closely connected to the ability to act competently in work, and as the community embrace and reject new tools, what it is to be competent and to act competently in practice changes. Police practice is dependent on the tools applied in work. As shown in Plate 1, the officer carries several mobile artifacts, some connected to forceful action (the stick, gun, handcuffs, etc.) and some connected to communication with colleagues and others (radio, phone). Plate 1 also makes it quite clear that support of practice cannot be so
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Plate 1. Some of the mobile work tools carried by the Swedish police officer
much about equipping the officer with new devices unless the new device replaces one of the old ones. The patrol car is an important tool used in police practice. In the car, the officer has access to a number of different technologies. Besides its obvious capacity to transport the officers as well as other persons, the police car is a place where much coordination, communication and other tasks are performed. Officers in a patrol car have basically five modes: (1) on their way to an incident; (2) on their way from an incident; (3) at the site of an incident; (4) general surveillance when driving around or parked at a specific location; and (5) parked at the station handling detained people or paperwork. Accordingly, the car is equipped to support different activities (see Plate 2). The officers have access to computer terminals at the police station. The officers can use any computer connected to the police network. A hardware verification card and personal login is required. Each officer has a profile, which gives him or her appropriate access to the different systems, applications and resources in the network. Access is generally granted depending on the role of the officer. All use is logged and there is constant monitoring to avoid improper use of the systems. The computer environment for the national Swedish police is called BasA (Base working area). BasA is installed and accessible in all police stations in Sweden. Data access outside the police station is only partly implemented across the different police districts. There have been several nationwide and local attempts to implement data access through MTDs (mobile data terminals). The first generations of MDT were run on a laptop PC. The laptop was to be used when working outside the police station. Over several years, different versions of MDTs were introduced. The first, MoAr I (mobile working area) was introduced in 1993, followed by MoAr II in 1997, and MoAr III in 1999. All three versions have the
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Plate 2. The support available in most Swedish police cars
same base functionality but different carriers; access to mainframe computers via a terminal application. MoBasA (Mobile base working area) was introduced in 2001. Now, all the applications, systems and resources were to be accessible outside the station. Extended access to all resources became available on BasA, first on a portable PC and later in a permanent mounted version (see Plate 3).
Research approach This research focuses on how police officers talk about (police) tools and how they talk about their use of these tools. To gain access to the everyday activities of the officers, the researcher had to be present in the field, observing and listening in on conversations among co-located officers as well as on the radio.
Plate 3. A police car with the mounted MoBasA system
The field work presented in this paper was collected as part of an ongoing ethnographic field study of police work in Sweden. The study was initiated in 2001 and consists, at the time of writing, of approximately 900 hours of participant observation and interviews. Most of the field work was done with uniformed police patrols in their daily work, taking notes and asking questions, performing non-participant observations, supported by a field journal as described by Hammersley and Atkinson (1995). The field journal was a small black notebook of the same type that the officers themselves use in their daily practice, which made observation less noticeable to an onlooker. Due to access to sensitive information and integrity of people it was decided early on not to take any notes that could be used to identify people, such as names (besides the officers’ names), addresses or license plate numbers. A problematic but also interesting issue was that after a time the researcher was in some ways included as a resource in practice. Being present when the officers were too busy to be able to take notes concerning information about people or vehicles that was broadcast over the radio, the researcher with a notebook at hand was asked to write the information down. In this way, the researcher in the field was quickly assimilated as a resource for secretarial work. The notes taken were expanded after each shift and sensitive information was erased. The setting for the study was mainly police work conducted in and around the patrol car. Conducting fieldwork in and around a police car has a number of characteristics. Three types of settings recurred throughout the fieldwork. Each of the settings provides different opportunities to study police work. The first setting, which can be referred to as “front seat”, is when the researcher is alone with one officer in the vehicle. Depending on the workload, the geographic area patrolled and the relation between the two people in the car, the setting constitutes a fruitful environment for in-depth conversational interviews. In this setting, the researcher is also invited, and even sometimes expected, to assist the officer in police work. However, a single officer riding in the patrol car is quite rare in Sweden. The second setting, referred to as “back seat”, occurs when there are two officers in the vehicle and the researcher can listen to the conversation between the officers and also ask questions about the ongoing work. The third setting, referred to as “full car”, occurs when there is a suspect, witness or police student from the academy in the