The ‘desired state of mind’: Emotional labor and the hidden cost of symbolic power in 911 emergency response in the U.S

Abstract

Borrowing from scholarship on emotional labor, emotion management and symbolic power, this article highlights emotions’ symbolic role in sustaining the vital correspondence between the reality of social life and the official classification system. Through the concept of the ‘desired state of mind’ and empirical data from 3 years’ ethnographic fieldwork in an urban 911 dispatch center in New England, this research shows what the ‘desired state of mind’ of this context is, how the link between the folk and the bureaucratic is made though ‘controlled empathy’, and how the cost and consequence of this process is shaped by the status disparity prevalent in 911 emergency community.

Keywords

Symbolic power classification emotional labor cognition street-level bureaucracy

One afternoon, I asked Dispatcher James to take a picture of me working at my dispatch console and listening to 911 calls. He grabbed my phone and said: “You wanna look like a real dispatcher? Just put your feet on the desk like you don’t care about anything they say.” Sometimes after he hung up he would say: “I don’t give a shit. I don’t wanna know what’s going on,” jump right back into the random conversation he had been having with his colleagues before the call, or simply start a new one. But other times, long after he had hung up he would click the police department’s blue icon in the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, search a particular incident whose result he wanted to know and read its police report. During the very same training period, the same audience—the trainees and I – listened to a past call played by training supervisor Sally for pedagogical purposes: it is a medical call answered by the very James: “Where is the baby?! Where is the baby?! How old is he? He fell from the tree?! Do you need an ambulance? ……A baby squirrel? OK…” In fact, the caller had clearly stated from the beginning that it was about a baby squirrel, but James immediately took it as a call about a human baby, and after longer than a minute, he realized it was about an animal and had to cancel the ambulance already on the way. After the class, we teased James and said we had the opportunity to hear his signature ‘squirrel call’. He laughed at himself with us.

This is an instance of what I call ‘controlled empathy’ common in the daily work process of 911 dispatchers—the practice of detached attachment with a constant battle between emotional connection and emotion management. Sitting at the interface where the ‘folk’ and the ‘official’ intersect, dispatchers’ work of association and dissociation is both an emotional and a symbolic one. Their work, including the way they do it—manifest in their interaction with everyday citizens—not only translates complex, messy and ambiguous real-life situations into stable, clear-cut and pre-defined categories in the bureaucratic system, but also sustains the ‘neutral’, ‘universal’ and even ‘natural’ appearance key to the state’s symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1997). This symbolic role of emotions is what this article seeks to demonstrate, which has to do with both the demonstration and management of emotions—a topic that has received much scholarly attention—and the so-called inductive function of emotions (Craciun, 2018).

Through my ethnographic data, I show how emotions are utilized to make the crucial link between varied, unpredictable and complex emergency situations reported by callers on one end of the 911 line and limited, readily-available and clear-cut categories in the 911 dispatch system on the other. The ‘desired state of mind’ in this context is ‘controlled empathy’, a hard-fought balance between emotional investment and disinvestment. The contrasting characters of social reality and bureaucracy, the former commonly thought of as dynamic, in-the-moment and flesh-and-blood while the latter often conceived as static, sedimented and clinical, are crystalized and activated within the same working individuals making life-and-death decisions in real time. This conflicted nature of the ‘desired state of mind’ makes the 911 center a perfect site to uncover the secret demands of symbolic power, namely, the power to impose categories of thought and system of classification while sustaining the appearance of their naturalness and universality (Bourdieu, 1998).

Emotion, cognition and the state

Although emotion and cognition are said to be intertwined and even inseparable (DiMaggio, 1997; Vaisey 2009), only recently has a cognitive dimension been explicitly added to the investigation of emotions in the workplace (Craciun, 2018). Yet, a close examination of the scholarship on emotional labor—which concerns the manipulation of emotion for wage and money—and the literature on emotion management that researches the control of emotion for other purposes (Pugliesi, 1999) shows that there is a cognitive aspect to both. In these studies, cognition is not a by-product, but an integral part or even the very objective of emotional labor and emotion management, which I dub in this article the ‘desired state of mind’. The cognitive aspect of said research attends to the nuances of micro-level interactions and the influence of structural forces, while connecting both in the context of the workplace.

Indeed, a close reading of the emotional labor and emotional management literature shows that cognition—the perception of work (Sanders, 2004a, 2004b), the definition of self (Erickson and Ritter, 2001), the evaluation of worth and expertise (England, 2005), the interpretation of social relations and interactions (Leidner, 1993) and so forth—is the outcome of intentional, deliberate human control, management and socialization. Such control, management and socialization are conscious actions towards a socially, organizationally and/or individually desired state of mind, which not only affects individuals’ psychological well-being (Erickson and Ritter, 2001), but also shapes social interactions and relations among actors. For example, Lois (2001) shows how the emotion work by managers of a search and rescue group was accomplished through the redefinition of selves, norms, roles and various situations, and how the social relationship between the volunteers and families of victims was shaped during the process contingent on the search results. Lopez (2006) shows that employers can self-consciously foster an environment for “emotional honesty” in the workplace. Through “organized emotional care” employers can help trusting relationships take form naturally, instead of instituting them as job expectations. In a word, actions toward a desired state of mind carry both individual and structural level consequences and implications.

