Just Enough for Resilience? Creating Capacity in a High-Security Prison

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how human resources on the organisational front line can both challenge and support resilience in a prison system. Based on an ethnography of safety and security work in a Norwegian high-security prison, how operational senior officers manage resources on the spot to maintain safety and security is explored. The results show that senior officers created capacity as and for situated resilience through small acts of saving, stretching, and strengthening human resources. Due to their twofold position in both operations and management, senior officers seemed to hold a potential key function for counterbalancing organisational vulnerabilities through their embodied competencies. However, due to the limited available resources in the prison organisation, their management of resources often took the form of “firefighting”. Although sufficient in keeping specific parts of the prison safe and secure in specific situations, the achieved situated resilience did not necessarily contribute to avoiding or handling future disturbances. Moreover, because of the socially determined risk, the reallocation of resources could influence the existence and dimension of risk, due to reduced resources to prevent and mitigate beginning disturbances on the prison wings. These findings indicate that situated resilience, when not met with corresponding structural or systemic adjustments, can fuel organisational brittleness to future events. This research contributes to a bottom-up understanding of how situated resilience unfolds through the situated and embodied competency of operational managers, making the hidden but essential processes that constitute the order of a system more visible.