The ‘haves and have-nots’ of social support during police recruitment: why the playing field is anything but level

ABSTRACT

Current police recruitment research is often focused on disproportionate outcomes based upon identity-based categories such as race, ethnicity, or gender. National government statistics and political discourse support this research agenda, indicating a significant recruitment gap in representation in England and Wales. This gap has resulted in the design and use of ‘in-house’ positive action initiatives for police recruitment, with little examination of their impact or otherwise. To understand this research gap, this paper applies a labour market lens to police recruitment. This study contributes to existing research by exploring how police recruits navigate the recruitment process using their social resources. It represents 27 in-depth, participant-led, long-form interviews within an English Constabulary, informed by the theory of Social Embeddedness. It explores how candidates who did not receive positive action navigated and perceived their recruitment process, whilst using their friends, family, and acquaintances for both instrumental and pastoral support. This is contrasted against those candidates that utilised positive action initiatives. The results illustrate developed social embeddedness within police recruitment in the researched constabulary. Recruits who drew heavily upon social contacts experienced instrumental and pastoral support throughout the recruitment process. Some stages of recruitment were more socially embedded than others, resulting in some specific, instrumental advantages. The nature of this social support evidences how disproportionality can be generated in police recruitment. Candidates using positive action initiatives experienced negative, pastoral social support, and temporal instrumental support – illuminating a very different journey during their presocialisation into policing. This finding underpins evidentially informed positive action interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• diversity
• representation
• recruitment

Introduction

Substantial academic literature investigates police recruitment. Over time, the focus of this research has changed, with significant periods focusing on police personality (Vastola 1978, Adlam 1982, Gudjonsson and Adlam 1983, James et al. 1984, Evans et al. 1992, Lorr and Strack 1994, Twersky-Glasner 2005), race in police recruitment (Gazell 1971, Regoli and Jerome 1975, Decker and Smith 1980, Farrell 1983, Holdaway 1991, 1994, Jain 2005, Murji 2014, Waters et al. 2007, Spence et al. 2017, Aiello 2019), and more latterly gender in police recruitment (Prenzler 1997, Zhao et al. 2014, Spence et al. 2017, Aiello 2019). Police personality still plays a part in research today (Whitman et al. 2022), as does identity (Aiello 2019), yet the two are rarely linked, and even more rarely linked to operational efficacy. It is possible to draw this diaspora of research together and gain significant insight over time; however, combining the concepts used requires a cross-disciplinary analysis of the literature.

In practice, it is likely that the pragmatic nature of policing (Bowling et al. 2020) influences choices around police recruitment, with human resource recruitment practitioners and senior officers simply ‘making do’ with current recruitment practices, often at the behest of governmental budgetary cycles and grants or allowances. This has been exacerbated in England and Wales with the introduction of short-term, politically elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC’s) who direct the objectives and priorities of serving chief officer teams. Recruitment through a sustained period of government austerity (Sindall and Sturgis 2013) also posed a challenge, as chief officers were forced to make disproportionate savings from police staff, as they simply could not make serving officers redundant under police regulations (Police Federation 2017) but did not replace officers resigning/retiring. Police officers do not tend to work in human resources departments; therefore, these departments are likely to have suffered cuts in non-police staff under austerity. These departments needed to be quickly re-staffed because of the proposed uplift of twenty thousand police officers that began in 2019 (National Audit Office 2022).

Because of these circumstances, an empirically led steer for policing recruitment research in England and Wales is absent. This is inevitable not only because of the long period of recent austerity and the subsequent uplift of officers over a very short period, but also because of the political influence affecting policing. Chief officers are often not tenured for long periods nor are they experts in police recruitment. Changes in budgetary conditions can occur without warning and remain volatile alongside an unpredictable, local political influence from rotating or constantly shifting PCC’s (serving a five-year tenure between elections). These conditions can result in a lack of continuity in internal policy and practice development with police forces, often causing theoretical approaches to be applied to evaluate or understand the single recruitment windows within individual services. These instances may show great promise only to be supplanted by another method applied to another window in another service several years later. This pattern mirrors the professional environment within police forces, as the short-term approaches, political tenures, high and low pressures to recruit subject to budgetary restrictions and political support for in-depth and persistent research vary tremendously. This leads to a veritable patchwork quilt in police recruitment research, often with novel or emerging theories applied in context. There seem to be some exceptions to this research that feature in other places in policing literature, such as hotspot policing (Kennedy et al. 2011, Mohler 2014), stop and search (Bradford 2017), and procedural justice (Hough et al. 2010, Bottoms and Tankebe 2012, Herrington and Roberts 2013). These are all linked to operational police performance and seem to theoretically maintain persistent development. Questions could be asked as to why police recruitment research has not maintained this momentum. Instead, it represents a staccato of different theoretical applications that have not developed coherently over time.