Further, the research on emotional labor and emotion management highlights the tension between individuals and their work requirements in the context of paid work in the market economy (Hochschild, 1983; Zapf and Holz, 2006); the distinction made between “surface acting” and “deep acting”, for instance, captures the strain between the private and the public, and the extent to which the latter penetrates into the former (Grandey, 2003; Hochschild, 1983). The ‘desired state of mind’ prescribed by the job on the part of the workers is often in conflict with workers’ own expectation and experience on the job, and the ‘desired state of mind’ that the workers are expected to create in their customers demands not only the former’s socialization during training, but also painstaking labor at the moment of service encounters (Sherman, 2007; Van Dijk and Brown, 2006). In other words, from the perspective of emotional labor and emotion work, paid jobs involve consciously creating a mindset of the workers that better positions them as good service providers for their customers, regardless of what takes place in their own mind. Consequently, workers experience psychological dissonance and burnout (Van Dijk and Brown, 2006).

Related to the previous point, emotional labor and emotion work literature places the ‘desired state of mind’ in conversation with the broader context of inequality, viewing it as simultaneously a cause and consequence of status disparity. A plethora of research has shown how women, racial minorities and lower-class members are disproportionally more likely to be recruited to perform emotional labor in service sector, who are perceived as better fit for jobs that require agreeability and deference, and over-representation on such positions reinforce their status in the social spectrum (Hochschild, 1983; Kang, 2003). The psychological stress and the subsequent emotional management methods of such jobs are also unequally distributed across status groups, as some have access to what is called the “status shield” (Hochschild, 1983; Wharton, 2009) coming from authority and a higher structural position, which not only eases the process of emotion management and recovery after work, but also alleviates the psychological stress carrying out emotional labor in the first place.

Moreover, the dimensionality of emotional labor and emotion work shows how there is both self-oriented and other-oriented shaping of cognition. The dimensionality is manifest in the dual-directionality of emotional labor and emotion work—inward and outward, or self-focused and other-focused—and in the complexity of emotional labor and emotion management’s various facets that might have different impacts on actors (Pugliesi, 1999; Wharton, 2009). This enables the investigation of both the organizationally and socially patterned actions towards the ‘desired state of mind’ within individuals, and the inter-subjective meaning-making space between individuals where some actors make intentional and organized efforts to impact others’ perceptions and feelings, such as employers’ control and socialization of workers’ mentality (Lopez, 2006; Sherman, 2007), workers’ management of their clients’ perceptions and emotions (Lois, 2001), as well as workers’ reciprocal management among themselves (Lively, 2000).

But why should students of emotional labor care about cognition in the first place? There are two ways the study of cognition contributes to the scholarship on emotional labor and emotion management. First of all, incorporating cognition into the research on emotional labor and emotion management highlights the variety of roles that emotions play in the workplace, transcending the cognition/emotion dualism. In Hochschild’s original formulation, emotional labor “produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild, 1983: 7) and is sold for its exchange value on the market (Lively, 2000). The ‘commodification of emotion’ strand of research follows this tradition (for review, see England, 2005 and Wharton, 2009), viewing emotions in the workplace as profitable resources to be utilized by workers and exploited by employers to create the ‘desired state of mind’. Others show how emotions provide genuine support and care between workers and clients, and among workers themselves, shaping and being shaped by their views about gender, self, work and the workplace (Cottingham, 2015; Lively, 2000). Still others focus on ‘expert services’ provided by professionals such as physicians (Smith and Kleinman, 1989) and lawyers (Pierce, 1995), seeing emotions as sources of authority and key to professionalization (Abbott, 1988; Pierce, 1995). Paradoxically, as Craciun (2018) summarizes, the scholarship on expertise and professions (especially those in science and technology) either marginalizes emotions altogether or treats them as negative elements antithetical to discipline and objectivity, in contrast to abovementioned research on ‘expert services’ that looks at the very same occupations. She calls attention to the positive functions of emotions in expert work—supportive, didactic, and inductive ones—all of which contribute to the production of knowledge.

Therefore, emotion is by no means a hindrance to cognition, but conducive or even integral to it, and the separation between the two has already been called into question (DiMaggio, 1997; Vaisey, 2009). Just as scholarship on street-level bureaucracy and expertise can benefit considerably from bringing emotions into the picture, studies on emotions in the workplace will make substantial progress by taking cognition into the analysis. Findings of research reviewed above clearly show that once examined in connection with cognition, emotions prove to be sources not only of profit but also of knowledge, and that they provide the basis upon which both collateral relations and structural inequality are produced and reproduced.

Secondly, despite their distinct foci and methodology, the majority of existing studies share a common context, that is, the rise and expansion of service economy home and abroad (England, 2005; Erickson and Ritter, 2001; Hochschild, 1983; Kang, 2003; Leidner, 1993; Wharton, 2009; Zapf and Holz, 2006). In other words, the structural backdrop against which their research agenda is set up—whether explicitly identified or left unstated—is primarily the market. Yet emotional labor is performed across a myriad of occupations in both private and public sectors, which might or might not be related to economic gain (Cottingham, 2014; Lois, 2001; Lopez, 2006). The work of street-level bureaucrats, for example, involves encounters with citizens as complex and interactive as in the private sector (Schaible and Gecas, 2010). However, unlike students of emotional labor and emotion management, street-level bureaucracy scholars are oftentimes more interested in the ‘cognitive’ than the ‘emotional’ aspect of the job, more commonly known as ‘decision-making’. This focus is evident in the research on front-line bureaucratic work in various settings (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003), such as how welfare officers decide on the deserving recipients (Dubois, 2016), how police officers take discretion on violence and crime (Manning, 2008) and how dispatchers respond to emergency calls (Whalen and Zimmerman, 1998).

