Police Culture in Unsettled Times: Examining the Impact of Police Oversight

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Bureaucracy, Control, and Authority

Abstract

Within police studies, “police culture” has been defined in two ways – ‘broadly’ as an organizational ethos through which officer behaviour is presumably explained, and ‘individually’ as officer typologies. In both definitions, culture is depicted according to a series of police values and attitudes, largely attributed to the threatening and isolating nature of the job. This paper argues in favour of an alternative conceptualization of police “culture” which draws on the central tenets of cultural sociology and institutional theory. Assessing culture at the level of meaning, police culture is viewed as a resource which actors draw on within particular institutional constraints. Drawing on data gathered from interviews and participant observation in the police department of a medium-sized city in Ontario, this analysis examines how officers negotiate meaning in a changing occupational environment – specifically, how unprecedented levels of police oversight impact their sense of solidarity and mission. This case study highlights how institutional cultures are socially and historically embedded, and must be analyzed as such in order to avoid either a monolithic or narrow application of cultural practice.

Author

• Holly Campeau, University of Toronto