FEK seminar series - Lauren Waardenburg (IESEG School of Management)

Juggling street work and data work: An ethnography of policing and reporting practices

Abstract: Organizational research on data production often aims to unpack the nature and meaning of data and the work practices through which it is made. Yet, not much is known about how the growing need to produce data influences the performance of other, more situated work. Our three-year ethnographic study of the Dutch police unravels this issue and shows that police officers adopt three strategies to cope with anticipated data work in their situated practices: avoiding work, deviating from protocol, and capturing experiences. These strategies helped police officers to alleviate the burden of data production, but also influenced how they performed their situated work and what and how crimes were reported, which contrasted the aims of data-driven police work. Our findings have implications for existing research on data production and for studies on anticipatory work by arguing that data construction starts at the situated practices and by showing how anticipating the work needed to produce data influences how both situated and data work are performed.

FEK seminar series