Admittedly there are exceptions that focus on emotions in the work of state-employees, such as police officers (Collins, 2008; Keesman, 2021; Schaible and Gecas, 2010; Stephens et al., 1997), but compared to the rich insight provided by extant scholarship into the service sector and the market that it shapes and contributes to—structural inequality and discrimination (Macdonald and Merrill, 2009), the use value contra exchange value of emotional labor (Lively, 2000), commodification, alienation, altruism and their relationship to the market (England, 2005), just to name a few—far less is learned about the state and emotional labor done for it and/or on its behalf. Looking into cognition is key to filling this lacuna. On the one hand, as is discussed above, cognition is part of or the very outcome of emotional labor; on the other hand, cognition is where the state realizes its symbolic power, which by definition, is the power to impose cognitive structures and systems of classification (Bourdieu, 1998, 2014). Through the analysis of emotion and cognition in the workplace, individual-level encounters are linked to a structural context distinct from the market. Therefore, investigating cognition is to uncover the overlooked symbolic dimension of emotional labor, that is, how it helps sustain the state’s symbolic domination, an important topic to which I now turn.

The state, symbolic power and classification systems

For decades, studies have examined the state’s symbolic system with its official categories and rules of classification. Scholars have documented the ways in which ordinary citizens’ experience and perception of social life—from class (Fantasia, 1995; Lamont, 2000), time (Bourdieu, 1998; Zerubavel, 1997), family (Bourdieu, 1998), citizenship (Miller-Idriss, 2006) gender and sexuality (Meadow, 2010), to nature and space (Scott, 1998), money and value (Zelizer, 1999), and race and ethnicity (Brubaker et al., 2004)— differs and sometimes resists state classification schemes. While the former tends to be complex, fluid, ambiguous, inconsistent, situational, contextual and multi-dimensional, the latter are simplified, static, clear, consistent, universal and uniform. But at the same time, there is persistent (though questionable and contested) correspondence between social reality and the state’s vision and reconstruction of it. Such an agreement is what gives the state’s symbolic system an appearance of naturalness and universality, and makes citizens take it for granted on a pre-reflexive and sub-conscious level, thus reinforcing the power of the state (Bourdieu, 1997; Brubaker et al., 2004). This correspondence between the ‘real world’ and the state’s symbolic system is crucial to the state’s legitimacy, its symbolic domination, and the success of social engineering programs such as urban planning, forestry and public health projects; at the same time, it perpetuates categorical inequality along various dimensions (Tilly, 1998). The misunderstanding and interruption of this connection can result in legitimacy crises, and natural and human catastrophes (Bourdieu, 1998; Scott, 1998; Weber, 1946) but also opens up space for social change (Goldberg, 2001).

Therefore, the correspondence between the ‘folk’ social world and state classification system—while being quite different from each other—is key to the state’s symbolic power. And 911 dispatchers are agents situated at the interface between the two who make and reproduce said correspondence on a daily basis. This article seeks to bring this crucial moment of translation to light by examining the process of the conversion of reported emergency situations to bureaucratic categories that dictate official responses in the 911 system, with a focus on emotions. Exploring the work process in 911 communication system, the empirical analysis focuses on how 911 call-takers translate emergency situations that vary immensely in content, kind and severity to pre-determined incident types in the CAD system that result in dispatch responses from the police, fire, and/or EMDs, and what role emotions play in this process. To capture the moment of translation from the world of complexity and ambiguity to the world of order and universality, is to unravel in detail the social process through which the state exerts its symbolic power—the power to produce and impose "cognitive structures, forms and categories of perception, principles of vision and division" through which its citizens perceive social life (Bourdieu, 1998: 53), while to highlight the human cost—emotions and status disparity resulted in this case—incurred in such a process is to debunk the ‘naturalness’ of state categories and interrogate the consequence of state’s vision and construction of social reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Bourdieu, 1998). This link between social reality and bureaucratic classification is the link between unique, emotionally-charged bodily experiences tied to specific context and situation—person, time and place—and dispassionate, standardized organizational forms of representation that can be recorded, reviewed, reproduced and disseminated (Bourdieu, 1998); it is a process of transformation as well as subordination. Analytically, this link bridges social interactions on the micro level (Collins, 2008, 2012) and state symbolic order on the macro level—the gap between social events and statistics (Black, 1970)—and empirically, it involves the day-to-day work of state employees who utilize their emotions in a labored process of translation.

And in this regard the objective of this research is a rather modest one: to examine the state’s symbolic power by studying ongoing work processes of active agents in an organizational context. In fact, the task of uncovering symbolic domination is quite daunting, which almost inevitably involves rigorous historical analysis (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) and sometimes more sophisticated methods like multiple correspondence analysis (Bourdieu, 2005). And it is for this reason that the author seeks to open up more empirical possibilities for this topic, identifying sites and moments suitable for ethnographic observations and interviews, of which 911 emergency response is a typical, if not ideal one.

In sum, situated at the interface where the ‘folk’ and the ‘official’ intersect, 911 dispatchers’ job is both an emotional and a symbolic one. The key to their work process is classification, during which reported emergencies are comprehended and then assigned incident types pre-determined in the emergency dispatch system, and only then, complex, ambiguous and even changing circumstances of emergencies become legible, actionable and transmittable in an official sense. ‘Controlled empathy’ is the ‘desired state of mind’ that plays a key role making this crucial link between state’s classification system and the reality on the ground, yet it also reproduces the status disparity in the organizational context of 911 emergency response, as is detailed in the empirical analysis that follows the introduction of data and methods.

