The Story Behind an Organizational List: A Genealogy of Wildland Firefighters’ 10 Standard Fire Orders

Abstract

To invigorate research on the dialectic between lists and stories in communication, this study recommends adding context back to text by focusing on the enduring problems these forms are summoned to solve. A genealogy of one significant organizational list, wildland firefighters’ 10 Standard Fire Orders, shows how a list's meaning resides less on its face and more in the discourses surrounding it, which can change over time. Vestiges of old meanings and unrelated cultural functions heaped upon a list can lead to conflicts, and can make the list difficult to scrap even when rendered obsolete for its intended purpose. Reconciling these layers of meanings and functions is thus not a technical problem but rather a rhetorical one. Implications for communication research are addressed.

Keywords:

• Organizational Communication
• Dialectic of List and Story
• Genealogy
• Organizational Rhetoric
• Wildland Firefighting

This article was previously presented as a Top Three Paper to the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association at the annual meeting in San Antonio in 2006.

This article was previously presented as a Top Three Paper to the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association at the annual meeting in San Antonio in 2006.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Robin Clair, Tom Ryba, Alan Sillars, Dave Thomas, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts. Thanks also to Marty Alexander, Jim Cook, and Kent Maxwell for assistance in locating historic documents related to the Fire Orders.

Notes

This article was previously presented as a Top Three Paper to the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association at the annual meeting in San Antonio in 2006.

1. All references to “his” are historically accurate. Although women worked for state fire agencies as early as the 1940s, federal firefighters were strictly male until the 1970s (Floren, 2004).

2. In the move away from the historic root metaphor of the war on wildfire (Pyne, 1994), the policy to suppress 100% of fires was lifted, and prescribed fire was introduced. However, even prescribed fires are called “controlled burns,” which signals that they are still supposed to be contained, and that people and property are still supposed to be kept safe. Thus the problem of achieving both fire control and crew safety in a distributed and dangerous environment endures. Also, any references to protecting lives in this article refer strictly to firefighters and other fire personnel, and not to civilians; protection of civilian lives introduces a whole different dynamic and is best left for another study.

3. Although Fire Control Notes began in 1936, evidence of shaming as a control practice was also evident as early as 1919 in the list of Common Errors in Firefighting in the Forest Service Western Firefighters’ Manual. For example, one error reads, “failure to throw dangerous snags. He would build a three foot fence to keep birds out of his garden” (p. 1). However, those items related entirely to putting out a fire, there being no mention of safety. Kaufman (1960/1967) also addressed the Forest Service logic that “sources of guilt and shame about deviating from preformed decisions must be instilled in organizational members” (p. 211) as a control mechanism.

4. Although it is not widely known, the NWCG actually proposed a revision to the Fire Orders in 1980 that combined and collapsed the Fire Orders and other guidelines into a different list whose items spelled “Watch Out.” This revision was never adopted; however, later a different list of Watch Out Situations was created, and now the two lists are usually paired in conversation and referred to colloquially as “the 10 and the 18” (National Interagency Fire Center, 2007).

5. The fact that OSHA would require agencies to provide a safe working environment for wildland firefighters reflects that agency's own particular ideology (Zoller, 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer A. Ziegler

Jennifer A. Ziegler (PhD, University of Colorado) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Valparaiso University