This suggests that there may be a connection between decision-making in police operational settings based on expediency, the influence of local and national politics, a lack of physical resources, and the overall research output looking at police recruitment. It may also be the case that police forces have chosen to invest in academic access and partnerships for crime control and legitimacy while considering recruitment to be a subject of lower overall importance. Over time, this lack of attention may explain the current levels of proportionate representation within the English and Welsh forces, which are objectively poor (National Statistics 2022). Positive action initiatives have therefore been implemented across England and Wales quickly and widely, yet there is little research that directly supports where exactly they are needed or indeed whether they work. This study aims to address this research gap by exploring the use of social resources for successful police recruits using the lens of social embeddedness (Granovetter 2017).

The literature that follows forms the basis for this investigation and comprises three parts. The first discusses the theoretical and underlying requirements for representation in policing, the second discusses how positive action is used to attempt to reach that goal, and the third explores the theoretical framework used in this article.

Addressing representation in police recruitment

Outside the policing environment, the theoretical development of Representative Bureaucracy (Krislov 2012, p. 1974) has persisted in many disciplines. This theory posits that a representative bureaucracy is more likely to make decisions that more equitably reflect the population it represents. This theory has generated a great deal of attention in recent decades, supported and occasionally subsumed by a developing body of academic critical theories surrounding race and ethnicity. In many police recruitment-based studies, improving representation for police forces represents a clear and unadulterated good, while also being relevant to fundamental policing concepts such as policing by consent. The theory has flourished amidst a shifting political background concerning representation within policing, but several key public-facing reports have justifiably maintained the spectrum of under-representation as a problem over time. These have repeatedly highlighted the issue, preventing it from being overwhelmed by traditional narratives such as crime control.

The Scarman Report (1981) was the first influential parliamentary report to address community tension through race, with further emphasis emerging in the Macpherson Report (1999). There have been many assessments of the success of these reports (Foster and Souhami 2005, Rowe 2007, Home Affairs Select Committee 2009, Holdaway and O’Neill 2013, Rowe and Garland 2013, Souhami 2014, 2020), illustrating a mixed set of results within police forces, set against a backdrop of increasing racialisation throughout policing (Holdaway 1991, 1994, 1997, 2003). This is well described in the insights gathered and edited by Rowe (2016), whose book describes the concept of police diversity as complex and contested. This has not prevented its recent political reemergence, with the Baroness Casey Review (2023, p. 24) of standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police force recommending specifically, ‘A narrowing in the gap between the diversity of the Met’s workforce, including its officers and senior officers, and the makeup of the city it polices.’ These reports have created a tidal environment of internal reform in policing, alongside a body of academic research concerning representation as both instrumental to policing performance (Murji 2014, Hong 2015, 2017, Hochstedler et al. 2016) and, in some cases, problematic (Regoli and Jerome 1975, Decker and Smith 1980, Hur 2012, Nicholson-Crotty et al. 2017). The examples in these references are distributed across the Anglosphere in the last half-century, and all employ varying methodologies and analyses. In practical terms, this research sits alongside currently supportive political will (Home Affairs Select Committee 2016, House of Commons 2017) bolstered by the current action plan from the College of Policing (2023). The plan provides no place to hide for police forces; they must strive for proportionate representation.

Positive action in police recruitment

By accepting this target of representation, it is now possible to examine the means used to reach it. This study examines positive action or affirmative action in the United States (Thornton 2003), a layering in of an intervention that seeks to assist under-represented candidates through a particular challenge or process that has been found to be discriminatory (McCrudden 1986, p. 223). If positive action is introduced to augment the success rates of under-represented recruits, this assumes that the ongoing processes are fit for their current purpose and that the changes in attainment are the recruit’s responsibility, but with extra provided assistance. Although it may be quicker to remove or replace disproportionate process stages altogether rather than employing lengthy positive action initiatives that represent an addition to already unwieldy recruitment processes, this is a high-risk solution and must be undergirded by the best available evidence. Unfortunately, there is little evidence grounded in a solid theoretical framework in the policing sphere; nothing appears to have developed persistently over time in this area that offers police forces a viable alternative.

The aim of current positive action in police recruitment is therefore to ‘lift’ under-represented candidates ‘up’ to the required standards for a particular recruitment stage. However, it is unclear what is being ‘lifted’ and whether the standards that require ‘lifting’ are evidence-based or even necessary. Applying a critical perspective, there may be no need to layer in a positive action process to’ lift the attainment of under-represented recruits with regard to a fitness test, when the fitness test is not linked to superior performance as a constable. Even the notion of ‘lifting up’ implies that under-represented individuals require some form of ‘help’ that others do not, and this can negatively affect those subject to the positive action through stereotype threat (Holzer and Neumark 2000). Another approach in this area may be to put evidence-based controls in place that actively re-adjust scores for candidates where persistent disproportionality is evidenced, without adding further requirements for the candidates themselves to navigate. This second example is more controversial, as it qualifies as positive discrimination (Bennett et al. 2005).

Therefore, police executives do not have a definitive body of evidence to assist them in making decisions about recruitment disproportionality. There is no developed theory regarding the application of positive action initiatives in police forces in England and Wales, and there is a lack of practical guidance concerning what exactly each potential solution does within the current workforce when it is implemented. A set of potential options is available.