Data and methods

The analysis is based on data from three years’ ethnographic fieldwork in a police department’s emergency communication center in a metropolis in New England. There are thirty-five dispatchers divided into five groups with one supervisor in each; there is also one director, one training supervisor and five trainees. I followed all groups, and observed and interviewed dispatchers, trainees and supervisors about their work process during day (7a.m.–3p.m.), evening (3p.m.–11p.m.) and overnight shifts (11p.m.–7a.m. next day), with access to the communication center’s work space and shift schedules. And because the dispatching and call-taking alternate within one shift and the same individual can be a call-taker for half of a shift, and a police or fire dispatcher of the other half, I use dispatcher and call-taker interchangeably in this article. In addition to access to the communication center’s work space and shift schedules, I also had access to the CAD system, my own dispatch console with nine monitors and fourteen radio channels—same with other dispatchers, except the supervisors who have greater access—plus a hear-only 911 line typically used for trainees, which allows one to hear both sides of the conversation without being able to interrupt anyone. I also obtained permission to follow their in-house training classes for an entire year and on-site training process with copies of all training materials.¹ I was also permitted to listen to phone records of past calls of my choice. In this project I focus on 911 calls. Calls through business or other non-emergency lines are not included. While 911 calls are public records in most of the states, all names and addresses are altered for anonymity, and as per IRB protocol, all records were stored in a password-protected device and there was no identifying information that could connect the subjects and locations appearing in this research to actual people or places.

In the emergency communication center where I did my fieldwork, there are three ‘sides’: fire on the left, police on the right and call-taking in the middle. The fire side has two consoles occupied by two fire dispatchers, who talk to the fire department when a fire dispatch command is sent to their side and pops up on their screen. The police side has two consoles, seating two police dispatchers who dispatch and assist police officers. Six consoles are in the center of the room: four call-takers take incoming calls, on its opposite there is a supervisor who oversees the whole room, next to a tactical position an additional staff member in case of more severe emergencies that need more help. I was placed at the tactical position (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

911 Communication system and computer aided dispatch.

During the fieldwork, I normally conducted interviews after the calls to avoid interruption and to learn why certain incidents were handled and coded in certain ways. I also followed the incident updates on CAD screens to see if and how incident types changed. If there were any ambiguous or in-progress calls to which type changes were made, I traced the changes and asked the dispatchers for explanations. I asked them what information they relied on to understand and categorize the incidents and what made them change their mind during the conversation. I focused on the ways in which the dispatchers questioned, probed, and comprehended the callers during 911 calls to capture the nature of reported emergencies. I also looked up corresponding phone records to take further notes. I also studied the emergency communication center’s training manuals, textbooks, slides, trainees’ review sheets, on-online and off-line exams, and certification procedures to further understand the skills and expertise required of 911 dispatchers. I was not allowed to record any conversations or take videos, but was permitted to write down fieldnotes while making observations, and to conduct interviews and listen to phone calls. All hand-written notes were typed down in a laptop, and analyzed through thematic coding.

When a call comes in, the call-taker must start the conversation with three questions: “911,what’s the location of your emergency? What’s the number you’re calling from? What’s your emergency?” (Different dispatchers ask them a bit differently and these questions and their answers are removed in this article due to anonymity and space). He/she then understands the nature and type of the reported incident and then selects a code (incident type) in the CAD system that he/she thinks is closest to the emergency reported; this code determines the information flow both inside and outside of the communication center and the response plan—the kind of help that is sent to the citizens. A police matter coded will automatically show up on the police side of the room where the police channels and police dispatchers are, a fire call will go to the fire side of the room with fire channels and fire dispatchers. A medical call might appear on both sides, and although medical calls through 911 lines are processed by the call-takers in the emergency communication center, their dispatch takes place outside of the center. A response plan is a code-based official action to citizens that varies greatly in number, size and kind of vehicles and personnel in police, fire and medical departments separately or jointly out of hundreds of possibilities; for most incident types, response plans consist of certain combinations of forces among six types of police vehicles, police officers on three different ranks, eight kinds of fire vehicles, firefighters on two ranks and two general levels of medical life support (see Table 1, and it's illustrative not exhaustive). About three hundred CAD codes constitute the classification scheme for the response of emergency situations and the coding process structures the center’s operation and largely determines the official actions. Codes are essential to the 911 response system and to get at the codes the dispatcher need to bridge three gaps, as is demonstrated in the following section.

Table 1.

The correspondence between incident type and unit response plan.

CAD Code	Police units						Fire units					Ambulance	Priority
	Vehicle			Officer			Fire units					Ambulance	Priority
	R	S	PS	P	SGT	LT	Engine	Squad	Ladder	Rescue	Division
DOMESTIC	2			2									1
DISTURBANCE				2									1
CHEST PAIN D1							1	1				1	1
STRUCTURE FIRE	1			1			3	1	2	1	1	1	1
DRUGS	1	1		1									2
SICK PERSON C2							1	1				1	2
FIRE ALARM							1		1				2
NOISE OTHER	1												3
ABD PAIN A1												1	3
Fire INVEST							1						3

