Of "old" and "new" ways: Generations, border control and the temporality of security
Whether it insists on the significance of anticipation or interrogates the centrality of pre-crime to security practice, current scholarship misses how security professionals make sense of their work's temporality. Borrowing its theoretical tools from the sociology of generations and evaluation...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2018
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In: |
Theoretical criminology
Year: 2018, Volume: 22, Issue: 2, Pages: 149-168 |
Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
Keywords: |
Summary: | Whether it insists on the significance of anticipation or interrogates the centrality of pre-crime to security practice, current scholarship misses how security professionals make sense of their work's temporality. Borrowing its theoretical tools from the sociology of generations and evaluation, this article focuses on how Canadian border officers rely on generational categorizations to negotiate change in their work. It proposes exploring the coexistence of competing temporalities in border control through the notion of generational borderwork. Produced by different paths of professional socialization and embedded in tensions over social status in ports of entry, generational borderwork makes more explicit the security field's logic of aging, the internal dissensions over policing methods and the decisions these differences sustain. Whether it concerns nostalgia for economic protectionism or disagreements over the respective value of intelligence, technologies and interview skills, the contested nature of time in border control invites investigation into officers' transforming policing sensibilities. |
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ISSN: | 1461-7439 |
DOI: | 10.1177/1362480617690800 |