Status-Authority Asymmetry between Professions: The Case of 911 Dispatchers and Police Officers
Status-authority asymmetry in the workplace emerges when lower-status professionals are ascribed with higher functional authority to oversee higher-status professionals and elicit compliance from them. However, eliciting compliance from the higher-status professionals is ridden with challenges. How and when lower-status professionals with functional authority could elicit compliance from higher-status professionals? To examine this question, I conducted a 24-month ethnography of 911 emergency coordination to understand how 911 dispatchers (lower-status professionals with functional authority) were able to elicit compliance from the police officers (higher-status professionals). I identify a set of relational styles – entailing interactional practices and communication media – enacted by the 911 dispatchers. Findings suggest that as compared to the customizing and the escalating relational styles enacted via the private communication medium, the publicizing relational style (i.e., publicizing the noncompliant behavior of an officer to his immediate peers) enacted via the peer communication medium enabled the dispatchers to elicit compliance. Such peer publicizing triggered self-disciplining, as that noncompliant officers’ trustworthiness is on the line in front of the peer group. More generally, through enrolling the alters’ peers in the compliance process, the lower-status professionals with functional authority were able to generate second-degree influence and elicit compliance from the higher-status professionals.