Filling the gaps: Work process, emotions and inequality

Between the folk and the Bureaucratic: The work process of 911 dispatch

Making the connection between what callers say and its corresponding code in CAD is the key part of the work of 911 dispatchers’. They work to bridge three gaps between the laymen’s world and categories in the bureaucratic system, the first of which is between callers’ lexicon and official codes in the system. Average citizens describe their situations in their own, everyday words, and it is dispatchers’ job to make association between folk and bureaucratic languages, between a sequence of details and one official category. In fact, the difference between lay and official language is so great that it is suspicious when a caller uses words in the system. Training officer Sally played a call during the in-house training about how “there is an officer assaulted” and she told the trainees that because the dispatcher did not pay attention to the caller’s unusual familiarity with the language in the system, he failed to prevent a bank robbery. She said: “That’s weird. Because laymen say ‘a cop gets his ass knocked off or ‘somebody’s beating up a cop’. ‘Assault’ is a police jargon. So the cops went to help their colleague and it was a decoy, a diversion. The police went there, and a bank at Northville was robbed. And they got away for a while.” Sally told the trainees, the first step towards discerning the nature of incident is to pay attention to the differences between the languages used by the callers and by workers in emergency response system. Dispatchers usually bridge this gap in two ways. First they communicate the category directly to the callers if the most possible code is straightforward: “Is it a seizure?” “Are you reporting a break-in?” or “Is there an electric fire?” The second way is to capture and confirm “boundary details”—the key information that distinguishes one possible category from another. Victor, the supervisor of group 5 summarized:

Most of the studying revolves around the codes, getting familiar with the options and translating down to the codes. For instance, if you are sitting in Green Park and somebody took your cellphone next to you on the bench, it is a larceny; and if he is running down the street, it is larceny in progress; if you say, “oh I just noticed it and it might happen have 20 minutes ago”, it is a past larceny; if you are listening to music on your iPod and someone took it from your hand, it is robbery. You can’t always go by what they tell you. People present information in strange ways, so you have to go extra steps to clarify what’s going on. “A guy in my store just won’t leave.” You take it at face value, it’s unwanted person. Then “oh, he’s throwing things around.” It’s disturbance. They often don’t leave the most important thing, you gotta pry it out of them.

What did Victor mean when he said, “you take it at face value, it’s unwanted person”? Not only is there a gap between laymen’s words and bureaucratic categories, there is also remarkable distinction between the report of the incident and the nature of said incident. So surface translation between folk description and codes in the system is only the first step of the job. Dispatchers also need to see through the narratives and bridge the gap between the report of a situation and the nature of said situation hidden on purpose or unintentionally. This is where most of the “intelligent jumps” are made. What callers see as the most relevant or urgent details oftentimes differ from the dispatchers; callers’ reactions during the call might make it difficult to convey key information needed for categorization, and they might even hide or distort the story for various reasons. One time a caller said someone just passed by her window. The call-taker started to ask whether it was a break-in. The caller denied and said that person was just “passing by”. Just when the call-taker was about to code it as a “suspicious person”, the caller added “um…we are also on the 10th floor”, then the caller-taker realized she was reporting a suicide.

The ambiguous nature of some situations makes incident comprehension and coding process even more difficult. In such cases, dispatchers either resort to the ‘residuals’ of the codes, such as “miscellaneous” and “unknown”, or balance between a few possible options. This is to cross the third gap, which lies between the complexity of social life itself and the simplicity of bureaucratic representation schemes.

Below is part of the conversation of a medical emergency call. The caller is a registered nurse and his description of the patient provided all the useful information needed, he was calm, cooperative and his delivery clear, but at the end dispatcher Tom had a hard time assigning a code to it. He tried to strike a balance between two possible codes with different levels of severity, to make a link between an ambiguous incident and an actionable category in the system.

Caller: I am a visiting nurse, I came to visit my patient. She started complaining about gastritis but escalated to a psychiatric crisis, having a pretty bad anxiety right now.

Tom: Well it’s an anxiety attack?

Caller: Well, yeah, she has a history of hurting herself so I can’t leave her alone.

Tom: Gotcha. Are you with her right now?

Caller: Yes I am.

Tom: Is she breathing?

Caller: She’s breathing. Pulse elevated to about 110 to 120.

Tom: Is she violent?

Caller: No.

Tom: Does she have a weapon?

Caller: Yeah, a walker.

Tom: Her walker?

Caller: That’s about it.

Tom: Is it a suicide attempt?

Caller: No, but she had suicide attempt in the past, that’s why I can’t leave

her.

Tom: Is she thinking about committing suicide?

Caller: No, but when she gets anxious she starts to go toward suicide ideation.

Tom: So she’s not thinking about it.

Caller: No, no, but I’ve known her for a year now this is what she’s gonna progress to.

I looked at CAD’s display and saw that the incident description read, “Unknown status/other codes not applicable (Weapons)” So after Tom had finished up the call I asked him about the “unknown” status and he explained:

Of all the categories, no one fits, because she has a weapon, but [is] not threatening suicide. If she doesn’t have a weapon—which is the walker, she might use it to hit herself—I will go with PSYCH/SUICID A2 (SUICIDAL NO THREAT); but the caller explicitly said there is a weapon; if she has threatened, I will go with PSYCH/SUICD B3 (THREATENING SUICIDE). And the first one is level 3 priority; the second latter one is level 1 priority. Unknown status is level 2 priority. It just makes sense to choose something in between.

Emotion as expertise and controlled empathy as the desired state of mind

To bridge said gaps and maintain the correspondence between incidents and codes in CAD, dispatchers utilize trained feelings and emotionally charged experiences. Controlled empathy is the desired state of mind and it plays its role in two ways: first, it affects the quality of communication over the phone important for the dispatchers to sustain the callers’ cooperation and obtain helpful details to identify the problem. Second, it builds connections between dispatchers and callers in a timely fashion, which allow dispatchers to access to callers’ feelings and comprehend the nature of the reported incidents. It is a state that dispatchers acquire through occupational socialization and management of their perception of calls and callers. I need to point out that “controlled empathy” is simultaneously an emotional and cognitive state—it not only has to do with the desired and displayed emotions in the context of 911 communication, but also the dispatchers’ perceptions of the callers in relation to themselves, their interpretation of their needs and intentions, and their perceptions of their role as dispatchers.

