Taming tensions: police docket production and the creation of trans-contextual stability in South Africa's criminal justice system

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic data collected in a police station, renamed Blue Hills police station, located on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape of South Africa. The data is presented as three vignettes, each focusing on the production of a police docket and its movement across branches of the criminal justice system of South Africa. Particular attention is paid to the move of each docket from the Uniform Branch to the Detective Branch (both being part of the same institutional network, but represented by different actors pursuing specific goals). My analysis draws on actor network theory used to conceptualize the creation of networks as a translation process. In this paper, I concentrate on problematization – representing the first stage in the translation process and a core element of defining network relations (Callon 1986). As my analysis will show, “problematization” is at the core of creating stable network relations in my case, and a salient feature observable in trans-contextual meaning making around dockets as a moving object. I also draw on the notions of “enactive work” and “recognition work” (Gee 2000). to explore how the police docket, understood as a boundary object, is created and re-interpreted across contexts, being the nexus point through which various and often contradictory ontologies flow, intersect and mingle. I argue that tensions which arise when police dockets travel trans-contextually – in this case from the Uniform Branch to the Detective Branch – are tamed (Mol 2002). This taming is the outcome of an interplay between enactive work performed by officers in the Uniform Branch and recognition work performed by officers in the Detective Branch. I argue that this interplay is necessary in order to create network stability across sites of practice, especially given the fact that police dockets are boundary objects which possess a “high degree of interpretive flexibility” (Dugdale 1999).