Discourse, practice and the production of the polysemy of security
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612466564 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Author | Prashan Ranasinghe |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Theoretical Criminology
17(1) 89 –107
Discourse, practice and the
© The Author(s) 2012
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production of the polysemy
DOI: 10.1177/1362480612466564
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of security
Prashan Ranasinghe
University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
While ‘security’ has now become a central theme in criminology, the literature on it is
limited (and, limiting). One of the major issues plaguing the literature is definitional, that
is, that it is often unclear what is meant by ‘security’. As noted by numerous scholars,
what is needed is empirical documentation about what ‘security’ is to a variety of actors.
In this article, I explore what ‘security’ looks and feels like to particular actors working in
an emergency shelter. In so doing, I explicate the discursive production of the polysemy
of ‘security’ by exploring the ways that ‘security’ is thought about, made sense of and
put into practice.
Keywords
Emergency shelters, primary safety, security
Security is a slippery concept. Its meanings are multiple and without clarity about which
meaning is intended (or understood); exactly what is being provided and consumed; sold and
bought; promised or sought remains obscure.
(Zedner, 2003a: 154)
[W]hat we need are not theories of security in general but rather an open-ended, content-neutral
framework for undertaking the kinds of empirical studies of security governance that will then
tell us what ‘security’ means, in practice.
(Valverde, 2011: 5–6)
Corresponding author:
Prashan Ranasinghe, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, 120 University Street, Ottawa, ON
K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: prashan.ranasinghe@uottawa.ca
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Theoretical Criminology 17(1)
Introduction
Criminology, like, though perhaps much later than, other disciplines, has produced a
voluminous and still heavily growing literature on ‘security’. Indeed, there appears to be
an ‘obsession with security’, as Lucia Zedner (2009: 1) puts it, which is reflected in the
fact that the study of security has become ‘a central theme in criminology’ (p. 1). To a
large extent, this obsession makes sense given that life plays out in what is referred to as
the ‘security society’ (Zedner, 2003b: 156) or ‘security state’ (Hallsworth and Lea, 2011).
Yet, for all that is written and opined, the literature on security is limited (and, limiting).
There are several reasons for this. One significant problem is definitional, that is, it is
often unclear exactly what is meant by the term. The claim made by RBJ Walker some
15 years ago and in a different setting, nevertheless applies well to what is currently
unfolding. ‘Whether analytically or rhetorically’ Walker (1997: 63) writes, ‘claims about
security increasingly have an air of slovenly imprecision. A word once uttered in hard
cadences to convey brutal certainties has become embarrassingly limp and overex-
tended.’ The legal-philosopher Jeremy Waldron (2006: 455) has made similar observa-
tions noting that the literature ‘almost never address[es] the question of what “security”
means’. Criminology, as the epigraphs to this article suggest, is certainly not immune
from this problem and it is perhaps this that leads Zedner (2009: 9) to remark that
‘Security is a promiscuous concept.’
The recent exhortations of Mariana Valverde (2011; see also Valverde, 2001, 2008)
among others (see Loader and Walker, 2007: 3; Shearing and Johnston, 2010: 496;
Zedner, 2003a) are introduced here for they speak to what is perhaps the pressing prob-
lem facing the study of security, that is, the paucity of empirical inquiry. Valverde’s
major point of contention is that security does not exist as a thing. While ‘it may be
grammatically correct to use the term “security” as a noun that is the subject of a sen-
tence …’ she writes, ‘it is dangerous to go on to the assumption that security actually
exists, even as a fuzzy concept’ (Valverde, 2011: 5; see also Valverde, 2001: 85). In
other words, ‘we [should] think about security not as a thing, a concept or condition but
rather as an umbrella term under which one can see a multiplicity of governance pro-
cesses that are dynamic and internally contradictory’ (Valverde, 2011: 5). To a large
extent, it is the lack of empirical inquiry that is the culprit behind the tendency to not
only think about security as a thing, but also provide grandiose theoretical musings that
often miss the mark. As Clifford Shearing and Les Johnston (2010: 496; emphasis
added) comment, ‘criminologists must insist on the importance of empirical enquiry
that scrutinizes a priori assumptions’ about security. Thus, what is required is empirical
documentation of what security looks and feels like to a variety of people (see Eisch-
Angus, 2011; Goold et al., 2010 for two examples). This is because ‘all that we can
[largely] know about security is what people do in its name, and … therefore our focus
should be on practices of governance that in fact appeal to “security”’ (Valverde, 2011:
5; emphases added). In focusing on these practices, Valverde (2011: 9; see also Valverde,
2008) notes three interrelated concepts that studies of security projects should account
for: logic (concerning rationales, objectives, purposes and discourses); scope (concern-
ing scale and jurisdiction); and techniques (concerning practices encompassing both
agents and equipment).