In the first training sessions, training officers emphasized two things: dispatchers need to rely on their own feelings during the job and that they shouldn’t internalize these feelings. Controlled empathy plays a key role in making fast and accurate coding decisions, while its impacts outside of the workplace should be minimized. The immediate and emotional connection established between dispatchers and callers secures both the speed and quality of the work. Trainee Crystal asked supervisor Walter: “During in-progress calls, people do hang up, do you call back?” Walter said: “We call back.” Crystal followed up:” When I call back, nothing’s happening but seems like there’s something fishy...” Walter interrupted her:

It’s your decision, your perception. So it’s your feelings. You can come to me, ‘Walter, can you hear that call?’ You wait for a minute, think for a minute, come talk to me for a minute, and I listen to the call for a minute, it’s four minutes, or five minutes. It’s your perception. You think outside of the box, think ahead of what they think. There’s a lot of tasks, a lot of stress out there, as long as you don’t take it home. I don’t take it home much.

Indeed, dispatchers need to simultaneously engage and disengage with callers’ emotions, balancing between empathy and detachment, connection and control. It is both other-focused and self-focused. Dispatchers try to influence the callers’ mind and their own; at the same time, they vicariously experience callers’ emotional state that provides unspoken yet important information regarding the nature of the situation being reported as the basis for their coding decisions. This emotion-based occupational intuition and expertise is important to their daily call-taking and coding practices.

Luz criticized her trainee Kim for “not knowing how to get the answers” in response to a medical call. The caller was panting in pain and trying to describe the problem in her spine in a weak, frightened voice. Since protocols of medical calls require the dispatchers to ask a few standard questions—regarding breaths, sweating, mobility etc.—to diagnose the caller, Kim handled the call in a dispassionate way—only control, little empathy. She read the standard questions: “Do you have difficulty breathing? Are you clammy, having cold sweats? OK the paramedics are on their way… Just lie in the most comfortable position till they come.”

After Kim hung up Luz criticized her: “She’s in excruciating pain, and you said ‘just lie in the most comfortable position’”—she impersonated Kim in a cold, mechanic tone—“If I were her, I would be pissed. Just be more sympathetic: ‘Do you have problem breathing? How’s your breathing?’” Kim defended sheepishly: “I thought you were supposed to say the words.” Luz insisted: “You say the words. But once you’ve said the words, you can add words to get the answers you are looking for.” This exchange shows how newcomers are socialized into controlled empathy. Control and empathy are indispensable to each other. Control keeps the callers communicative and informative so there is better chance to understand the emergency situation; empathy comforts the callers and makes them calmer and more cooperative.

Callers’ emotions, such as fear, anxiety and helplessness, not only affect the quality and outcome of the citizen-dispatcher interactions, but they themselves provide key information that helps dispatchers make accurate assessment of the situation, and it is impossible without dispatchers’ being measuredly empathetic with callers. Through that connection with callers’ emotions, call-takers vicariously experience and visualize the nature of the incidents, in order to make the link made between calls and codes—the key link which sometimes carries life-and-death consequences. Supervisor Victor summarized:

A lot of experiences, a lot of comes back to, you know, you just listen if somebody says he’s fine, but the background sounds like a war zone. You know, what you are picking upon. Being smart to pick up on it when somebody’s giving you the information without sounding like they are giving you the information. And sometimes they can only answer yes/no questions. “Can you speak freely?” They are like “No.” And I was like “you need police right?” “Yes!”

James once worked with a trainee who once failed to associate the caller’s report with a deadly weapon. A driver called and said he was threatened at a parking lot then locked himself in the bathroom of 7–11. While James could sense caller’s intense fear through the call, his trainee couldn’t: “She missed lots of stuff. She missed some key information. That’s the biggest thing for her. One time there’s a driver of a delivery company in front of a 7–11. 30 seconds into the call it was obvious there was a gun….At the parking lot, somebody threatened to shoot someone, but she never made the connection between that, and a gun.” “How could you tell there was?” I asked. “Voice, the way they word it. You need to make the decisions. When a driver calls and says ‘I locked myself in a bathroom of 7–11,’ you know something’s wrong.” To associate the truck driver’s locking himself in the bathroom with fear, and probable use of weapons is an ‘intelligent’ jump that supervisor Victor emphasized, it is also an emotional one: to make such associations, dispatchers must be emotionally connected to caller’s feelings; when callers are too nervous, afraid or anxious to communicate their situations to the call-takers, it is in itself an important clue. Therefore, dispatchers are always mining through the calls for traces of emotions that reveal the actual situations that callers are in—whether it’s a suicide attempt, a medical emergency, a threat with a weapon, or just an accidental misdial.

I discovered that dispatcher Jimmy always handles hang-up calls and ‘butt-dials’ with extra caution. One time he answered a call from a man claiming that there was no emergency at all:

Jimmy: 911 this line is recorded what’s the exact location of your emergency?

Caller: It’s not an emergency, I hit it by accident.

Jimmy: Alright, so you are able to speak freely?

Caller: Pardon sir?

Jimmy: You are able to speak freely?

Caller: Yes, sir, I can speak freely. Yeah, yeah, there is no…no emergency, I just hit it by accident, it was a mistake. But I stayed on the line just so you guys don’t get nervous.

Jimmy: OK, thank you.

Jimmy hung up, made a dispatch and said: “He said he hit it by accident. I’m still gonna send someone.”

Jimmy has thirteen years of experience on the job. Eating his pastrami in the kitchen, he explained why he is sensitive to hang-up calls. He can feel it when someone needs help but cannot speak freely. His measured yet compassionate approach comes partly from his memory of one call he took before, and partly from his personal experience.

