Partnerships with the police – logics and strategies of justification

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Political reforms call for new types of public-private or community partnerships, in which public services are shaped in collaboration with networks of public, business or non-governmental organizations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how municipal partners justify and thereby maintain partnerships with the police. Design/methodology/approach -The empirical material comprises documents and 26 semistructured interviews with civil servants, politicians, and police staff. This qualitative study investigates three Swedish municipalities engaged in partnerships with the same police authority. Findings -Based on Boltanski and Thévenot's order of worth, the paper describes how municipal partners manage two partly contradictory arrangements; one constituted by industrial and civic logics, and one constituted by domestic and industrial logics. Guided by these two different arrangements, they justify and thereby maintain their partnership with the police by alternating between a compromising strategy promoting adaptation to the police and a compensating strategy stating that they are independent partners with demands on the police. Research limitations/implications -This is a qualitative study that needs further confirmation before general conclusions can be drawn. Still, it suggests that partners justify themselves by making claims on being both collaborative and independent within these partnerships. Originality/value -Unlike research investigating how authorities initiate partnerships to organize integrated and cost-efficient public services, the paper highlights how partners justify their participation by alternating between two rather different but linked justifying strategies. The study applies a justificatory logic perspective that helps us understand that complex and sometimes contradictory arrangements of logics, which could threaten partner participation, also enable them to justify and thereby maintain their partnership with the police. Unlike institutional studies describing how tensions challenge organizational legitimacy this study describes how justificatory strains remain even when partners are able to justify their participation.

Justifying Coproduced Policeability: Restrained Creativity and New Modalities of (Dis)Agreements in the Swedish Police

“…In line with Weick and Sutcliff (2007), it is assumed that divergent inputs from municipal partners increase demands on police to extend their repertoire of responses, affecting how they justify coproduction (Rolandsson, 2015). Tensions between approaches to various logics would then complicate matters for police trying to justify different conventions of coproduced practices.…”

“…They must be prepared to manage the external input and the resultant strains in various ways. In particular, the responsive justificatory modality reflects how partner authorities and their interests in locally embedded policeability force the police to accept persistent tensions between practices guided by industrial and domestic values (Rolandsson, 2015;cf. Savage, 2007).…”

Voicing the Puppet: Accommodating Unresolved Institutional Tensions in Digital Open Practices

“…This is in keeping with previous studies that have described schemas for handling multiple logics (Kodeih & Greenwood, 2014; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999). Such schemas orchestrate compromises and the forging of new hybrid organizational terms (Battilana & Dorado, 2010), loosely coupled practices that promote legitimate coexistence of identities, or resolutions that allow one logic to dominate or be prioritized over another (Cloutier & Langley, 2013; Rolandsson, 2015; van Gestel & Hillebrand, 2011). While the mechanisms presented in these works mainly draw on the assumption that legitimacy is a direct result of resolved institutional tensions (Greenwood, Raynard, Kodeih, Micelotta, & Lounsbury, 2011; Pache & Santos, 2010, 2013; Thornton et al, 2012), this study seeks to show how legitimacy can be maintained in spite of unresolved institutional tensions.…”

“…Common to these previous studies is an emphasis on the legitimacy of initiatives where management is striving for influence or organizational integration despite tensions (Greenwood et al, 2011; cf. Rolandsson, 2015). Although the present study draws on these insights, our empirical focus is the current digitalization of news production, which is a different type of phenomenon.…”

Multi-professional work practices in the field of immigrant integration – examples of collaboration between the police and social work

“…Multi-professional working can be called in various terms like inter-professional working, multi-agency working or partnership working. It contains a shared understanding that "a joined up" approach with "joined up thinking" would reduce the overlap between services and promote the pooling together of expertise and resources, resulting in not only added value but a more effective and less costly service (McLaughlin, Reubsaet & Vanhanen, 2011: 20; see also Isoherranen, 2012;Rolandsson, 2015;Vanhanen, 2016).…”