Towards an Organizational Folklore of Policing: The Storied Nature of Policing and the Police Use of Storytelling

Abstract

For police officers, much of the working day consists of telling stories about everyday policing and events. Although the study of narrative and storytelling in organizational contexts is an expanding area of research, the same cannot be said of the study of narrative and storytelling in a police context, which remains an under-researched, although not unexplored, subject of study. Using the work of management-narrative theorists such as David Boje and Yiannis Gabriel as a starting point, this article considers policing organizations and agencies as storytelling organizations. This is achieved through a literature review of the ‘storied’ nature of policing and the police use of storytelling in an organizational context. Thus, this reflective article contributes to the developing literature in the field by reviewing and mapping the literature, highlighting potential areas for future research.

Notes

¹ This thesis also resonates with entrepreneurship and leadership scholars.

² A ‘butterfly man’ is a senior officer who is moved about departments and roles with rapid short-term posts designed to give him experience and credibility. The problem is that he is never in a post long enough to learn to do the particular job or role correctly. He flits about; hence the term ‘butterfly’.

³ 'Great Man’ theory is criticized by scholars such as Spencer (1896) as being a hopelessly primitive, childish, and unscientific position, in that ‘Great Men’ were merely products of their time and social environment. This also holds true for police stories because such men are made by society via their particular organizational culture. Cawthon (1996) argues that situational forces and leadership theories cannot always account for the emergence of great leaders and that it is remiss of leadership scholars to refuse to recognize ‘Great Man theory’ as a legitimate and meaningful avenue to understanding.

⁴ UK police officers have shoulder numbers on their uniforms, the first two numbers of which represent the year they joined. Thus, a number beginning with sixty-three indicates twenty years more experience than one beginning with eighty-three.

⁵ We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. A putative story is one in which the speaker does not have direct evidence of what he/she is asserting, but has inferred a meaning on the basis of some other knowledge or something else (in this case, an existing body of police knowledge or folklore, which to listeners ‘rings true’ with the facts they already knew). Many television and movie representations of police narratives (e.g. the series Cops) had such putative stories told by officers and acted upon by other officers.

⁶The Bill is a British television crime drama about ‘Sun Hill’, a fictional police station in London.

⁷ Police training revolves around book-learning by rote and favours those with prodigious memories. Street-based learning is learning by doing, or mimesis. This is where stories come into their own. However, much police wisdom cannot be codified nor written down.

⁸ The first is the Official Secrets Act, which one has to sign upon joining the police. He is not free to discuss many of the details for the actual cases he dealt with.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Smith

Dr Robert Smith is a Reader in Entrepreneurship in the Aberdeen Business School at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. He is a former police officer and the Scottish Institute for Policing Lecturer in Leadership and Management. His primary research focus is on entrepreneurship and on narrative in a variety of organizational settings.

Sarah Pedersen

Professor Sarah Pedersen is in the Department of Communication, Marketing, and Media in the Aberdeen Business School at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. She is particularly interested in blogging and other contemporary narrative forms, such as social media.

Simon Burnett

Dr Simon Burnett is the Research Theme Leader for the Information and Communication theme in the Institute for Management Governance and Society research institute in the Aberdeen Business School at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. He is also a Reader and Research Coordinator in the Department of Information Management. His research interests are in the area of information and knowledge management and narrative.