Of “old” and “new” ways: Generations, border control and the temporality of security
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617690800 |
| Author | Karine Côté-Boucher |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
690800TCR0010.1177/1362480617690800Theoretical CriminologyCôté-Boucher
research-article2017
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(2) 149 –168
Of “old” and “new” ways:
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Generations, border control
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617690800
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and the temporality of security
Karine Côté-Boucher
Université de Montréal, Canada
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Anticipation, borders, generations, policing, security, temporality
Despite a wide literature concerned with border control, the everyday work of border
officers is poorly understood and little theorized. Nevertheless, in a context of restructur-
ing in border agencies, paying attention to what border officers do and how they see their
Corresponding author:
Karine Côté-Boucher, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, Office C-4103, Montreal,
QC H3T 1N8, Canada.
Email: karine.cote-boucher@umontreal.ca
150
Theoretical Criminology 22(2)
work appears essential for studies of border control. Some empirical investigations held
in North America, West Africa, Europe and Australia describe this work as a street-level
policing activity characterized by monotonous paperwork and repetitive questioning of
travelers (Gilboy, 1991). It is an occupation with its own set of political challenges
(Mountz, 2010), from anticipated pressures by politicians over sensitive decisions
(Gilboy, 1992) to demands coming from exacting headquarters (Chalfin, 2010). How
border officers’ work shapes their subjectivity and the plurality of meanings they give to
their job has also attracted limited attention (Pallister-Wilkins, 2015)—from their sense
of uselessness (Casella Colombeau, 2015) and of their privileged position (Heyman,
2002) to their ethos of suspicion (Pratt and Thompson, 2008).
This article examines another aspect of border guards’ “mundane forms of professional
and personal self-understanding” (Aas and Gundhus, 2015: 2), that is how they see them-
selves as pertaining to different generations. Younger and more experienced officers argue
they practice and see border policing differently. When describing their daily routines,
officers refer to “generations” or to what they consider to be “old ways” and “new ways”
of doing borderwork. If “old ways” refer to a variety of dispositions (i.e. ease with trade
and national regulations on goods, traditional border enforcement skills such as interview-
ing and detection of behavioral “risk indicators”) as well as interests, affinities and prefer-
ences (i.e. public service, taxation, economic protectionism, good relations with local
communities), officers were seen to embrace “new ways” when they supported the adop-
tion of the firearm and risk management principles, showed an ease with databases and
detection technologies as well as focused their attention on law enforcement.
There are two reasons why examining more closely how officers speak generationally
about their practice matters. The first reason has to do with a recent paradigmatic shift in
border control. It is characterized by lesser taxation on global trade, a global agenda for
securing people’s mobilities as well as significant investments in detection and informa-
tion technologies—trends well covered by the literature. It has been argued that, to take
the full measure of these changes, they must be studied in practice (Côté-Boucher et al.,
2014; Loftus, 2015). But how border guards experience the consequences of this chang-
ing political script is less well known. My research shows that doing border control
under these new conditions is the topic of daily discussion and disagreement in ports of
entry. Officers often attribute their divergent points of view (about topics such as the use
of technologies or the importance of protecting the economy) to the notion that they
belong to different generations, with their respective work experience and professional
socialization. This article takes security actors’ talk about generations seriously because
it sheds light on how officers’ conduct is shaped by these disagreements. Ultimately,
investigating generations tells us about how border officers justify their decisions,
achievements and failures (and that of their colleagues), and whether, and when, they
find their work meaningful.
How border guards speak of their daily labor of law enforcement, risk management,
trade regulation, taxation and administration exposes the different “temporal scales”
(Valverde, 2010: 12) in which security unfolds. Accordingly, I make a second intervention
in the following pages. Border guards’ characterization of their work as generational
invites us to reconsider the question of temporality in security. An influential scholarly
interpretation proposes that security is concerned with anticipating threats (Pickering and
Côté-Boucher
151
McCulloch, 2009) or even with “act[ing] in the face of uncertainty” (Amoore, 2013: 62).
In areas such as border control, counterterrorism, cybersecurity and criminal justice, secu-
rity actors would not as much aim to intervene after a crime has been committed but are
concerned with predicting and preventing “that which has not yet occurred and may never
do so” (Zedner, 2007: 262). However, empirical studies show variations in the temporality
of security as it remains shaped by political context, bureaucratic and budgetary con-
straints, organizational culture as well as by the continuing significance of long-estab-
lished, more reactive policing habits (Amicelle, 2014; Sanders et al., 2015).
I add to these findings by inquiring into how, under conditions of organizational insta-
bility in security agencies, such variations also express themselves in the changing sub-
jectivity and professional dispositions of security workers. To do so, the article presents
a take on the sociology of generations that is inspired by the sociology of evaluation and
boundary work (Lamont, 2012)—which insists that people engage in interpretive work
about their lives. A good part of this interpretation rests on activities of categorization
that evaluate practices and distribute social status. In interview, officers had recourse to
this popular cultural repertoire (“generations”) and applied it to border policing—saying
something like “there is such a thing as young and old generations of border officers and
let me explain to you the lesser value of what the other generation does”. By doing so,
officers not only temporalize their work (those are “old ways”; this is “the future of the
border”) but also attribute positive or negative meaning to belonging to one or the other
generation. Accordingly, officers classify their skills, training, regulatory knowledge,
professional attitudes and work methods along a temporal scale of worth from which
they determine what constitutes a job well done. It is this work of categorization, and the
practices it both reflects and sustains, that I call generational borderwork. Accordingly,
I propose to investigate how, in a context of transformation, border officers “make sense”
(Chan, 2007) of their work by associating it with differentially valued temporalities of
border control. These diverse temporalities count: they are entangled in the day-to-day
implementation of changing policies, regulations and programs and they are central to
the distribution of status and privileges at the border.
Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with frontline personnel working “com-
mercial” (assessing trucks, truck drivers and goods) at the Canada Border Services
Agency (CBSA),1 the remainder of this article unfolds as follows: first, it provides a
short explanation about the notion of generations. After a quick historical overview of
recent organizational change in border control in Canada, it then illustrates generational
borderwork along three themes: some officers’ nostalgia for an honorable and economi-
cally sensitive occupation, their accounts of the comparative value of interviewing and
technological aptitudes as well as instances of social demotion for older officers. Building
on these conclusions, the last section takes us beyond debates about anticipation and
considers how generational borderwork presents an alternative insight into the temporal-
ity of security, as well...
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