• Review existing recruitment processes for disparity and alter/adjust the processes themselves

• Review existing processes for disparity and replace the stage causing disparity entirely

• Review existing processes for disparity and layer in positive action to address the disparity

• Maintain existing processes

These options already assume that there are enough under-represented potential recruits to address the process itself as a justified problem rather than altering the policing career pipeline. Isolating the recruitment process in this way allows a more rigorous approach to understand why recruitment itself may have disparity, but it does not address recruits that did not apply. A body of research (Raganella and White 2004, Wu et al. 2009, Cox 2011, Cochran and Warren 2012, Zhao et al. 2014, Murji 2014, Spence et al. 2017) explores why under-represented candidates do not apply to the police. This article does not deal with this problem directly, yet anticipatory socialisation (Bennett 1984, Conti 2006) can and should be discussed as a potential variable when it comes to potential disproportion in recruitment outcomes; it is possible that there may be negative social influence from peers and family for some candidates when they disclose that they wish to join the police. Option one above, where original processes are reviewed for disparity and the processes themselves changed should be explored more deeply, but as current police forces in England and Wales opt for layering in positive action rather than existing process changes, research that directly addresses this gap is necessary.

The social building blocks of the police labour market

To understand why there may be disparity in the recruitment process, there must be proper consideration of what is being potentially imported (Charman 2017) into the existing workforce. Labour moves from outside to inside, and it is in this transition that disparity in outcomes may occur. During this transition phase, several variables should be considered. These variables may or may not be causal in determining recruitment success. In the College of Policing’s assessment centre processes prior to the Covid 19 pandemic, disproportionality was certainly evident (College of Policing 2020a), with under-represented candidates failing in 16.7% more instances than other white candidates. The College of Policing assessment process is a standard approach to recruitment and is used by all police forces in England and Wales. These statistics represent the best indicator for the service to measure disparity in a particular recruitment stage at the macro level. It is usually ‘sandwiched’ between constabulary-based processes, such as the application forms and final in-force interviews. These stages are not standardised or monitored centrally; therefore, there is an inability to examine recruitment disparity across larger numbers of police forces. It is of note that the College of Policing has sought to rectify this disproportionality during the Covid 19 pandemic, introducing a change in method. Traditional in-person exercises have been replaced with online processes (College of Policing 2020b, 2021), and this has already evidenced an over 5% reduction in disproportionality. This is an attempt to remedy an undefined problem; the change of method has led to a lowering of outcome disproportionality, but the ‘why’ this has worked is absent.

In the wider labour market literature, Granovetter (2017) studied the interaction between the economy and the labour market since his seminal paper, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ (1973). The theory developed into a theory of ‘social embeddedness’ (Granovetter 2002), which not only investigates the existence of social ties, but also their interrelationships over time. Through his research, he illustrated that some professions are highly socially embedded, whereas others can be removed from social influence. This theory has developed in both coherence and empiricism, as other scholars have pursued in various labour settings (Grieco 1987, Haythornthwaite 1996, Lin 1999, Elliott 2001, Waldinger 2005, Tassier and Menczer 2008, Eckstein and Peri 2018). Research has suggested that there are significant differences in highly family oriented, embedded employment roles (Grieco 1987), and those roles that appear to spread across whole immigrant ethnicities (Tassier and Menczer 2008, Eckstein and Peri 2018). Social embeddedness is absent in police recruitment literature, with only a single systematic review discussing how wider socially embedded emergency service professionals benefit from greater resilience in recruits with family based social resources (Geuzinge et al. 2020).

Outside of the policing recruitment literature, scholars have examined how job vacancy information is exchanged in labour markets (Haythornthwaite 1996). They have shown that beneficial information for job opportunities may be passed through chance encounters with acquaintances (Parnes and Granovetter 1976), while other jobs that have more highly embedded social structures groom potential recruits over lengthy periods (Grieco 1987, Willis 2017). When the latter is in place, theory suggests that some jobs may exist with what can become an ‘extended internal labor market’ (Manwaring 1984). This is where potential applicants are selected by existing employees, and coached, cajoled, and supported into a profession. There are hints of such a network’s existence in police socialisation studies (Van Maanen 1973, 1975, Bennett 1984, Fielding 1988, Charman 2017). This may explain why positive action is needed to raise representation in policing organisations. At present, the need for positive action cannot be ruled out or ruled in empirically using anything other than disproportionality outcomes. This could be construed as being a ‘racism of the gaps’ approach:

Process results in disproportionate outcomes (the gap) = Process is racist

This is unsophisticated and does not allow intelligent and targeted remedial interventions. It is possible that a proportion of the advantage conferred on candidates in recruitment in England and Wales is pre-social in nature. Some candidates may experience lengthy and instructive social coaching through their existing networks, which results in disproportionate outcomes in the police recruitment processes. This is the socialisation period before becoming a police officer, and objective police recruitment processes do not measure or acknowledge it; they only experience the outcome of it. It is possible to design positive action that actively redresses these imbalances.

Therefore, this study seeks to explore this research gap by asking the following questions:

What are the pre-social benefits that successful police recruits have experienced and how are they used in police recruitment?

These specifically address how successful police recruits use social embeddedness, thereby illuminating the nature of the pre-social advantage they may possess and informing on the design of positive action.