car. This setting is different since the appearance of the officers is more official and public. Usually, the conversation in the vehicle is very limited during these situations. The analytical work focused on how new perspectives were presented and applied in discussions. We also looked for the incidents or triggers for discussions that were applied as resources in the talk. Further, we looked for how these were used to structure the discussions. It was also of interest to see how the work provided space for these discussions, i.e. how the organization of work enabled different persons to talk to each other, and how the organization facilitated these discussions. Accounts of talking about tools This section will introduce four accounts taken from the field studies, which describe talk about tools as it takes place in the officers’ everyday work. Each account will be related to learning as a collaborative activity. First, we would like to propose the notion
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of triggers when talking about tool use. In the four accounts we will see how different perspectives on tool use are made relevant in, and trigger, discussions. The four accounts reported on show: . how experiences from different precincts provide new perspectives on the use of communication technology; . how teaching takes place by talking about tool use; . how new tools are talked into practice; and . how recruits are taught how to talk about tool use. In the excerpts, the researcher, who was riding along with the officers is the “storyteller”.
Talking about communication technology use Any two officers who are assigned together have differences in experience in a way that creates a need for discussions on how to perform work. When two officers work together, a consequence is often that a master-and-apprentice-like situation is established. The excerpt below shows how two officers work together. One of them has 12 years of experience, and the other one less than two years: Excerpt 1 A nightshift in August, after three miserable jobs from the dispatcher in a row, the patrol is feeling somewhat dejected since the information from the operator was fragmented and partly wrong. The address information was not sufficient for fast location of the place of the suspected crime. The two officers are somewhat irritated. Ralph, with 12 years’ experience, explains how the dispatcher central operates in a neighbouring county where he worked previously. “The operator [at the dispatcher central] re-routed the call from a person to the patrol, which was then dispatched to the situation at hand. This way I could talk to the caller directly, get the address, some additional and later information. I mean, when someone was breaking into a house or something, the caller could give me first hand information.” Fred, with less than two years of experience, replies and provides a new perspective on this problem. “I never thought about it in that way. Then all patrols would be like a dispatcher central?” The conversation continues. Ralph gives a couple of concrete examples of situations where he has talked directly with the caller.
In this case, the two officers discuss how the current use of communication technology affects their work. Ralph’s comments concerning ways of handling emergency calls from the public presents an alternative way to organize work. This alternative way creates a contrast to the current practice and also presents an alternative way of understanding their role as practitioners (i.e. officers involved in dispatching). The experiences of the officers create new ways of understanding current practice. This relates to discussions on how identities are formed in practice and also how history is connected to practice in this way (Wenger, 1998). Experience is used as a resource in the collaborative interpretation of the situation.
Talk as teaching tool use This excerpt shows how experienced officers teach the use of tools by talking about them. In talking about the use of the police car, they set a scene that they find supports the learning of the recruit. Excerpt 2 Later, some time after midnight, we are dispatched to a public parking lot where some suspicious people have been seen sneaking around. Mike is driving and stops the car when we get close to the parking lot. Carl opens the door and tells me and the recruit to quietly follow him out. We get out and quickly move into the cover of the trees surrounding the large parking lot. The plan is that Mike will drive around a couple of blocks, and then enter the parking lot from the opposite direction. This way, the suspects would react by running away from the car, and towards us. Carl tells me to carefully move 20 metres to the left and the recruit the same to the right. Mike drives into the parking lot and we’re waiting for some people to come running towards us. No one comes. We walk around the parking lot for a while. Nothing suspicious. We get back to the car and report to the dispatcher central [. . .] The recruit is not allowed to complete the full shift due to time regulations and insurance issues. He is dropped off and we head out for three more hours of work before dawn. Mike and Carl immediately engage in a conversation concerning their opinion of the recruit and more general issues concerning the academy. They raise some crucial points concerning the relation between academy and the real work. Carl is explaining his view of introducing colleagues to his way of working. “They spend ten days, at the most, with us. The rest of the time is spent at the academy. During this short period I try to provide them with, as I see it, a positive view of what the work is all about. Mike and I knew that the parking lot was cold [meaning that there were no suspects there], but why not use the situation to break him in? I mean, we need to teach him to take his own initiatives and to be a bit more creative doing the work, that’s not what they learn at the academy. Most of our colleagues [pointing at Mike] would drive into the lot with a marked car, look around without getting out of the car, and then radio in “nothing here”.
