Abstract
In the midst of a series of episodes of police brutality, it has become urgent to discuss community policing and the consequent change of focus of police work from exerting force to cooperating with and supporting a community. One of the distinctive features of community policing is its concern with evaluating police training. An obvious – and indeed the most prevalent way for doing so – is to focus on the practical outcomes of law enforcement training (such as reduction of crime in a given area) by conducting quantitative studies. Another method might be to obtain police perspectives on these matters through qualitative interviews and focus groups. Conventionally, these focus groups would be videotaped and transcribed, and their content inspected by researchers who would select particular extracts for evaluation and treat them as factual statements about an external objective reality. In Multimodal Performance and Interaction in Focus Groups, Gilbert and Matoesian try a different and more innovative approach, focusing less on the content of these speech events and more on the interactional context and the resources available for participants to construct, for example, their sense of community.
The authors’ approach is influenced by the classic ethnomethodological distinction between topic and resource: rather than seeing focus groups as a resource for evaluating the outcomes of a public policy change, they turn those events into a topic of inquiry and uncover the participants’ methods for creating an intelligible social world. The aim of the book is thus to develop a sociocultural approach to evaluate training in community-policing. The authors do so by re-specifying the study of community and examining how focus group participants mobilize this notion as a multimodal resource in negotiating professional expertise, an unexplored dimension of evaluation in US criminal justice. They show that this evaluation involves not just assessing training success or failure, but also a process of social differentiation: between expert and novice, us and them, police and academia, etc. This process is conducted multimodally through the integration and coordination of talk, gesture, gaze, posture and movement.
The empirical part of the book is divided into three sections. In the first, Chapters 2 and 3 show how symbolic boundaries and communal identities reflexively shape and are shaped by multimodal conduct. Place references and reported thoughts are mobilized to negotiate claims about policing expertise and authority, and officers enact – instead of merely representing – a sense of communal identity through speech-gesture synchronization. These initial chapters emphasize the activities performed by the officers, slightly putting aside the role of the mediator and the fact that the former’s turns are often produced in response to what the latter had previously said. In Section Two (Chapters 4 to 6), however, Gilbert and Matoesian incorporate the interactional context into their analysis and turn their attention to how multimodal performance of stance and interactional (dis)alignments work to create sociocultural representations of the jurisdictional division of labour among policing professionals. In these chapters, the authors show how stance, voicing and positioning are put into motion through the integration of talk, gesture and the body. Through a series of well-evidenced claims and fine-grained analyses, they offer original insights to the study of fundamental concepts in linguistics and sociology. Section Three (Chapters 7 and 8) moves to some more practical and applied considerations, including discussions about the challenges of turn-taking that arises from the hybrid texture of focus groups. For example, the authors suggest that, in order to avoid problems regarding turn-transition, moderators could be instructed to recognize and acknowledge non-verbal requests to speak.
The book is an ambitious effort to combine linguistic anthropology, gesture studies and conversation analysis (CA). Even though the authors explicitly downplay the inspiration from CA on their work, the influence of ethnomethodology and indeed CA is visible throughout the entire text, including the extensive and meticulous use of Jefferson transcription, the aforementioned distinction between topic and resource, and the focus on members’ methods for creating an intelligible social world. The book also represents an attempt to integrate the study of micro-practices into the understanding of macro-social structures, which at some points leads to claims about the ‘world out there’ that are a bit speculative and extrapolate too extensively from what is objective observable in the interactional setting – perhaps where the book departs from CA. A good example of this can be seen when the authors suggest an interpretation of the mediator’s laughter and the officer’s non-reciprocal response to it as illustrative of an interprofessional competition between police and academic researchers (p. 87).
The assumption behind the research is that bodily conduct does not merely serve as an additional feature to verbal conduct but in fact imposes particular meaning and significance to selective descriptions. Although this is certainly visible in other contexts (such as episodes of police violence, which can later be assessed in court), it does not strike me as an entirely convincing reading of some extracts presented throughout the book. Notable exceptions are the ones presented in chapter 6 and 7, which are powerful examples of how the use of multimodal resources change the perception of participants about the actions being accomplished.
One of the limitations of the book is that no matter of how precise the authors’ descriptions are, the absence of video clips hampered this reader’s understanding of some of the analytical points involving the combination of the different modalities (see for example their analysis on gesture and lexical choice, which involves movement pace, p. 76). Some multimodal studies journals have been recently encouraging authors to include video clips or animations of the extracts in their papers. Although the difficulty or impossibility of including these resources in a written analysis is certainly not the authors’ fault, I believe it is important to recognize that readers, especially those not yet familiar with multimodal analysis, would benefit tremendously from the addition of such extra material.
Multimodal Performance and Interaction in Focus Group is an insightful reading and offers an original take on how to analyse focus groups, considering them as deeply moral events that have practical implications to participants. In the context of community policing, it helps us to take a step back; before evaluating policing training, we should understand participants’ sense of community and how they achieve this by bringing different kinds of meaning-making resources together. Even though the authors do not explicitly mention a particular audience, the book will certainly benefit discourse scholars in a broader sense as well as those interested in conducting focus groups as part of their research. Additionally, the discussions generated about community and tensions involving police expertise and jurisdiction may appeal to researchers studying police settings and practices, particularly those working closely with law enforcement.