Method

Ethics permission was granted by Canterbury Christ Church University to investigate the use of social networks via personal interviews with new police recruits who had just been successful in the police recruitment process. The interviews were conducted by the first author over several months in 2017–2018.

The interviews were conducted using long form, semi-structured (Creswell 2003), and participant-led interviews (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009). The interviews began with structured questions that examined their prior police-related social contacts and demographics, followed by open-ended questions that explored their personal experiences of recruitment. In the open-question section of the interviews, participants were allowed to discuss their experiences freely; probing was conducted as they explored their social interactions and support. The intention of these interviews was not to prove the scale, but to investigate the mundane social contact that took place between other serving or former officers and those interviewees as they navigated the recruitment process. Although this method has limitations, such as wide generalizability (Lincoln and Guba 2000, Schofield 2002), the validity (Creswell and Miller 2000) of the data gathered was triangulated with other theoretically informed labour market empirical literature (Granovetter 1973, Grieco 1987, Tümen 2017, Yuksek 2017). This indicates the suitability of the theory for interviews in this context. Examples of structured and unstructured questions are as follows Table 1:

Table 1. Examples of questions used.

Structured question 1	Did you have any parents that were in the police prior to joining? (probe who)
Structured question 2	Did you have any friends that were in the police prior to joining? (probe who)
Unstructured question 1	Why the police? (probe and explore social network influence)
Unstructured question 2	Could you describe the application process? (probe and explore social network influence)

Data collection took place in a single constabulary. The sampling was purposive (Etikan 2016) to capture fresh recruits with the best recall of their experiences during the recruitment process. It took place in the on-site police training academy within their classrooms; therefore, all participants were adults and capable of full consent. Participants were recruited across four different ‘windows’ of police recruitment, and 26 interviews were conducted. As an employee of the researched constabulary, the lead researcher found access to research participants to be a straightforward process, but this did present some problems with the navigation of rank (Davis 2018) during data collection. Visible rank was purposefully hidden through no uniform being present as they were a serving inspector, but verbally disclosed during the initial discussion about the study for honesty and transparency reasons. The researcher did not work in the training department and had no daily contact with participants. The new recruits’ agency was emphasised when consent forms were provided on the desks before they arrived for class, and they were allowed to fill them after the researcher had left to prevent coercion (Davis 2022). The trainers in the class collected them to return to the researcher. The trainers were unaware of who had signed to participate, as the section was contained on the rear of the forms. Of the four classes attended, 26 took part, averaging an approximate recruitment rate of 21% from classes of around 20 recruits each. The researcher transcribed the interviews manually and coded them using NVIVO (Richards 1999, Leech and Onwuegbuzie 2011). A mixed coding approach was used that involved both emergent and theoretically based themes. The existing literature on social embeddedness (Granovetter 2002, 2017) led to primary codes that represent instrumental and pastoral support from layers of actors in existing social networks (Hesketh and Stubbs 2023). These two codes represented tangible physical help in the case of instrumental support, and emotional and motivational support in the case of pastoral support. Other codes emerged from ‘sitting with the data’ (Belotto 2018), such as those solely related to seeking information from the organisation on vetting standards or the gradual identity-based nudges that occurred over time through indirect social endorsements. The codes allowed the researcher to see how instrumental support emerged from existing social networks and how this was bolstered and developed with pastoral support over time.

The sample of n = 26 contained n = 22 self-defined white British candidates, n = 3 British Asian candidates, and n = 1 from a self-defined mixed-race background. n = 6 of the candidates in total qualified as being from under-represented communities (this included sexual preference orientation) and experienced positive action initiatives. n = 11 of the participants were male, and n = 15 were female. Of note, n = 13 of the successful interviewed candidates were ex-employees, having held either full-time, part-time, or volunteering roles within a prior policing organisation. None of the participants were personally known to the researcher. The under-represented candidates in terms of race made up 15% of the interviewed cohort; this was higher than the reported rates of under-representation in Constabulary, which was approximately 5% at the time of this study (Police Workforce - Gov.uk 2023). This may indicate a higher willingness to participate in such research from underrepresented groups.

Findings

As this study investigated the influence of social networks on recruits navigating the recruitment process, the initial results section concerns the frequency and distribution of existing social network access and use. The next section includes details about how social support manifests alongside some narrative context illustrating the different journeys of the candidates in receipt of diverse types of social support.

The frequency and distribution of social support

It is noteworthy that all candidates accessed social support to some extent as they traversed the recruitment process. This was a salient finding, and indicated a developed level of social embeddedness for candidates within the recruitment process. Table 2 illustrates the types of social support per application stage and the instances of pastoral support reported by candidates.

Table 2. Frequencies of social support by social tie.

