Professional Disobedience in Probation Manual-based Interventions and Transgressive Strategies

1. Introduction: Challenges and potentials in Danish probation and beyond, 2. Policy and discretion: How frontline personnel adapt, resist and transgress organizational directives, 3. Approaches: Tracing the ethnographic ‘how’, 4. The office: Spaces, boundaries, entrances and people inside, 5. The manual: Adapting routine to change, 6. The work: Supervising change between administration and rehabilitation, 7. The act: Performing rehabilitation, causing anomie and breaking character, 8. Scripted participation: Client-processing in the name of democracy, 9. Beyond responsibilization: Closing in on professional disobedience, 10. Conclusion: Summary, findings and contributions

Biography

Asbjørn Storgaard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Law, University of Southern Denmark, specializing in criminology and philosophy of law. He holds a PhD in Social Work from Lund University (2023) and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen (2016).

“This fascinating book provides a rich insight into contemporary probation practice in Denmark — but its highly original analysis will be of great interest to practitioners, researchers and scholars much further afield. Drawing as much on philosophy as on social theory, this is as deep and thorough an ethnographic exploration of how probation professionals adapt to and resist managerialism and the manualisation of their craft as I have ever read. Ultimately, their ‘professional disobedience’, driven as it is by the inescapably human and therefore messy interactions that are at the heart of probation work, represents both a necessity and, for me, a source of hope. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in the future of probation and of penal systems.”

Professor Fergus McNeill, University of Glasgow

 

“What happens between a probation officer and a convicted person is a black box but thank you to Professional Disobedience in Probation we can understand how probation services deviate and resist new managerial discourses. This book is interesting reading for practitioners and for all those interested in policy shifts in criminal justice.”

Professor Elena Larrauri, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

 

“Asbjørn Storgaard’s book is an ambitious, well-written, and thought-provoking study of the practice of offender supervision in Denmark. It delves into the everyday lives of probation officers and their clients in great ethnographic detail, while never losing sight of the big picture. It is essential reading for anyone interested in state punishment in the Scandinavian countries today.”

Professor Thomas Ugelvik, University of Oslo