We plan to use some of our LinkedIn discussions as data to develop strategies. These writings will be evolving pieces, and if you’d like to share your insights, please send your thoughts?

Link to post on LinkeDin

This article has yet to be finalised.

An interesting article from Stephanie White provides a wealth of recognisable qualitative data, about how a process that she identifies as ‘organisational betrayal,’ can be a potential cause of ‘Burnout (betrayal fatigue).’ Stephanie’s description of the processes and outcomes provides rich data. Victims will immediately find much of this familiar. Stephanie’s suggestion is clear. ‘Don’t let them sell you yoga and smoothies as a cure. Burnout isn’t fixed by self-care. It’s fixed when systems stop grinding people down and betraying them.’ Experience also tells us that some services may not even offer any support at all. Especially when vict speak out officially. Then, they can be marginalised, because of the risk that they pose to the organisation.

In commenting on this article Dr Jason Price suggests, ‘This is at the heart of many of the issues of workplace culture problems, incivility, bullying and harassment seen in Fire and Rescue services the world over.’ This international similarity appears almost organically and yet fire services, least of all firefighters, are unlikely to have particularly learned this behavior from the other side of the world. The phenomenon of similar behaviour. The potential that it develops as a formal and informal culture, across watch’s, fire services and internationally is unlikely to be osmosis. Could this be a very good example of hegemonic masculinity at work?

This sort of conversation resonates with my research, and I would like to provides an analysis of the processes at work. This is developed from my PhD and other research that now focuses on finding and promoting levers for organisationl/structural change. What Stephanie calls a ‘Push for structural change, not just resilience.’ Although what follows may appear a generalisation, please see it as condensing 100,000 words. I hope you can see the connection between to topics at play, because cultureonfire intends to push at boundaries to seek answers.

My Post (edited)

The UK fire and rescue service (FRS) traditionally organised through a tough, militaristic, and disciplined culture. Reforms introduced by the ODPM (2003) sought to promote a managerial style. Despite these efforts, FRS continues to function as a hierarchical, top-down structure, where officers manage their teams and are managed by those above them (Weber 1978).

This hierarchy is seen on firestations, where a watch, typically comprising around ten firefighters and three officers staff two fire appliances with three managers/leaders/officers. Under these arrangements an informal culture of resistance emerged.
Several interconnected reasons explain this divide.

1/ Firefighters’ primary role involves entering buildings on fire, to save life, and extinguish the fire.
2/ Firefighters work in dangerous and unpredictable circumstances.
3/ In a fire, firefighters never work alone; always in two’s, sometimes in three’s (permed randomly from the 10 firefighters on the watch).
4/ Officers stayed outside.
5/ In such circumstances, it was necassary to trust the firefighters you worked with.
5/ Firefighting was/is experiential and skills are learnt on the job. The longer you serve the better you skills are.
6/ Experienced firefighters shared their skills with new firefighters and to do this they formed up in masculine hierarchies (the informal culture).
7/ Through this process, firefighters informally developed and shared an enormous skill set, which was handed down through each generation, to keep safe.
8/ Trust built up in the circumstances above, added to the authority of experienced firefighters.
9/ The informal culture also developed as a powerful site for organising resistance to officers.
9/ It also became an important site to protect, what was prior to 1980’s, almost exclusively a white male job.

AND then Leanne Allen responded

Thank you for your post, Dave Baigent. FIFireE, FHEA, BA (Hons) PhD (and all the work you have done on this topic over the years). It really speaks to the heart of fire service culture—how informal systems of trust, built for survival, can also become systems of exclusion.

For those who don’t “fit-in” either by gender, race, sexuality, etc. or by simply not conforming to the dominant way of being, the same culture that should be protecting you sometimes becomes the very thing that harms you. Belonging is conditional: you’re accepted if *you* adapt, tolerated if you stay silent, or pushed out if you resist.

As we have have spoken about before,  the hegemonic culture of firefighting has, for so long, seen anyone who challenges this (their?) culture as a threat. And like any system built on control and conformity, it reacts, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, to maintain itself. It seems to take  on a life of its own.

Your work helped me name what I had felt but couldn’t articulate in my early years of firefighting. It’s also why the work we’re doing now with Culture on Fire matters so much, especially to me. Because change will always feel like a threat to systems that were never built for everyone.

With (yes, finite) positivity (I’m a realist too 😁), I wish for a growth mindset for these cultures: one that sees challenges or differences not as threats, but as opportunities 🤞🏼👍🏼💪🏼

Push for structural change, not just resilience.

More later from Culture on Fire, Janette Morris, Leanne Allen.

Push for structural change, not just resilience.

Institutional betrayal is when the organisation says “stand up if you need help” but when people do, they may find themselves retaliated against, sidelined, scapegoated and gaslit as “the problem”

Leanne As we have have spoken about before, the hegemonic culture of firefighting has, for so long, seen anyone who challenges this (their?) culture as a threat. And like any system built on control and conformity, it reacts, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, to maintain itself. It seems to take on a life of its own.

Bibliography

ODPM (2003). “Our Fire and Rescue Service, downloaded from http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1123887 on 10-8-06.” from http://www.odpm.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1123887.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society. Berkeley, University of California Press.