	Application Form	Assessment Centre	Medical	Vetting	Fitness Test	Final Interview	Pastoral Support
Acquaintances	3	2				1	1
Friends	7	9			1	3	12
Close Friends	1
Family	1						2
Close Family	11	5	1	1	1	2	30
Work Related Support	7	3			1	1	6
Total	30	19	1	1	3	7	51

The frequency of social support discussed by candidates lay heaviest at the stages of the initial application process and assessment centre. This illustrates that the first two stages of police recruitment had the highest levels of social interaction and support across the cohort. It should also be noted that much of this support lay in Close Family, Friends, and Work-Related support. Pastoral support was particular to the type of tie, with Close Family and Friends again garnering the greatest levels of support. Close familial pastoral support was highly represented, indicating that candidates experienced a great deal of emotional and motivational support from their families. Of note, n = 13 who were prior employees and used their active social ties at work to assist with the initial application form. This is evidence of an ‘internal-internal’ labour market, where candidates from within the police help each other progress into the post of police officer. This is peculiar to the police environment and is not present in extant literature in this area (Manwaring 1984, Haythornthwaite 1996). This may be due to the lack of internal pathways for existing police employees who must apply through external recruitment processes to become police officers. This puts them into competition with the external labour market within the same recruitment process, conferring an obvious social and instrumental advantage. This has the potential to severely disadvantage those with fewer police-related social contacts, as those who can lever such resources from being already present within the force will operate as competition for a limited number of spaces.

To further understand this, Table 3 shows the breakdown of existing ties across the demographics of the cohort.

Table 3. Sum of Social Tie type.

White Females
Candidate	Acquaintances	Friends	Close Friends	Family	Close Family	Prior Employee	Ties Used	Cumulative Ties
1	X	X	X			X	X	4
2	X	X	X			X	X	4
3				X			X	1
5	X						X	1
11	X			X		X	X	3
12				X			X	1
13	X						X	1
15	X			X		X	X	3
18		X				X	X	2
19	X	X				X	X	3
20	X						X	1
21		X				X	X	2
23		X					X	1
26	X	X				X	X	3
Totals	9	7	2	4		8	14	2.1 Average
Percentages	64%	50%	14%	29%	0%	57%	100%
White Males
Candidate	Acquaintances	Friends	Close Friends	Family	Close Family	Prior Employee	Ties Used	Cumulative Ties
6	X	X	X		X	X	X	5
7	X	X				X	X	3
9	X	X					X	2
10	X						X	1
14	X	X					X	2
16	X	X				X	X	3
22	X						X	1
24	X	X				X	X	3
Totals	8	6	1		1	4	8	2.5 Average
Percentages	100%	75%	12.5%	0%	12.5%	50%	100%
Black Asian Minority Ethnic Female
Candidate	Acquaintances	Friends	Close Friends	Family	Close Family	Prior Employee	Ties Used	Cumulative Ties
17		X					X	1
Totals		1					1	1 Average
Percentages	0%	100%	0%	0%	0%	0%	100%
Black Asian minority Ethnic Male
Candidate	Acquaintances	Friends	Close Friends	Family	Close Family	Prior Employee	Ties Used	Cumulative Ties
4	X	X		X		X	X	4
8	X	X					X	2
25	X	X				X	X	3
Total	3	3		1		2	3	3 Average
Percentages	100%	100%	0%	33%	0%	66%	100%

This table shows how every successful candidate levered social support to navigate the police recruitment process in some way (n = 26). This is to some extent expected, as joining a profession like the police is likely to have a significant social impact. This finding also alludes to the relative importance of social support for these candidates, who all chose to consult existing ties in some way before or while traversing the process. This raises questions about candidates from under-represented groups who may find such social support scarce. Family ties were also more highly represented in successful female recruits (n = 4), which may suggest varying levels of social tie type importance for candidates across genders. The ‘prior employee’ code encompassed candidates who already worked for the police as a Special, a Communications Room Operator, Investigatory Support, or as a Special constable.

The nature of social support for those candidates with accessible, existing social ties to the police

To investigate the nature of social tie access and usage, social tie interactions are explored in detail. The following examples detail provided assistance to white candidates who did not access positive actions. The quotes were not selected by specific design but were a result of the coding in this area. They are representative of the wider themes, rather than individual instance. Instrumental support of the following nature was almost exclusive to white candidates. Many of the instances appeared mundane and concerned general conversations about the process itself.

… and then, my grandad, his friend had a son, who has literally just started Merseyside police. He’d just got in about two months prior, so he was telling me a bit about what happens in the assessment centre, and what happens when you start.

This quote was a simple encounter with a friend of close family, but the discussion centred on familiarising the candidate with the structure and content of the assessment centre. The College of Policing does provide generic guidance on what the stages of the centre contain, but there is no familiar contact available that meets a candidate in a social setting. With each candidate that mentioned social assistance, more details about what this assistance contained were probed:

[help with] my examples that I could use if that makes sense? Would you use this one, or that one, or … because they were the sort of examples that you sort of store up and think, even in the future if I ever need to do an interview or whatever this is a really good example for that. And it’s sort of storing those ideas, and then, like ‘what’s the better one now?’ Because after 13 years teaching, that one example is like, well old, is this one better? It was that sort of conversation.