Ranasinghe
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It would be remiss not to mention several works that have examined the way security
is undertaken in various settings. Some of these have explored the manner in which pri-
vate security officers are involved in the policing of private spaces such as malls and
other quasi-public spaces open to the public (see Button, 2007, Huey et al., 2005;
Wakefield, 2003), residential sites (see Rigakos, 2002) or spaces of leisure such as night
clubs (see Hobbs et al., 2003; Rigakos, 2008). As richly textured as these ethnographies
are, and as far as they go in explicating the manner in which particular security mecha-
nisms are at work, they do have limitations. The main problem is that the studies noted
above (and many others as well), in one way or another, are related to studies on policing,
be it public, private or some hybrid form. This has the unfortunate effect of translating
concerns about security solely into concerns about policing and vice versa, and this is
especially so in the aftermath of 9/11 (see Johnston and Shearing, 2003; Loader and
Walker, 2007; Shearing and Johnston, 2010; Wood and Shearing, 2007; for exceptions,
see Moran and Skeggs, 2004; Neocleous, 2008; Shearing and Stenning, 1985). Second,
and related, security has often been conflated with physical safety, what criminologists
generally refer to as ‘primary safety’—that is, ‘the basic physical safety of oneself and
one’s loved one’s’ (Valverde, 2001: 84)—and elsewhere referred to as ‘the pure safety
conception’ (Waldron, 2006: 461), or that which closely parallels what Anthony Giddens
(1984: 50) calls ‘ontological security’. This is also the case with the foregoing studies
where security is largely reduced to concerns about crime and violence. These two prob-
lems have the effect of unnecessarily narrowing and reducing security to the way particu-
lar actors conceptualize it, leaving aside a whole host of other ways in which it is thought
about, made sense of and put into practice.
In this article, I take the exhortations of Valverde (and others) seriously and seek to
explore and explicate what security looks and feels like to particular actors working in a
specific setting. This setting is an emergency shelter for men in Ottawa, the capital of
Canada. This site is particularly useful because it sheds light on the way different sites—
over and beyond what has been the focus of traditional and orthodox criminological
inquiries, such as correctional institutions or the policing of public spaces—are also
heavily governed by logics and rationales of security, and, as will become apparent and
perhaps more importantly, the much broader ways that security is, and can be, conceptu-
alized than what these studies have unearthed and documented. It is important to keep in
mind that the site in question here is one that is largely, if not primarily, designed to
promote social services and welfare in general, and yet, it is one where concerns about
security trump all other concerns and logics. Thus, even welfare services, it appears, are
governed through the logic of security and expanding the focus of inquiry can shed light
on the way the logic of security has become all encompassing in contemporary life and
the myriad ways that it is thought about and acted upon.
My findings reveal the polysemy of security, that is, that what security looks and feels
like to one person is quite different from what it is to others, or, to put this another way,
that security can mean many different things. This is not necessarily a novel finding, as
there has been some mention of it, both in criminology (see Dupont, 2006: 173; Zedner,
2009: 9–25) and in disciplines such as anthropology (see Eisch-Angus, 2011: 94–96),
though much more along these lines is required. Specifically however, what the literature
lacks is illumination on how it is that the polysemy of security comes into existence. This
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Theoretical Criminology 17(1)
requires, as will become apparent, coming to grips with the contradictions...
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