One time I had a hang-up, I called back, she said, “everything’s fine” but for some reason, maybe her tone, maybe she stayed a bit longer on the line, I felt something’s wrong. And when the police officers went in, I heard them saying “God! Who did this to you?!” Turns out there had been many hang-up calls from there. She had an abusive boyfriend and she told me that it’s her fault. Or she shouldn’t have said or done something. My three sisters have all been in abusive relationships, and they blame themselves. So I know how it’s like: when you continue to be in an abusive relationship and you blame yourself for that.

Jimmy’s and James’ stories show how emotional investment in the coding process has reconstituted their expertise and informed their dispatch decisions. In response to the calls, they rely on their empathetic connection with the callers as key to accurate judgment of the situations and coding of the incidents. Controlled empathy as both an emotional and cognitive state is demanded in the work context that 911 dispatchers inhabit. It is the key link between the report of the incidents and the coding decisions made. It is the ‘desired state of mind’ in the context of emergency communication.

‘Fruitcakes’ and ‘operators’: Disparity, lack of outlet and status shield

Compared to firefighters and police officers, 911 dispatchers have a lower status on multiple levels. They are not in the same retirement group with fire or police (which makes them retire five years later than police and fire); unlike police officers and firefighters, they do not have their own union, but are grouped with other public workers. They are also mostly civilians while people in fire and police are sworn officers. They are not recognized by their peers, their organizations, the city or the state—as equals with those who fight on the street, and their contribution and sacrifice is considered smaller and less important than their front-line colleagues’. Therefore, while police officers and firefighters benefit from organizational recognition and support to deal with stress and trauma, dispatchers do not.

The emergency communication center has long been a less desirable workplace than police and fire. According to Sally: “There used to be many ‘fruitcakes’ in the dispatch. They put injured officers—police or firefighters—or those with drinking problems, or those who got in trouble on the street, in the dispatch. It’s a hiding place. There they got rid of ‘deadbeats’, if you will.” Sometimes dispatchers are still seen as people just answering phone calls and passing the information. “We always felt like second class citizens in a small environment. You know, cops can do no wrong, but we… in some major cities, there’re rough neighborhoods; you won’t say you are disrespected, but you never feel you are on equal grounds.” Dispatchers are yelled at over the radio, denied information and sometimes cooperation during real-time calls. James said:

The wacky ones, they’re cowboys. In the middle of the night, pull over, have eight kids in the car… might have guns with them. They need to tell me everything that they do…There’s one hard-core officer and I wanted to shake the life out of him. It was at night, he stopped three kids and there were two guns, didn’t tell me where he was.

Of course the lack of equal ground goes far beyond individual interactions and communication with front-line colleagues. Since 1960s, state legislators have been trying to push the state to move 911 dispatchers retirement group 1 to group 2—the same group that includes police, fire and other criminal justice employees. Legal documents show that in 1968 the governor objected to the bill to place dispatchers in the same retirement group with police and fire. It was passed in July 1968 by the House of Representatives and the Senate. However, more than fifty years later, there are still many towns and cities where dispatchers retire under Group 1.

Not only do fire and police provide better retirement benefits, they also have more powerful unions to support them. A few months into my fieldwork, I found that dispatcher Ben stopped showing up to work. Someone told me he had left for a job at the fire department in a neighboring town. “Fire has a stronger union…we have the same union with public work.” Luz explained to me. “We are grouped with people that pick up trash. People have no idea what’s going on here,” Bree complained to me over lunch. In the next section, I shall show how the status inequality described above influences the ways in which the dispatchers approach controlled empathy.

Stress, the ‘wall’ and The “wacko sense of humor”— rugged path towards a desired state of mind

As is shown above, controlled empathy is needed in order to understand the nature of the emergency situation and make a fast, accurate response that oftentimes carries life-and-death consequences. Because the dispatchers have little ‘status shield’, they need to constantly rely on self-protection strategies to do their job well. Their emotional work involves engaging and disengaging with the clients’ emotion. They try to engage with emotions during the call and disengage afterwards, but emotions cannot be turned on and off like a switch, instead, they have enduring impacts on dispatchers’ experience at work and their well-being. I identify two emotional issues—relatable incidents and traumatic visualization and two emotion management strategies—distancing and bad humor.

Dispatcher Bree took an in-progress call about a theft in a department store. Hearing the call, she was outraged, so she did everything possible to make sure the suspects were arrested. The caller had dropped her wallet in the fitting room; someone then took it and spent her money. Bree identified the situation, updated the progress of the incident in CAD, instructed the caller to describe the suspects, and kept the caller on the phone till the suspects were found. She looked extremely proud and excited after the call, telling her colleagues:

That one really aggravated me. The girl’s buying clothes for her mother’s funeral and they stole her money and credit card! And the phone is breaking. She was in the dress room and it fell. It’s on video! I love it! It’s 12 minutes’ talking. They wouldn’t get her if I stopped talking to her, because she followed them to the garage. It’s absolutely horrendous. I would never do that to someone. The poor girl is buying clothes for her mother’s funeral! I want them arrested. I’m so mad. They went to McDonald’s and ate, with HER money!

Bree was very compassionate with the caller and was determined to help because the incident was “absolutely horrendous” to her. Her reaction to that call is anything but unusual. Dispatchers are emotionally invested in their job: they think about their calls, talk about their calls and try to get over their calls. ‘Good’ calls like Bree’s —in the sense that the problem reported is solved—make them excited, and bad ones can stay with them for months or even a lifetime.