This is very practical advice from the candidate’s brother, who had recently been through the process and represents direct feedback on choices for content of the application form. Assuming that the advice is timely and based on recent successful experience in the process (in this case, it was), this is direct evidence of social tie access conferring practical advantage to those candidates with existing contacts. This is supported by the following example:

[who provided support?] My mum’s, friend’s daughter. She’s in [the police]. And she sent me some of her application answers to look through. She’d not been in long, probably 6 months to a year, I think. She’d been a PCSO before for quite a few years, and she’d gone to [local police force] as a PC … I was given her email address. It was all done over email. She sent me her application form. The questions that she sent me were questions that I had pretty much answered, but it was good to compare what she’d put … So, I was able to check whether I was able to hit all the right points.

This example represents remote, temporally relevant coaching, and should not be underestimated. Having a recently successful application form, in company with written feedback that is specific and actionable, allows the candidate direct assistance with structure and content. It is of note that the above example was sourced not through a close friend, but through the candidate’s mother; strong social ties within existing social networks were not necessary for people to access this support. The perceived usefulness of the information provided to candidates also increases with current and applicable relevance. It is of no use to a candidate to source initial application feedback from experienced officers with many years of service, as the recruitment process has changed many times since their recruitment. Instrumental social ties were often located through a ‘friend of a friend’, suggesting that the structure of instrumental social embeddedness in police recruitment may rest disproportionately among weak social ties (Granovetter 1973). This finding is worthy of further research at scale, as it would further illuminate the underlying social structures that inform the police recruitment process.

The instrumental support did not rest just in the coaching arena, but also in the direction towards existing external resources that may help the candidate directly. This direction tended to come through work colleagues and friend-based contacts:

“How to pass the new police selection system,” Harry Tooley, Billy Hodge, and Katherine Tooley. Practice for Psychometric Tests and succeed at the assessment centre. He gives it me, said it helped him massively get through. I went through some of the stuff with him.

[with relation to a recruitment course] One of the other people that was working in the office, he’d just applied, and he’d just got through, so he was in his probation, his ten-week tuition phase. He’d advised me to go on it. He said that it had helped him, it had helped him a lot … 

My husband works for the ambulance service, so he had a friend who had got in [to the police] who was actually a friend of mine, which is quite ironic because I helped him get in and then I was the one who failed that year. And he got in … This book was good so the next time I applied I used the book that he said.

The use of third-party material assistance was usually referred through an existing social tie, but was also sourced through generic Google searches by some candidates. The difference was often in the endorsement, in that a personal referral to third-party materials was often accompanied by assurance that it had been used by other prior candidates to succeed. This provides an element of reliability to third-party material and appears to be especially prevalent in existing police employee settings (see Interviewee 18 above):

… and my friend has a DVD as well actually regarding the application process. I did a lot of studying before the assessment centre and interview. It was quite stressful *probes the origin of the referral* In [the police communications room] I knew people who had just gone on the recruitment [process] before and got through, and he told me about this book and DVD. So, he lent me his DVD, but he didn’t have the book, so I’ve bought the book myself.

This collection of social and instrumental social support was straightforward for white British candidates, many of whom were prior employees of the organisation. This represents a strongly performing nexus of potential candidates from within the police force, actively supporting and reinforcing the skills of their existing social contacts. This includes direction to and sharing of third-party support material, tangible assistance with the content of application forms and examples to be used in the assessment centre, and a series of regular social nudges reinforcing their decision to become police officers. Officers from within the job itself are coaching colleagues and friends who are, in this case, already heavily connected with the profession. This manifests as a wall of competition for anyone from without the profession without such access.

The nature of social support for candidates utilising positive action

In the studied constabulary, a number of positive action opportunities were available for under-represented candidates to access. These included the Black Police Association’s offer of personal contact taken up by a single individual, a localised leadership programme for under-represented candidates at a local college again taken by a single individual, and a process of support offered via Human Resources (HR), which all under-represented candidates used. Interviewee 17, an under-represented female, discussed her experience with HR support:

But I do feel like I had an advantage because I qualified for the positive action scheme they were doing. So, after each process I was invited to headquarters, and we got a presentation about it and what was going to be expected of you. So, I had the opportunity to have a practice interview, and assessment centre. And also practice doing the incident statement. So, I feel like I’ve had quite a lot of help in that respect, because otherwise I can imagine it’s really, really hard to pass each stage … I feel like I’ve been really lucky for my first time and having no previous police experience.

The candidate further elaborated on the content of some of the assistance.

[they were] referring to Just how the day would be set out. And obviously they talked about doing each stage. So, they talked about examples for the numerical and verbal reasoning.

This is very similar to the instrumental support received by white candidates. Yet, there is an addition, described by the candidate as an ‘advantage’ and a feeling of having been ‘lucky.’ The advantage conferred on this candidate through positive action was the same format and content as that accessed through the white candidate’s social networks.

This was a continuing theme, with another candidate expressing how they gathered assistance through the policing leadership programme, subsequently again gathering a personal feeling of ‘advantage.’

… I could always email [the leader of the course], or give her a message, and ask for any advice. And throughout the whole thing at each stage, she did a workshop or what have you, going into detail of what to expect. And she was there for a shoulder to cry on basically, so I would ask what does she think would be the best example, or … and she would just give me gentle guidance. I think, doing the bleep test – like she took her own morning to attend that just to help me. Just having that person for reassurance really helped. Because I’d imagine if you were new to the course that for anyone would be quite hard. So that’s why I do feel that that’s been an advantage. It is a hard course. If I didn’t have all that support network, I wouldn’t have done it first time.

