Читать книгу Narrative Change - Hans Hansen - Страница 9

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No Place to Hide

I desperately wanted to disappear. I should have begun the workshop already, but I inched back toward the corner of the large meeting room in Lubbock, Texas. A voice in my head whispered that I do not belong here, that this job is too big for me, and that attempting to change a monstrous system like the death penalty is impossible. I felt out of place and suspected it was only dumb luck that brought me to this moment. On top of that, people’s lives were on the line.

At that time, death penalty defense had gone poorly in Texas. Death penalties were handed down more than 90 percent of the time in capital trials in Texas, and 98 percent of the time in West Texas. We had launched the country’s first permanent death penalty defense team, and the entire team was present along with additional experts who came to lend their minds and insights to this endeavor. There are many public defender offices in the United States, but ours was the only one in the country that exclusively handled death penalty cases.

We intended to rewrite the way the death penalty was defended. Twenty people were gathered in the room. They milled around, sipped coffee, and introduced themselves to each other. We were all meeting for a daylong narrative change workshop I had suggested as a way to introduce a new narrative for defending against the death penalty. Attorneys, mitigators, constitutional experts, and other death penalty defense experts had traveled in from all over Texas.

When this began, I was a newly minted assistant professor at Texas Tech University, in the business school, in the management department. When I say I don’t know how I wound up in that room that day with all the major death penalty defense players in Texas, it’s because I had a very different plan when I moved to Lubbock. I am not a lawyer, and I never had any interest in the death penalty. My plan was to disappear; I was trying to be a hermit professor. None of it was working out.

I am an ethnographer. When people hear the word ethnographer, they probably picture an anthropologist in weather-beaten khakis traveling to visit distant tribes, studying culture by living among tribe members and engaging in their rituals. At the extreme, the anthropologist may even become part of the tribe. People are not wrong to imagine that, but today’s ethnography is a less romantic version—although it can be just as adventurous.

Organizational culture became a distinguishing factor in corporate performance in the 1980s.¹ In exploring why a strong corporate culture made such a difference in business, researchers borrowed ethnographic methods from their anthropology cousins to study corporate culture. Ethnographers treated corporations like not-so-distant tribes and embedded themselves in corporate settings. They observed and worked alongside employees to understand the culture of the firm: what it is like to work here, what it is like to be them, and how we do things around here. If you knew what kind of culture great companies had, you could attempt to instill that same culture in your own organization and become great as well. In the search for what made some companies excellent, organizational culture was recognized as the primary factor.

Better performance through better cultures was a main area of focus, but some ethnographers simply sought to describe what it is like inside an institution for the sake of knowing, without an agenda of improving performance. For example, ethnographers described what it’s like to work in an auto factory, to serve in a police force, or to work in a slaughterhouse, to name just a few. They sought to reveal the inner workings and culture of these groups by becoming insiders in these contexts. For example, cops had their own language and informal yet powerful codes for their behavior.² Strong norms dictated how cops should cover for one another and have each other’s back, both on and off duty.

I joined the death penalty defense team and became a member of that tribe so I could watch and learn and participate as much as possible as an insider. One of my main research aims was to describe the inner workings of the death penalty and how it worked in practice. This understanding would eventually become crucial in changing how it worked.

The team wanted to change the way the institution of the death penalty worked, and I agreed to help organize the team. I observed their work, went everywhere they went, and participated in any way I could. For instance, I strategized on cases, visited defendants, met with DAs and judges, and shadowed team members to learn their roles in defending against the death penalty. Ethnographers often attempt to remain invisible, studying social interaction from an arm’s length to minimize influencing what they observe. In some ethnographic practices, researchers are encouraged to maintain objectivity and keep some social distance between themselves and research subjects. For lots of reasons, being a fly-on-the-wall observer would not do this time. Once we decided to rewrite the ways things are done in death penalty defense by constructing a collective narrative that the team would use in their daily work, it became impossible for me to maintain any distance. Ethnography of this type required me to get close to the culture to understand it. If we were going into battle together, I would have to become an insider.

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Stares from around the room cajoled me to begin. Earlier that morning I had laid out a blank slate, with dozens of sheets of paper torn from giant flip charts. The pages were spread neatly across several folding tables, and I squeezed a fistful of markers to keep my hands from shaking. I began to speak. At the end of that day, our budding narrative was strewn all over the room, with more ink than white space on any piece of paper.

After hours of creative discussion and excited conversation, the room was finally quiet. I could hear the florescent lights hum above me. Exhausted, I crawled around on the floor, trying to put into order what amounted to a collective brain dump. Alone in the room, I made additional notes and sorted through all the pages we had filled. Every tattered page contained some kind of list, diagram, or scribbling about how we planned to fight the death penalty. The new narratives we would create from this material were the seeds for change.

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My whirlwind encounter with the death penalty began with a cold call; I was asked to help design and build the country’s first permanent death penalty defense team. I conducted a six-year ethnographic study of how the death penalty operates in practice, seeking to understand its inner workings and strategizing new ways to change the way things are done. All of my theoretical ideas about change were put to a real-world test. The stakes were life and death. I never became comfortable with the task, but I think that’s a good thing.

We pursued a risky strategy using an innovative methodology I developed called narrative construction. We created a narrative to organize the team, to determine the work they would do, and to change the way the death penalty operates. A narrative perspective also helped us understand and make sense of what others did, such as district attorneys. Instead of a typical structure and strategy, our team used narratives to guide our actions and to decide what tactics to pursue in death penalty cases.

Skipping ahead six years, our ragtag team has stopped more than one hundred executions against nearly insurmountable odds. We also expanded the office, covering almost all of Texas. By the time my research engagement ended, we had lost only once. Today Texas sentences very few people to death (figure 1.1). In the years before I got the call, Texas sentenced more than forty people to death each year. In the past two years, only three people have been sentenced to death. Several factors have been at work, but our team has been a major component of this change. We have managed to change the way things work.

Figure 1.1 Death sentences in Texas, 1999–2016

Source: Chart by the author