Compliance by Design: Legal Endogeneity and Policing Organizations

• In Event: Violence, Policing, and Criminal Law

Abstract

Recent sociological scholarship has turned toward organizational and cultural explanations to understand police use of force, emphasizing institutional logics such as the “danger imperative” and the role of officer training in shaping responses to uncertainty. While this work highlights how policing culture sustains force practices, it often overlooks how broader organizational fields stabilize definitions of justified force and confer external legitimacy on policing logics. This paper advances a field-level perspective by examining how courts participate in reproducing institutional logics through processes of legal endogeneity. Drawing on neoinstitutional theory, we argue that the Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness” standard established in Graham v. Connor (1989) represents a case in which organizational understandings of risk and threat become embedded in constitutional doctrine. Rather than acting solely as external constraints, judicial decisions translate professional assumptions into authoritative legal frameworks that shape how actors interpret legality, risk, and legitimacy.

The paper makes two contributions to the sociology of law and organizations. First, it extends theories of legal endogeneity beyond their traditional focus on corporate compliance by examining professions within legal institutions as actors who both wield and shape law. Second, by conceptualizing courts as field-level actors, it demonstrates how judicial deference reinforces and diffuses institutional logics across the organizational field. We show that the durability of policing practices stems not only from intraorganizational culture but also from legal processes that stabilize and legitimize institutional logics. By bridging organizational sociology and sociolegal studies, this analysis reframes police use of force as a product of broader institutional arrangements rather than solely individual behavior or departmental culture.

Authors

• Charlie Pollard, University of Arizona

• Amanda Pierson, University of Arizona