In this excerpt, the officers talk about that what they see as “simple” police practice, something that they can involve the recruit in. Being able to use the police car wisely when checking out a parking lot is seen as a basic competence, something that you can learn during your first days in the field. The officers display an understanding of their practice, where tasks are valued in terms of the need for expertise to perform the task. The experienced officers also emphasize improvisation with tools as an important aspect of their work. This, rather than doing the job “by the book”, seems to be an important part of how they view the use of tools. The officers describe an informal “curriculum” and use this to educate the recruit. It is also interesting to note how the focus of officers is on attitudes towards the use of the car rather than the more basic skills taught at the academy. Lave and Wenger (1991) discuss the problem of treating a peripheral participant (such as the recruit) as someone who has to be educated. As we can see in the quote, the curriculum for teaching limits the participation of the learner, thus providing fewer opportunities to become a practitioner, and instead prolongs the role of newcomer. In this way, the good intentions of the more experienced officers could actually prevent progress towards becoming a participant. In the excerpts above, the two officers are assigned a recruit for the duration of (almost) a shift. During this short time, they try to give him some valuable insights into the use of the tools in practice.
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Talking about how to use new tools One of the latest police tools in Sweden is pepper spray (OC). OC has been evaluated in a pilot study over one year. A number of police agencies around the country were selected to participate in the study. The agencies selected were then responsible for preparing and training their officers in the use of OC. The use of, and authorization to use, OC requires that the officer has experienced an OC “attack”. The procedure for the “attack” is as follows: An instructor drips OC in the eyes of the officer. This creates instant pain. The officer then has to wait for a few minutes before he/she is requested to physically deal with an “attacker” (the instructor) by keeping him away for a number of minutes. The officer is then asked to draw his handgun and in a controlled way make the “attacker” (instructor) back off. When this has been completed, the officer has passed the test and is allowed to rinse the spray out of his eyes; this takes approximately 30 minutes. The officers followed in the ongoing field study are participating in the OC pilot study. There are several parallel discussions among the officers concerning this new tool and non-lethal weapon, but two discussions have been chosen as being of specific interest from the perspective of appropriating new tools. In discussions, OC is often related to the existing tools, mainly the extendable [steel] baton carried by most officers. A situation where the baton has been used is recapitulated and the possible outcomes if OC had been used instead are discussed, often in terms of stories that many officers tell concerning effective use. Dealing with people sitting in cars and refusing to get out is a concrete situation that can be dealt with more efficiently. Excerpt 3 A group of officers are being debriefed after a situation where OC was used to deal with a person in a car. The officer who had used the OC: “It’s so easy and so safe, both for the offender and us. Donk, the window is gone [making a gesture with his arm as if he had the a baton] and then a quick spray of the guy, you back off and ask him to get out, and there he comes. I know it’s insane, but I used to smash the window, and then squeeze in through the window to wrestle the guy. How smart is that?” The narration of similar stories, where a situation was dealt with using less violence (using OC) than normally (using the baton or fighting), was heard several times during the field study.
