Abstract
Although sociologists have devoted a considerable amount of research to exploring high-risk organizations, they have not yet developed an adequate explanation as to why individuals working within such organizations place themselves in harm’s way and how organizations ensure they remain there. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how the United States Forest Service motivates wildland firefighters to participate in life-threatening activity. Drawing on ethnographic research and content analyses of official documents, it describes the process by which firefighters come to develop a specific disposition towards risk taking, a disposition through which they view firefighting as an activity void of danger, and how this disposition maintains its shape, and even grows stronger, after confronting its biggest challenge: the death of a firefighter.
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Notes
This article draws on a significant number of primary sources from the Forest Service and similar organizations; to conserve space, these sources have been excluded from the text but are available upon request.
In absolute terms firefighting does not appear to injure or kill as many workers as some industrial occupations (see Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005), especially those strained by taxing production pressures that force workers to take unnecessary risks (Heimer 1988). Workers in fishing and fishing-related occupations die on the job at a higher rate than any other workers, and drivers/sales workers and truck drivers (followed by structural metal working) have the highest injury rates, far outpacing those of firefighting. However, in relative terms, firefighting is very dangerous. That is, firefighting is much more likely to kill or injure its workers than are other jobs to which members of the Elk River Firecrew have access: firefighters are twice as likely to die on the job as painters and automobile mechanics, six times more likely to die than janitors and cashiers, and 14 times more likely to die than those working in food preparation and serving occupations.
I prefer the term “motivates” because it occupies a delicate position between volunteerism and determinism. One is motivated when an outside force (e.g., an organization) nudges one toward a position or course of action to which one already is predisposed, which firefighters indeed were (see Desmond 2007).
Another theory of risk taking is exemplified by Georg Simmel’s (1959 [1911]) writings on adventure and has to do with self-actualization (Lyng 2004). As this theory has been employed mainly by analysts investigating risky leisure activities, (e.g., skydiving), this article concentrates primarily on the theory of risk taking exemplified by Goffman.
In the interest of space, I must bracket questions of selectivity (e.g., what brings people to this line of work), which I have addressed elsewhere (Desmond 2007), and focus instead on what happens to people once they commit themselves to firefighting.
I have witnessed firefighters hesitate and doubt their own abilities during moments when things get too hot, when the flames get too violent, when the smoke is too thick, or when something does not feel right. Sometimes, they push forward, feeling disconcerted and edgy. (Once, George, reluctant to take a chain saw to a red-hot log, did so only when Allen, his supervisor, pushed him to.) Other times, they step back and let the fire calm itself. (On another occasion, Bryan, Diego, and Scott attempted to cut off the head of a fast-moving grassfire by punching a scratch line in front of it. They vigorously dug line in front of the fire, but the flame lengths grew and the fire increased in intensity. The firefighters soon found themselves in front of a powerful wave of heat and five-foot flame lengths. Accordingly, all three of the men pulled back and ran to a safe spot. They let the fire die down before returning to the line.) But in all cases, after the action has quelled, there await the Ten and Eighteen, providing firefighters with a vocabulary to make sense of their actions when reflecting, retrospectively, on them (cf. Mills 1940). These rules are pre-formed, satisfactory responses to questions, responses that firefighters rely upon to comprehend firefighting as orderly and safe activity. Crewmembers draw upon these vocabularies of motive to interpret, analyze, and justify their actions on the fireline after the smoke settles, and in so doing, they alter these actions by substituting the logic of practice (based on practical strategies) with the logic of procedures (based on rules). How firefighters interpret their actions are not the same as the motivations driving them during the action itself; however, these interpretations, however selective, are crucial to understanding how firefighters make sense of the perils of their profession.
