Características geográficas del municipio

The study of organizations is quite peculiar. In order to render intelligible something which is very complex – the messy and fluid nature of organizing – theorists must generally rely on abstract notions (cf. Grey, 2012). No such

10 _{Granted, not all rescues take place in these most severe conditions but All Weather Lifeboats}

abstractions were required here. Danger and risk were very much a way of life for the operational volunteers of the RNLI, both in the life-and-death situations encountered on rescue missions and via the process of placing themselves physically, psychologically and emotionally, in testing conditions. One element that gave my data its ‘depth’ is that it was extraordinarily embedded in real places, real lives and the real experiences of volunteers. The dangerous environment in this context was not abstract, it was actual. As one crew member recounted: ‘The sea doesn’t treat you different just because you are on a lifeboat’ (Luke, Crew Member).

To bring this point into sharper focus I will make use of an example which, I believe elucidates the richly textured sense of what these peoples’ lives are like. The example is so qualitatively rich not just because of the danger and tragedy, but because of the deep familial and temporal sense it conveys:

I interviewed in a station which had just received a brand new STG £2M lifeboat and asked the coxswain how it felt to be coming home with this fantastic new boat, bigger and faster than their old boat. He told me that himself and his crew, eight in total, had flown to Poole and then they had to take the boat home over the Irish Sea. Prior to him, this man’s father had been the coxswain of the lifeboat so he had very much grown up around the lifeboat station and when he finally reached the age of seventeen he was permitted to go to sea on the lifeboat. On his very first rescue, on Christmas Eve in horrendous weather conditions, the lifeboat capsized twice and a crew man was lost. My respondent described it as ‘a baptism of fire’ (Christy, Coxswain).

Thirty-three years later, now as coxswain in charge of brand new boat, pulling out of the marina at RNLI headquarters at Poole on his crew was the son of the man who had died that night. When they motored into open seas:

We had a meeting on the stern, a quiet moment for all that had gone … you remember the people gone before you and things like that … it is a bonding thing and everyone knows that and you know, it’s all part of it as well.

It is difficult to do justice to reconstructing the intensity of this man’s feeling as he relayed this story11, but I got a semblance of a cuttingly deep personal trauma which he and other survivors of that tragedy had endured. A sense of unanswered questions abounded. Could they have done anything different to avoid the disastrous outcome of that night? Why the deceased crewman’s son subsequently joined the lifeboat? How did he feel taking to the waters that had claimed the life of his father when he was a young child? That the bonding process was more profound and intensified as a result of those tragic events of Christmas Eve and subsequent local disasters became clear. It was the operational volunteers who are very much on the ‘sharp end’ of danger.

I will now present some additional examples of this to substantiate and advance my perilous volunteering concept and then will go on to elaborate on

11 _{Harrowing stories of danger, risk, tragedy and heartbreak abounded in the data collection}

phase of this research. It is important to emphasize that these narratives were not relayed with anything akin to boastfulness, pride or self-aggrandizing heroism. Rather they were told in a quietly wistful, regretful ways, sometimes emotionally. The history of loss through the perilous activity of lifeboating and the mental and emotional traumas such as post traumatic stress disorder these tragedies generate undoubtedly contributes to the meaning that lifeboating is experienced as an incredibly profound activity for those involved.

what this means for control and autonomy within the organization. Emotional danger appeared to be a substantial risk for volunteers:

It’s very stressful when you are dealing with, for instance I think we had something like fourteen suicides here in three years. And I’ll give you an instance, I brought my daughter and her two friends to the pub one Saturday night and I brought them home and the third girl didn’t come home. I got a phone call the next morning she was missing, and I picked her out of the water myself. (Ben, Station Chairman)

It was not just the responsibility of responding to the local community and mariners in local waters which contributed to mental and emotional pressures. The crewing decisions that coxswains had to take when a search was launched had life-or-death consequences:

So the practical element [of the sea conditions] is one side, the other element then is the softer side, are you going to choose someone that has got a young family, someone who is married, single? Who are you going to put out there tonight? And that’s quite a lot to take on board and make that decision, and know that you [the coxswain] are making that decision for the reason that they may not come back. (Steven, RNLI Manager)

This study proposes the concept of perilous volunteering to denote volunteering activities whereby the volunteer, by personal volition and having some prior regard to the risks that may be at stake, voluntarily engages in dangerous voluntary activity which may result in serious and/or significant personal bodily or emotional harm or distress, up to and including loss of life. In setting out the empirical findings of this research, it has been my argument that an individual’s experience of perilous volunteering situations is qualitatively different to reported experiences of other volunteering contexts. For example, a research situation where respondents inform a researcher: ‘we have a saying ‘drown you may, but go you must’’ (Pat, Mechanic) is obviously not only distinctive but also extraordinary and, moreover, unexplained by extant research (a partial exception to this being Thornbarrow and Brown’s (2009) study of paratroopers, although they of course, are paid). Clearly, the accounts presented throughout the findings chapters are poignant examples of perilous volunteering.

Perilous volunteering assists towards explaining the ‘thickness’ and ownership attached to the volunteer role. Experiencing, physically and emotionally, what was known as ‘the sharp end’ (Roderick, RNLI Director) was frequently reported by respondents as fundamentally contributing to the feelings of mutual solidarity felt by volunteers which worked to confirm their social identities and commitment to each other. This solidarity, loyalty and allegiance were pragmatically fashioned into bona fide teamwork and interpersonal trust aboard the lifeboat, with the coxswain as bricoleur (Lévi-Strauss, 1966; Duymedjian and Rúling, 2010), guiding, directing and mentoring:

We are a family like. When you are out there [at sea] you are relying on who is out there, who is coming behind you, who is near you. You are watching out for him and he is watching out for you. Everyone looks after each other. (Ross, Mechanic)

In the same rich vein, in her study of normative utopian communities Kanter (1968) found that feelings of ‘we-ness’ and ‘communion’ were crucial mechanisms in solidifying members’ commitment to groups. I attest that this dynamic totally permeated local stations. Team spirit and camaraderie deeply guided not only actions but also self-referential thoughts of team members: ‘You are all one team it’s all of you together [out there]’ (Peter, Second Coxswain). Deep bonding evolved over time and was intensified as a direct result of the (sometimes tragically realized) perils of lifeboating. The cultural identity and shared norms of the local station privileged this local bonding, this ‘condition of communion’ (Barnard, 1968: 148) to the extent of constructing and codifying local unambivalent ‘rules’ which facilitated the creation of ‘nomos, order, out of chaos’ (Berger and Berger, 1973, cited in Watson 1994: 22), evidenced in practice here in Pat’s response:

Jesus the one thing we have here is that if you fall over the side, go over the side, jump over the side somebody will be right after you. No matter what condition you are in, what speed you are going at, if you go in someone will be with you immediately. If they spot you they will be over with you and that’s the rule we have. (Pat, Mechanic)

It was at the sharp end where true commitment to each other was very much evidenced and was what really counted in creating meaningful volunteer realities. Real solidarity and affective commitment, the negation of the self to the extent that an individual would jump into a dangerous sea to help his team-mate ‘no matter what’ was quite extraordinary and symbolized the sacrifice of the individual to the collective which allowed ‘a group of individuals to crystallize into a team’ (Lois, 1999:124, cf. Kanter, 1968)12. This local team orientation also worked in ways to produce and reinforce the ingroup/outgroup (Kramer, 1993) distinction between those who put their bodies on the line to live the organization’s values and those who did not. Working at ‘the sharp end’ provided a very credible weight behind the mobilization of moral claims of ownership and legitimate control.