Resisting at the Airport: Security Guards among TIP and "Unruling" Passengers

The paper considers everyday practices of resistance within the context of airport security, with a particular focus on power-resistance relations (e.g. Levina & Orlikowski, 2009; Thomas, Sargent & Hardy, 2011) and a specific attention to the set of "norms and other kinds of institutional arrangements" (Martì & Fernández, 2013) that characterizes the considered domain. Indeed, we deem the latter as particularly interesting in its complexity, as it entails: multiple, intertwining, often contradictory (inter-)organizational goals and deriving constraints (e.g. quickness and thoroughness, business efficiency and security efficacy); a large, multilayered (international, European, national, local) corpus of norms and detailed procedures (for acting, accounting, reporting, checking, controlling, etc.); manyfold inter- and intra-organizational power relations, and a whole field of authority positions (where everything is down in black and white except for the ambiguous position of passengers); countless co-occurrent interactions among members of diverse groups; and an ensemble of technological tools and artefacts that mediate most of work activities. By the analysis of the resisting practices of airport security guards - that, as we shall see, are both individual and collective; often passive and quiescent; mainly mundane and routine; and mostly oppositional forms of resistance - the paper aims at contributing to the study of power-resistance relations and their role in innovative vs. stagnant organizational change (e.g. Mumby, 2005), particularly in institutional - and highly institutionalized - settings. The theoretical approach that lays at the basis of this contribution resonates with the perspective that has come to be known as "organizational becoming" (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), yet it is also the outcome of an interdisciplinary effort between sociology - in particular, ethnomethodology and workplace studies - and philosophy - more specifically, social ontology. The approach is processual and pays attentions at the details of everyday action-in-interaction, and the latter's crucial role in meaning-making and change processes. The empirical material on which the paper is based comes from the ongoing ethnographic research that is being conducted at an Italian international airport (April 2013 - April 2014), and that focuses, in particular, on security, border control and surveillance. Data include field notes, interviews with security guards and police officers, and video recordings of hand-luggages control activities. The research participate to a larger interdisciplinary project: VisCoSo - "Detection of crisis in socio.material systems via visual-cognitive-social processes" (http://www.istc.cnr.it/project/viscoso-detection-crisis-socio-material-systems-visual- cognitive-social-processes). The paper takes into consideration diverse modalities of resisting that can be subsumed under three main categories. First, it focus on the Threat Image Projection (TIP) used at airports in order to maintain the attention level of security guards during hand-luggage scan control, and to record - and then take action on the basis of - their performances at the monitoring of potentially dangerous and/or prohibited objects. TIP can be seen as instruments of control, pressure and, ultimately, exercise of power. Security guards enact different practices of resistance for coping with the TIP mechanism, practices that aim at the collective construction and everyday updating of a corpus of shared (practical) knowledge. This is achieved by making each and every instance of TIP appearance during work activities an occasion for collective learning and/or knowledge stabilization, as well as by leveraging on a corpus of TIP-related anecdotes and narratives that