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Abstract
Organizational design carries an interdisciplinary ethos. In the example of the police, this article elaborates a framework grasping tensions between managerism and professionalism, individualization and network society as developments influencing an organization; overt and covert crimes, and strategies as elements related to the police's task environment; but also, the challenge of knowledge diversity. The framework aims to overcome possible conflicts in and between different fields and blend them in a meaningful way for becoming organizational design. This focused framework provides three essential benefits. First, for police organizations, it is a ready-made solution to exploit. Second, for scholars in management, policing, and criminology, it calls for further examination. Third, it offers a practical solution for practitioners in various organizations to adjust and advance.
Keywords: police organization, organizational design, connective professionalism, framing, abduction
In addition to the overwhelming critique of policing in several countries, police organizations often struggle between the effects of political processes (how the police should look) and crime trends (how the police should handle safety issues). Both police reforms (Skogan, 2008; Bayley, 2008; Holmberg, 2014) and the police in dealing with crimes (Weisburd & Eck, 2004; Felson & Boba, 2010; Braga et al., 2014) are well-studied topics. However, these always contextual police practices with growing fancies of the police, political processes, and police dealing with crimes request new lenses in designing the police. These lenses should present a transparent and versatile design and grasp knowledge from management and safety. Moreover, since there are questions of adequacy in policing and the police, a base of knowledge must be clarified.
To answer these challenges and offer practical, complex, but still realistic tools, I will develop one possible framework for designing contemporary police organizations from the outside in. The framework aims to present knowledge from fields closely related to police organizations and turn it into practical value. This framework's three components are development in management, understanding crimes from the community's perspective, and abductive analysis.
The critique of policing leads to the question of profession and professionalization, which are under scrutiny in the field of policing (Weisburd & Neyroud, 2011; Lumsden, 2017) as well as in management (Noordegraaf, 2016; Noordegraaf et al., 2019), and in combination, they have a lot to offer for organizational design. The...