Control Through Violence: A situational analysis of embodied practices of violence in a refugee reception centre

Abstract

This paper explores how violence is mobilised for control purposes in organisations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at the total institution we name Arrival – a German refugee reception centre – we develop how private security guards engage in practices of signalling and exerting violence vis-à-vis Arrival’s residents to enforce rules. Our research contributes to the extant literature in three ways. First, we elucidate how practices of violence, following a logic of escalation and deterrence, work for organisational control purposes. Second, our research shifts the extant focus from discursive to embodied forms of invisibilisation by showing how violence is made simultaneously visible and invisible in its very enactment. Third, it provides insights into situational interactions rather than conditions of violence in total institutions.