“You know, James is like what the Marine calls a ‘hard-charger,’” David told me. He once took a fire call that he spent years to get over. For him, the best way to deal with negative emotion is to distance himself from it. “He gets really excited about the calls—you walk it, you live it, you breathe it. He talks about his phone calls. Those days are behind me now. I don’t talk about my phone calls. I can just go home and block it. Sometimes my wife has more information than me. Cuz she sees it on the news.” The call that David had been trying to forget was about a child who died in a fire. The victim was close in age to his own children. Such incidents are quite difficult for dispatchers to cope with. One morning during the break in the kitchen, Kim said: “Calls about kids…I just have a soft spot for them…I guess you just do what you can to help them.” Sally drew a circle in the air with her arms and said: “Yep, and you grew this wall” Kim nodded: “Yep, this wall.” Sally said: “And this wacko sense of humor.”

Because of the delicate dynamics resulting from status inequality with fire and police, dispatchers are either ignored by other agencies, or unwilling to participate when peer and organizational support is needed. After traumatic incidents, police and fire will run a ‘critical incident relief’ program so the law-enforcement agents can speak about their experience and feelings. Often dispatchers are not invited to such events. In cases when they are, they feel reluctant to join. In the classroom, James recommended such support and admitted that most of them do not use it:

If you guys get stuck into the shitty calls—dead baby, failed fire, things like that—if you want to go to the post-incident things…it’s been a pain in the ass for us to go to these. It’s definitely worth to get into the open. Being here…it really hits home and you can’t get away from it. The last thing you want to do is to get into a bar and get drunk…I you want to talk to somebody, just talk to me. Speak up, have a shell.

When he was on the floor with other dispatchers, it was obvious that he and his colleagues had been doing exactly the opposite of what he had told the trainees to: “I had a bad day, go home and have a beer and leave it behind me. You need to separate life from work. Neal has worked here for seven years. He always goes to this bar at Sunnydale.” Neal nodded.

For police officers or firefighters, between the relief program and the bar, there is a choice to speak to counselors who used to be or still are officers and know the job very well. But there is no such service provided to dispatchers. One day I suggested dispatcher Stevie that he should seek ‘professional help’ if he is stressed out and he responded: “Therapist? You think I need a therapist? I don’t…I’m fine. I go to a bar and get a drink.” Victor walked over to us and explained: “The problem with going to a business, is you do a lot of explaining: what’s happening, and it turns generic: ‘oh I understand what happened’. If I talk to firefighters or cops, they understand what’s happening, but if you go a therapist, ‘oh, you work for 911? It must be stressful.’” He shrugged.

While distancing and bad humor have been found as coping mechanisms in other law-enforcement occupations (Stephens et al., 1997) and not unique to 911 dispatch, they are noticeably both negative strategies—if bad humor is seen as a form of avoidance—that lead to even more distress, among a number of options available such as positive appraisal or problem-solving (Violanti, 1993). This selection of negative strategies towards a desired state of mind prescribed by the context of 911 emergency communication is, as I have shown, attributable to their lack of status and organizational outlet.

Conclusion

As we have seen, classification is the key process in the work of 911 dispatchers. Selecting codes for emergencies on the 911 line is making life-and-death decisions. It is a cognitive process during which realities on the ground are interpreted and comprehended, then converted into pre-determined categories recognized and actionable in the official system—one of the state’s classification schemes—and at the end, the correspondence between the ‘folk’ social life and the ‘bureaucratic’ representation of it is reproduced. This correspondence is neither smooth nor natural, rather, in order to sustain it three gaps have to be bridged: the first between every-day and official languages, the second between the nature of the incidents and their verbal reports, and the last between the ‘messiness’ of real life and the boundedness of official categories. These gaps cannot be crossed without emotions being utilized, and controlled empathy is the desired state of mind in this context. It is a constant battle to balance attachment and detachment, sensitivity and desensitization; yet, emotions cannot be turned on and off like a switch, thus 911 dispatchers’ path to controlled empathy is always a rugged one.

The structural features of this context—including the dispatchers’ low status within the public safety system, their lack of recognition, and limited outlets for emotional stress—shape the particular ways in which dispatchers approach controlled empathy and keep functioning on their job. They express reluctance to share their anxiety and stress with colleagues outside of the 911 center, such as firefighters and police officers, who are typically viewed as holding higher positions with more resources and support. And they are even less willing to talk to professional therapists who know little about what their job is like. As a result, 911 dispatchers resort to negative strategies such as distancing, bad humor or even alcohol, rather than positive ones that can help them in the long run.

This research contributes to the literature on emotional labor and emotion management, showing the roles emotions play in classification—a basic cognitive process—which sustains and reproduces the state’s symbolic power. The painful and emotionally costly process through which situations on the ground are matched to codes in the official system is clear evidence of the social construction of the appearance of ‘naturalness’ and ‘universality’ that the state’s symbolic domination rests on, imposing lasting, pre-determined and largely de-contextualized categories of perception and rules of classification through the hard work of front-line officers. Viewed this way, emotions not only create profit, produce knowledge, but also maintain and legitimize the state. This human cost of symbolic power is unequally distributed, with those on the lower end of the organizational structure bearing the lion’s share of it, in this case, the 911 dispatchers.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by National Science Foundation (grant number 1539822).

ORCID iD

Phoenix Chi Wang

Note

Author Biography

Phoenix Chi Wang is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Renmin University of China. Her research interests include cultural sociology, political sociology, body and embodiment, and work and occupations. Her other works appear in Politics and Society, American Journal of Cultural Sociology and Qualitative Sociology. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.

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