This last quote again describes personal access to a serving officer contact, providing the same information and support as social contacts for white candidates. This illustrates the suitability of the method used for the positive action but is accompanied by a feeling of having some privilege. From the researcher’s perspective, this was construed as guilt or shame. The feeling of advantage came from being provided with what they perceived as ‘extra’ added over and above that of the other candidates. Other candidates received this support, but the perceived salience of this support mattered. Social support was invisible and manifested through existing social contacts, positive action support was highly visible, and candidates believed themselves to be receiving ‘extra’ help.

Candidates from under-represented backgrounds also experienced more negative social support prior to becoming police officers. This was evidenced in quotes from under-represented candidates discussing their families’ perspectives on their career choices:

I live with my mum, so one parent. She’s quite apprehensive. She weren’t the best, she weren’t bowled over that I was joining the police, because of the things she sees and hears on the news. She didn’t think it was really a job that her daughter should go into, because I think she’s quite worried about getting assaulted and getting abuse from the public. Especially because growing up I got quite a lot of abuse racially. I got called quite a few things, so … I think just, that naturally as a parent she’s quite worried about whether I’m going to be safe.

This negative social impact was fleshed out in greater detail by a male candidate who applied from within the British Asian community.

… even when I was doing my degree it as they was like, “it’s pointless joining the police.” It was all going back to, “well who do you know that’s Asian that’s made it in the police?” And I didn’t have anyone that I could say, “well this person’s done it.” You know whereas they could say well, you know, “why don’t you follow like a legal background?” And look, “such a person, he’s a doctor, such a person’s a lawyer.” But they could give me examples of people who’d done it in the legal sector or in the medical sector or other professions but when I was trying to push for the police, that’s one of the questions I was coming across, well, “who do you know that’s done it in the police?!” And that’s when I didn’t really have an answer because I didn’t know anyone. My family didn’t know anyone.

This represents the opposite of the social support experienced by white candidates, who were essentially ‘pulled’ into the profession by their existing social contacts. This social support was identity-reinforcing and built through people already within their close social groups. The above example shows the degradation of the prospective identity of the candidate who had completed a policing degree against his immediate family’s wishes. The lower status of the profession within his community added a burden that was to be further reinforced by the perceived advantage gained from accessing positive action. This is akin to a ‘double hit’ upon his choice of profession; not only was he not supported into the profession socially, but he also accessed positive action that was perceived as additional support, causing guilt that white candidates did not experience. It is clear how the policing identity in the receipt of positive action is being built in very different ways, having important consequences for how recruits socialise into the culture or even remain within the profession (Charman and Tyson 2023). Social tie interactions over time for both those receiving social support and those receiving positive action can be viewed as a disparately connected system of profoundly unequal, identity-based building blocks (Hesketh and Stubbs 2023).

Discussion

Regarding Social Embeddedness theory (Granovetter 2017), the findings indicate that social ties in operation facilitate the navigation of the police recruitment process for those who have access to them. The use of networks and ties is most prevalent within the in-service application form and the national assessment centre stages. In this case, the recruitment process did not represent the close, family tie-based embeddedness of the Welsh Fish market (Grieco 1987) or the weak tie referral-based system observed in managerial professions in Granovetter’s early research (1973, Parnes and Granovetter 1976). Instead, it represents close family pastoral support, supported by coaching in informal settings, and encouraged using third-party support tools. These are especially prevalent when workplace connections exist. The use of ties to navigate the process is also recent in nature, as they are temporal. An example of why this must be the case is in the College of Policing’s evaluation of the switch to an online assessments report (2021). This is a recent change to a national process, relegating the ‘in-person’ based knowledge to below that of more recent online-based knowledge, suggesting a rolling system of social embeddedness. It is facilitated by friends or acquaintances who access timely information regarding existing recruitment processes. This may explain the existence and relative ‘strength’ of weaker social ties in some places, as evidenced in the first section of the findings, and contribute to the theoretical understanding of social embeddedness in police-related recruitment settings.

The particular manifestation of social embeddedness in this context may demand a level of pro-activity in positive action that requires organisational agility. Established, tried, and tested approaches to police recruitment may be reliable and allow for the recruitment of officers that ‘fit’ the ‘tried and tested’ construct. However, they also enable social embeddedness to function strongly and persistently over time. It is also possible that the reduction in disproportionality in recent national online assessments is, to some extent, the result of reducing the efficacy of social embeddedness. Any serving officer who has over two years of service has suffered a reduction in the value of their recruitment-based information because of the introduction of the new online assessment centre. The process through which those recruits went through, and the information that they had as a result, will not be as useful to those now going through a revamped and significantly altered online process.

The findings also illustrate that the use of social ties by candidates in police recruitment in England and Wales could be testable at scale. This would require continuous monitoring of how representative recruitment fluctuates with changes in the recruitment processes. Such a system would present a conundrum with regard to effective recruitment governance, as monitoring where social ties are highly influential would require improved data capture across all police forces. If these data were captured, it may allow police executives to understand how representation levels in recruitment respond to changes in structure and content at specific stages. Linos et al. (2017) are the closest to exploring this, as during their study, they isolated stages of their recruitment process and altered the guidance to under-represented candidates to affect attainment. This is a direct example of utilising improved data to combat instrumental social embeddedness, which the data above shows often benefits white candidates in the studied constabulary.

