ABSTRACT
The probation service has been committed since the 1980s to what used to be termed ‘anti-discriminatory practice’ (ADP) and is now called ‘valuing diversity’. Qualifying training programmes strongly featured ADP, which was sometimes criticized as being ‘too oppositional and concentrat[ing] primarily on issues of gender and race’ (Hilder 2007: 10). With the creation of the National Probation Service (NPS), the discourse of ADP was replaced by one of ‘diversity’, which embraced and celebrated difference and was perceived as being less threatening to the mainstream (Hilder 2007: 10). The Heart of the Dance (National Probation Service 2003) was one of a series of strangely named policy documents (invoking a choreographical analogy) that sought to position equal opportunities at the centre of the service’s culture, incorporating sexual orientation and disability in its remit. Despite these good intentions, Canton (2011) regards the outcomes of various policies and initiatives as disappointing. Drawing on earlier work by Thompson (2006) he identifies ‘occupational culture’ as one of three levels of discrimination (the others being ‘structural’ and ‘personal’). He argues that culture can be a ‘carrier’ of discrimination, with office dynamics, politics and work allocation practices feeding into and sustaining conventions of ‘how things should be done’ (2011: 38). In this chapter we consider four of the diverse voices that exist within probation and discuss their impact on probation workers’ occupational cultures. In drawing on Hirschman’s concept of voice, we extend his rather narrow use of the term. While Hirschman conceived voice as a reaction, namely a means for employees to speak up and to signal their dissatisfaction to managers, later writers have developed the concept to explore organizational inequality and exclusion more broadly (Simpson and Lewis 2007). The voices we are considering are: the voice of religion, the voice of the union, the voice of ethnic diversity and the female voice. We discuss the extent to which these four voices not only reveal organizational discrimination but, more positively, create and sustain identity in probation work. We conclude that it is the female voice – theorized as ‘gender capital’ (Ross-Smith and Huppatz 2010) that is the most pronounced in shaping contemporary identity within the service. But first we consider the tenacity of religious motivation.
