Conflicting Responsibilities in Coproduction: Police Practices of Work and Knowing

• In Event: Coproduction Practices: Reconfiguring Professional Knowledge and Work

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper examines the co-production of work and knowing emerging from community policing practices. Like many public services that have shifted to greater emphasis on an active role for ‘consumers’ or ‘clients’ in the definition and delivery of professional service, community policing is intended to promote proactive partnerships with public citizens for problem-solving - in the policing case, to increase safety and crime prevention in local communities.

Perspectives/theoretical framework
The paper uses a socio-material understanding of practice as ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organised round shared practical understanding’ (Schatzki, 2001, p 2). Workplace ‘learning’ is understood using Gherardi’s (2005) notion of knowing-in-practice. As Author et al. (2011) argue, knowing in co-production is emergent with environment, action, materials and identities: these are entwined as material-discursive phenomena.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The paper is based on a qualitative, exploratory study of police practices in rural Scotland where community policing is the preferred model of practice. Group interviews were held over five months in 2010-2011 involving 22 line officers, and individual interviews with 11 chief officers in police units located in diverse geographic regions and communities throughout northern Scotland. Questions explored officers’ experiences in practice with community engagement, the challenges and strategies of community policing, and the effects of these policing practices on relevant dimensions of community well-being (trust, security, order, etc).

Data sources, evidence, objects or materials
Data sources include, besides the transcripts and audiotapes of the individual and group interviews with police practitioners, policy documents specifying practice standards and evaluative criteria, and policy position papers promoting models for co-productive organisation of police practice. Transcripts were coded and cross-coded among three researchers and the findings validated with participants.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions
The evidence reveals (i) key problems and conflicts in the co-production of policing service, particularly revolving around contradictory responsibilities demanded of police officers, and ambiguous boundaries among their professional identities and practices as enforcers, communicators/facilitators, and community members. The evidence also shows (ii) knowing-in-practice strategies used in situ by police officers to resolve the tensions between codified practices and expectations of community policing and the difficult ambiguities that they often encounter. These strategies are not individual but distributed. They are clearly material, relying upon objects, geographies, technologies etc at hand. They are also social, embedded in cultural, historical and discursive traditions and resources.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study
The paper shows specific ways in which co-production is a multi-faceted and often fraught form of practice. The context of policing highlights the conflicts in authority, responsibility and knowing at stake in co-productive practice that arguably circulate in other contexts of co-productive public service professional activity. Further, the paper indicates how professionals’ strategies for negotiating co-production are rooted in specific materialities as well as social relations; but also, how socio-material conditions produce particular forms of co-production involving a range of actors that extends beyond simple categories of professionals and (community) users.

Author

• Tara Jane Fenwick, University of Stirling