Ethnography and narrative

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the topic of police storytelling from an ethnographic perspective. Ethnographies have always been full of stories, but it took a while for storytelling as such to draw attention to it within the broader study of police culture. Lately, we have seen increased attention for storytelling in policing. Recent studies cover new ground: they comment on story tellability, on police storytelling among recruits, on the differences across settings, and more. Nevertheless, a more systematic treatment of this topic is still lacking. This paper reviews the literature on police storytelling. Its purpose is to come to a more thorough and critical understanding of storytelling in policing (studies), which allows us to identify some challenges and opportunities we see for future (ethnographic) research.

KEYWORDS:

• Police culture
• storytelling
• ethnography
• narrative criminology

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a keynote lecture, given at the Policing Ethnography Conference at Northumbria University, Newcastle, January 2019. The author would like to thank Mike Rowe (Northumbria University), Megan O'Neill and Paul Quinton for inviting him to speak at the conference. He would also like to thank Jenny Fleming, Matthew Bacon, Bethan Loftus and Mike Rowe (University of Liverpool), and the two reviewers of the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Following Riessman (2008) and others, we treat stories and narratives as synonyms.

2 We would like to make a distinction between ethnography as a set of methods (which refers to the use of participant observations and includes formal and/or informal conversations with people in the field) and fieldwork, as the use of methods in the field (which typically includes the use of interviews and might also involve (participant) observations). Some sociologists, like Becker (1998), seem to treat fieldwork and ethnography as synonyms. Here, when we speak of ethnography we think of fieldwork that includes sustained observation. Important to note, however, is that in practice there are many ways in which one might engage the field to learn about storytelling. Nowadays, observation is more often done on multiple sites, in the form of shadowing people, combined with focus groups, diary studies or visual methods, etc. (see Czarniawska 2007). Ethnography and fieldwork, furthermore, might also be seen as sensibilities (Schatzman and Strauss 1973, Pader 2013), efforts to understand life in the field from the perspective of those who inhabit it. Finally, ethnography might refer to the written result of (ethnographic) fieldwork (Van Maanen 1988).

3 He also included the research interview. This last setting is of course no ‘natural’ policing setting for stories to be told, but it is important to notice that many of the stories that we encounter on the pages of ethnographies contain such interview stories (we come back to this below).

4 Van Maanen (1988) calls the stories ethnographers tell – not to be confused with the ones officers themselves tell - ‘realist tales’.

5 This does not mean that officers are often reflecting deeply before acting, as they will make use of stereotypical expectations regarding individuals and settings (Skolnick 1966).

6 The fieldwork during which this short excerpt was taped took place in 2014 and 2015. During this fieldwork, the fieldworker conducted participant observations in four Dutch police stations. He observed 38 briefings in total. A part of the briefings were taped and transcribed. Another part of this fieldwork has been published on (van Hulst 2017).