The comparative aspect of the study illuminates that the current nature of positive action represents the nature of the access to social ties that white candidates receive. This positive news finding conveys some hope for improving access to the profession. However, positive action does not continue past the point of recruitment, conveys feelings of undue advantage for those who receive it, and is often lain upon negative social support from family and friends prior to recruitment. In terms of the building of police identity, the evidence shows very different journeys from candidates who have existing social contacts and those who have not. This represents a complex problem, as the positive action intervention serves to bring candidates through the process, but does not assist in forming persistent social support or fostering feelings of social belonging with other officers. It may also create feelings of undue advantage, which this study shows is undeserved. The empirical evidence illustrates a high level of social access and tie usage by successful white candidates, a finding mirrored by the accounts of under-represented officers’ experiences of positive action content.

Regarding current practice, this study empirically adds support for ongoing positive action for under-represented candidates. It also supports further exploration of how positive action may be used to build longer-term social connections present in white candidates’ experiences. It is possible that practical ‘matching’ for under-represented candidates with serving officer mentors at an early stage in the process may help generate supportive longitudinal relationships, and it is also possible to consider larger scale change of recruitment processes on a rolling basis that ‘numbs’ the impact of social embeddedness. This latter change may lower the requirement for positive action for under-represented candidates. Both changes should rest upon wider research in this area and may require change at both the national policy level (in the College of Policing) and at the individual force level.

Limitations and future research

This study aimed to establish a foundation for understanding the experiences of candidates who received positive action and those who did not in the policing context. It is not, however, strongly generalisable (Schofield 2002) and should form a basis for further research in this area. This includes the possible establishment of complementary quantitative methods to create triangulation. However, it contributes to recruitment literature concerning representation in police recruitment, offering a theoretically based explanation for ongoing disproportionality. Larger efforts in this area are possible, but they will require improvement in data collection in England and Wales.

This study also assumes that representative recruitment is possible, presuming that there are equal distributions of the abilities required to traverse the recruitment process should access to social ties be considered. Refuting or developing this assumption further would require significant study to test this ability empirically, and a constantly changing cohort may require a longitudinal study. For example, it is only by controlling for variables such as being a prior employee/volunteer and levels of educational attainment that it would be possible to rule out these out as equally strong (or stronger) variables in disproportionality in recruitment. These may be equally viable aspects of social experience that contribute to success in the process. It is also difficult to lift the findings of this study into wider circulation in multiple police forces because of the differences in demography and application of various recruitment methods. Until some standardisation of police recruitment in England and Wales is established, and larger amounts of data are shared, any research in this area is limited in its scope of inference.

This study illustrates that social embeddedness is present and influential at specific points in the existing police recruitment process. This may explain why there is a representation gap. The entry routes have also been affected since the data collection in this article, and further contemporary investigation is needed to uncover how the efficacy of existing social ties in the police has been reinforced or dismantled for new recruits. There are several research opportunities in terms of the design of positive action. The feeling of advantage for those receiving positive action has been researched in other areas and is referred to as stereotype threat (Holzer and Neumark 2000). This stereotype threat effect is likely not to go away for recruits following recruitment, and as positive action exists for police promotion and development opportunities, this feeling may persist throughout their service. Further empirical work on the instrumental nature of police networks once inside the police would provide a solid evidence base for why such initiatives are needed. This is important work, as retention for under-represented recruits is also a problem for police forces (Barron and Holdaway 2016, Charman and Tyson 2023); this feeling of having received ‘extra’ support may actually be disadvantageous for under-represented officers in many different settings (Stubbs 2023). This research illustrates that the feeling of stereotype threat in this study was undeserved; therefore, it may also be undeserved in other policing areas.

The combatting of stereotype threat for under-represented candidates is also a potential addition to existing positive action schemes. What this may look like is unresearched, but it would be potentially useful to illuminate the power and proliferation of social network tie usage by other candidates in the processes they navigate. This may eliminate any feeling of perceived advantage, thereby affecting self-legitimacy. This is a promising area for future research and could ultimately build confidence in under-represented candidates. The same is true of exposing the power of existing networks to white candidates, to whom this will be almost wholly invisible. This may diminish feelings of injustice regarding perceived ‘extra help’ (Stubbs 2023) that under-represented candidates are seen to receive.

Finally, this study represents the ‘thin end of the wedge’ when it comes to the theoretical application of social embeddedness. Police promotion and development opportunity may be subject to its influence, but more widely it may be a significant contributor to the lower recruitment of under-represented candidates throughout England and Wales. This may be an opportunity for its wider application over a sustained period, offering some theoretical development that is thematic and instrumental in police recruitment design. This requires further exploration using both qualitative and quantitative methods but offers some hope when it comes to addressing the sticky problem of developing representation in police recruitment in England and Wales.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canterbury Christ Church University; Lancashire Constabulary.