The use of new tools in practice is articulated in discussions among colleagues. In the excerpt above, the officer is very much in favour of the new tool and uses stories about his own work to illustrate how the new tool changes his practice. By telling stories about using the new tool in everyday practice, he shows how the tool can be incorporated in the practice. Teaching how to talk about tool use In the excerpt below, we see how two officers show a visiting recruit how tools are properly talked about in practice. Excerpt 4 It is a night shift, and winter has just started. The two officers, Carl and Mike with whom I am riding have been assigned a second year police academy recruit for the shift. This is the recruit’s final day of his ten-day visit at the agency. The four of us, all male and the same age give or take a few years, get into the patrol car. It is almost snowing and it is dark, the FM
radio is playing soft music in the background, the communication radio is quiet and we are silent. After a while, the recruit leans forward towards the front seat and says “I hope we get a car chase tonight”. Neither of the officers in the front seat responds immediately. After a minute Carl, who is driving turns to him, and says in a serious voice: “It’s better if we can avoid high speed chases” [. . .].
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In this excerpt, the recruit and the officer describe the work in two quite different ways. The experienced police officer shows how an officer is expected to talk about a car chase. In general, a car chase is not considered to be anything particularly negative; it might even be quite possible that everyone in the car would appreciate some action. Rather, the excerpt shows that how it is talked about and who is describing the work is of great importance. Learning to talk about tools should not be seen as a simple matter, but rather as something that has to be learned through continuous participation in practice.
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Talking about tools as learning The previous section provided four accounts of how tools were talked about in everyday police work. Using the concept of triggers to further analyze the results, we can categorize the accounts of talking about tools as triggered either by new tools, or by new persons. Wenger (1998) describes how a shared repertoire is one of the dimensions of a community of practice (CoP). A shared repertoire includes the resources that the community of practice has developed and sustained over time. If learning is conceptualized as increased participation, this is then dependent on further mastery of the shared repertoire of the community. And understanding the development of practice as the development of the repertoire is dependent on how the participants deal with and discuss this repertoire. Triggers for talking As new tools are introduced into practice, they inevitably contrast with the contemporary repertoire, i.e. what is described here as triggering talking about tools. The practitioners need to learn how to deal with new tools, and this is done by actually using them in practice, but most importantly by talking about their use. When pepper spray was introduced as a new tool to the Swedish police officers, the introduction triggered talking about how it was to be used. However, not only the pepper spray became the object of discussion, but the introduction of new tools also made reflection on the other common tools for force relevant, as well as the general issue of violence and using force. The process of integrating, or making something part of the repertoire, can be observed in the discussions among the practitioners. This does not mean that everything new easily becomes adopted in the practice; rather, that even if a tool is rejected it becomes part of the resources for interaction in the community, as a rejected tool. In this way, new tools trigger talk about work: they make certain discussions relevant in practice. When newcomers enter the practice, they need to learn how to talk about tools, as well as to learn how the tool is used through talking. New persons, who cannot be described as new practitioners but rather as practitioners with new perspectives on
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work, provide a contrast to the ways things are done and a process of adjustment, change – in other words, learning – starts. We can see this happening in Excerpt 1, where one officer had experience from a different precinct where work was organized in a different way concerning the relation between the dispatcher and the officers in the field. By contributing this new perspective to the conversation, new ways of understanding the role of the dispatcher, the role of the officers out in the field and the relation to the citizen reporting a crime are expressed. Properties of talk among officers Discussions about the use of tools in practice are supported by the local qualities of practice. The resources and cues for engaging in discussions are available in the field. This, in combination with time spent waiting in the car (which is a regular part of each working shift) creates opportunities for reflection on practice in practice. Being on duty provides the experience, the content and the space for interaction concerning practice. This interaction also has to be adapted to what the situation offers. Officers driving around, talking in their car, are not able to plan their shift independently. The shift is controlled by what is going on in the district and how the dispatcher organizes work. In the case of newcomers the opportunities for taking part in police work shape the possibilities for on-the-job learning (Billet, 2004). And the opportunities to use the tools of the practice, and to reflect collectively on the experiences gained from doing this, shape the learning among the practitioners. The organization of the police force means that opportunities to observe other officers working, or to interact with them concerning how work is done, rarely arise. The pair relation becomes an arena for discussing and negotiating everyday work. The more experienced partner becomes one of the main sources of the community of police practice in relation to the newcomer. The newcomer has to negotiate the understanding and meaning of the practice as well as his/her identity as an officer, established at the academy, to the understanding of everyday practice presented by the more senior officer. The pair relation makes in-depth discussions about work possible. But it is limited and it also enables secrecy and the development of forms of work that would not be accepted by the police force as a whole. Since colleagues are only able occasionally to observe each other’s work, the creation of collective norms and the questioning of how colleagues work are more difficult. Wenger (1998) notes that the creation of communities depends on social proximity rather than geographical proximity. However, being physically close can facilitate communication and thus create good opportunities for interaction and shaping a community of practice. The field studies show that stories play a large role in everyday police work. The use of stories helps the ongoing negotiation of practice and the culture of using them is one of the communicative activities that constitute the practice of policing. The stories told among police officers are constructed, situated and lived in pairs, and through them descriptions of everyday practice are distributed throughout the community. Conclusion This paper investigates how police officers talk about (police) tools and how they talk about the use of tools.
