Resisting at the Airport: Security Guards among TIP and "Unruling" Passengers

The paper considers everyday practices of resistance within the context of airport security, with a particular focus on power-resistance relations (e.g. Levina & Orlikowski, 2009; Thomas, Sargent & Hardy, 2011) and a specific attention to the set of "norms and other kinds of institutional arrangements" (Martì & Fernández, 2013) that characterizes the considered domain.
Indeed, we deem the latter as particularly interesting in its complexity, as it entails: multiple, intertwining, often contradictory (inter-)organizational goals and deriving constraints (e.g. quickness and thoroughness, business efficiency and security efficacy); a large, multilayered (international, European, national, local) corpus of norms and detailed procedures (for acting, accounting, reporting, checking, controlling, etc.); manyfold inter- and intra-organizational power relations, and a whole field of authority positions (where everything is down in black and white except for the ambiguous position of passengers); countless co-occurrent interactions among members of diverse groups; and an ensemble of technological tools and artefacts that mediate most of work activities.
By the analysis of the resisting practices of airport security guards - that, as we shall see, are both individual and collective; often passive and quiescent; mainly mundane and routine; and mostly oppositional forms of resistance - the paper aims at contributing to the study of power-resistance relations and their role in innovative vs. stagnant organizational change (e.g. Mumby, 2005), particularly in institutional - and highly institutionalized - settings.
The theoretical approach that lays at the basis of this contribution resonates with the perspective that has come to be known as "organizational becoming" (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), yet it is also the outcome of an interdisciplinary effort between sociology - in particular, ethnomethodology and workplace studies - and philosophy - more specifically, social ontology. The approach is processual and pays attentions at the details of everyday action-in-interaction, and the latter's crucial role in meaning-making and change processes.
The empirical material on which the paper is based comes from the ongoing ethnographic research that is being conducted at an Italian international airport (April 2013 - April 2014), and that focuses, in particular, on security, border control and surveillance. Data include field notes, interviews with security guards and police officers, and video recordings of hand-luggages control activities. The research participate to a larger interdisciplinary project: VisCoSo - "Detection of crisis in socio.material systems via visual-cognitive-social processes" (http://www.istc.cnr.it/project/viscoso-detection-crisis-socio-material-s... cognitive-social-processes).
The paper takes into consideration diverse modalities of resisting that can be subsumed under three main categories. First, it focus on the Threat Image Projection (TIP) used at
airports in order to maintain the attention level of security guards during hand-luggage scan control, and to record - and then take action on the basis of - their performances at the monitoring of potentially dangerous and/or prohibited objects. TIP can be seen as instruments of control, pressure and, ultimately, exercise of power. Security guards enact different practices of resistance for coping with the TIP mechanism, practices that aim at the collective construction and everyday updating of a corpus of shared (practical) knowledge. This is achieved by making each and every instance of TIP appearance during work activities an occasion for collective learning and/or knowledge stabilization, as well as by leveraging on a corpus of TIP-related anecdotes and narratives that are used as conversational material over and over. Finally, they collectively put into question the modalities through which TIP performances are calculated, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, make a public, collective affair of the "contestation letter" they sometimes receive from security managers for bad TIP performances: in brief, given that they do not collectively support calculation modalities, there is no need to feel embarrassed or ashamed if the bad result comes publicly known - and showing the letter equates displaying such belief, in a ritual in which the colleagues participate as well.
Second, security guards are entrapped between airport security needs and airport business ones. On the one hand, their job is to be accurate and thorough in controlling passengers and their belongings; on the other hand, they should provide a nice experience for the airport's costumers. Often, they receive "letters of contestation" for their "unkind" behaviour with passengers, on the basis of the latter's report. On the other hand, they can receive such letters for having a prohibited (but not dangerous) object passed in order not to slow down too much the line. The latent contradiction comes in plain sight in presence of the so-called "unruling passengers", that is, passengers who are unwilling to be checked (or to have their luggage checked), who protest and variously offend and insult security guards, etc. Resisting practices, in this case, use laws and norms as an "object of resistance" (Courpasson, Dany & Clegg, 2012) and, by leveraging on the latter, go in the direction of "abstention" from work (i.e., from interaction) and responsibility unloading towards police officers. Guards stop to behave as mediators of the norms, and leave the role and responsibility - as norms themselves envisage - to whom the norms grant with higher authority. These are individually enacted, but collectively legitimated and then collectively recounted practices.
Finally, a third group of practices of resistance can be subsumed under the category of gossip (e.g. Scott, 1990; Hodson, 2001; Bergmann, 2014 forthcoming). Among colleagues, gossiping mainly serves as a display of distance from the organizational environment and the managerial ways of locally applying norms and procedures, where, on the other side, security guards everyday comply not only with norms, but also and especially with their local application procedures, as managers impose them.