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Keywords Police, Institutional analysts, Institutionalism, Organizational structure, Empirical study
Abstract One of the important developments in police theory and research is the recognition of the institutional contexts in which departments participate. A body of theory, organized under the rubric of the "theory of institutionalized organizations", provides a theoretical framework for the conceptualization and empirical assessment of policing contexts and their relationship to police organizational structures and practice4. The first part of this paper provides an overview of institutional theory and reviews writings on the application of institutional theory to the police. The second section reviews research conducted on institutional theory across the field of criminal justice. The third part contrasts the competing notions of institutions and utility in institutional theory, and locates police organizations within Giddens' model of human agency.
Institutional theory: what is it?
The political pundits love to take a shot at government agencies. The government seems to spend endless time writing reports, holding meetings, and generally wasting taxpayer's money. Why, they lament, can not government agencies be run more like businesses? Maybe if they were more business-like, more bottom-line oriented, something would actually get done!
The pundits are wrong. Governmental agencies are not like businesses and cannot be recast in their form. Businesses are about an economic bottom line. They have to develop efficiencies in their product core if they want to be competitive in the marketplace. Otherwise a more efficient or creative business will replace them - they will figure out how to make a cheaper or more attractive product.
Institutionalized organizations operate in environments that are complex, with values. The organizations, to survive, turn their focus "outward" to acknowledge influential constituencies and the values they represent (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). They are typically distinguished from technical organizations, in that technical organizations "turn inward", focused on the efficient and competitive production of a product core.
Mastrofski and Uchida (1996, p. 213) described institutionalized organizations as follows:
Here the nature of the organization's product or service and what constitutes performance are not readily specified in ways that are easy to conform empirically; the technical capacity of such organizations to produce this service is not well known or well established. However, these organizations succeed in their well-developed institutional environment to the...