This does not mean that firefighters do not perform masculinity—only that they do so in ways unanticipated by previous literature and conditioned by their host organization. Within the same context, masculinity can express itself in a myriad of ways. Indeed, opposite modes of action can stem from the same motivation: to assert one’s masculinity. This occurs, for example, when a teenager chooses to fight another “because real men know how to scrap,” while his rival declines the challenge “because real men walk away.” (And masculinity perhaps functions just as often as a convenient vocabulary of motive—a reason one applies, post factum, to one’s behaviors—as it does a motivation for action [cf. Mills 1940].) My crewmembers understood the act of firefighting as connected to their sense of manhood, not because it required crude bravado or mindless guts but because it allowed them to display clear-headed competence amidst the roar of an emergency. In fact, they sometimes criticize women firefighters, not for their unwillingness or inability to take risks or for their lack of courage, but for being too daring. Consider Peter’s comments: “Some of them ladies, they think that since they’re women, people look at ‘em like, ‘Oh, they can’t do the job since they’re women.’ So they, some of them, try to make themselves tougher than they are when all they’re going to do is hurt themselves. But I think that men are more like, ‘Fuck that shit! I’m a fat lazy fuckin’ slob. I’m not going to fuckin’ hike up that goddamn hill!’ . . . You tell that to another female, and she—” Peter squeals in a high-pitched voice, “‘Oh fuck it, ‘cause I’m a female!’ And whoom, there she fucking goes.”
Whereas only a few paragraphs are allotted to examples of management, equipment, and environment causes, handbooks devote several pages of examples to people causes. One manual provides a nine-page list of ways the dead or injured can err, while devoting only one page to managerial causes and no pages to environmental or equipment causes.
Supervisors never criticized the Ten and Eighteen in this manner. In fact, the elites whom I observed and interviewed seemed to believe in the importance of these rules just as much as (perhaps more than) seasonal firefighters.
One might wonder if, along with my crewmembers, I, too, internalized such a belief during my fieldwork. I did and began questioning how my crewmembers and myself made sense of risk and death, what the latter had to do with the former, and how my thinking had been influenced by the Forest Service only after I witnessed how my crewmembers reacted to Rick Lupe’s death. Their reaction produced in me a double effect: I began thinking of ways to reconstruct the logic of firefighting and processes of organizational training and discipline; and I began assuming a skeptical posture toward crewmembers’ and supervisors’ opinions and injunctions. The question I began asking myself again and again was, “Why do they (and I) think that?” Many fieldworkers have experienced similar encounters, unexpected ethnographic episodes that forced them to reevaluate their own ways of thinking. Full immersion fieldwork often presents the embedded ethnographer with reflexivity-inducing situations, conceptual crises that raze underdeveloped ideas and replace them with new ways of understanding (e.g., Rabinow 1977). However, I do not pretend to believe that I have broken completely with the common sense of the Forest Service. If “going native” is nothing more than a chimera for the outside observer, then so too is “going alien” for the inside observer.
This is not necessarily a necessary evil, for organizational legitimacy need not come at the cost of marshalling a set of rules (impossible to obey in practice) as post mortem evidence of incompetence. Just as it is unreasonable to assign blame, in virtually every case, to fallen firefighters, it would be unreasonable, in the absence of such assignments, to criticize the Forest Service after every accident. There are times when it is the individual’s fault, times when it is the organization’s, and times, we must admit, when it makes the most sense to blame the very nature of firefighting itself. Perhaps organizational legitimacy is not such a fragile thing, especially in the case of an organization that has been amassing it for over 100 years. The Forest Service’s legitimacy would not melt away if a collectivist ethic came to replace the current ethic of individualism. Although this shift could at times throw the Forest Service’s own competence into question, is it not equally plausible that, should this shift result in a marked decrease of injuries and fatalities, more organizational legitimacy could be gained in the process?
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Acknowledgements
I thank Mustafa Emirbayer, Javier Auyero, and three anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback. Sections of this article have appeared in On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (University of Chicago Press, 2007) as well as in “Des morts incompétents,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 165 (2006), pp. 8–27, both works by the author.
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This article was accepted by the former editor-in-chief Javier Auyero. The current editor, David Smilde, has approved of its publication.
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Desmond, M. Making Firefighters Deployable. Qual Sociol 34, 59–77 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9176-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9176-7