Here, the concept of triggers is proposed in order to describe how new persons and new tools motivate, or are used to motivate, discussions. What is new carries new perspectives on tools and on tool use, and these perspectives are employed in the discussions among colleagues. Newcomers learn to master, and are in some cases expressly taught, how to talk about tools, and in this way also how tools are to be used and understood in the community. New tools question the contemporary practice and must be incorporated through use and through talking. This is a process of evolving practice, and consequently a process of evolving the competences of the practitioners, i.e. new tools must be learned. It is argued that due to the organization in pairs, the use of stories as well as time for talking are properties of police work that shape and enable learning through talking about tools. As regards the relation between learning in practice and training to become an officer, we claim that the inclusion of newcomers in police practice is problematic for three reasons: (1) as the consequences of police work are direct and severe partners must establish a deep mutual trust to be able to carry out their work; (2) at the academy many aspects of the practice cannot be included in ways that are even remotely similar to actual police practice; and (3) police practice involves using force: this is something that many recruits have little or no experience of, and thus, understanding the basic premises of the practice is something that can only be achieved in practice. However, emphasizing talking about tools as a way of taking part in, understanding, and becoming an officer opens up new possibilities for involving newcomers in the practice. Giving recruits access to situations of police talk would be a possible way of giving them access to the practice. Closer links between educational activities and work have been suggested as a way of making education more stimulating and successful (Eales et al., 2002). Students are rarely given the opportunity to take part in actual work, especially in strictly regulated work such as in the police force. This also applies in sales and consultancy, where interaction with clients and customers is considered to be something that has to be handled with special care. Even though students are given few opportunities to take part in actual work, they can talk about work with practitioners, and in this way ease the transition. References Argyris, C. and Scho¨n, D. (1974), Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Billett, S. (2000), “Co-participation at work: knowing and working knowledge”, Proceedings of Working Knowledge: Productive Learning at Work, University of Technology, Sydney. Billet, S. (2004), “Workplace participatory practices – conceptualising workplaces as learning environments”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 16 No. 6, pp. 312-24. Billet, S., Barker, M. and Hernon-Tinning, B. (2004), “Participatory practices at work”, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 233-57. Boden, D. (1994), The Business of Talk. Organizations in Action, Polity Press, Cambridge.
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239 About the authors Johan Lundin is Program Manager of the Mobile Services master’s program at the School of IT at Go¨teborg University. He holds a MSc in informatics (2000) and a PhD in informatics (2005) from Go¨teborg University, Sweden. Johan’s research interests focus technology support for learning in everyday work, in particular how mobile technology can be used and design for such purposes. The research was conducted at the The Viktoria Research Institute, but also at the Department of Informatics and the Department of Applied IT, Go¨teborg University. Johan Lundin is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
[email protected] Urban Nulde´n is Associate Professor in Informatics and Vice Dean of the School of IT at Go¨teborg University. He is also research director at the Viktoria Research Institute where he coordinates a research group focusing on public safety.
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