fielding, nigel. theorizing community policing

THEORIZING COMMUNITY POLICING

NIGEL G. FIELDING*

The article considers two of the most generally applied analytic perspectives in the field of policestudies, in the context of their application to community policing. It is suggested that there has been ameasure of convergence or, at least, constructive borrowing, between the approaches. While this formsa basis on which to theorize community policing, the limited explanatory power of contemporaryanalyses is symptomatic of the constraint imposed by prevailing understandings of the structurationprocess in contemporary social theory. An alternative conceptualization is examined, again inapplication to community policing.

Policing Theory

Policing’s long post-1950’s crisis shows no signs of abating. It remains one of our mostcontroversial social institutions. Among the continuing troubles of policing are malprac-tice and corruption, conflictual relations with minorities, and problems in accommo-dating gender. These concerns are not confined to Britain. Controversy over them iswidespread.

One might expect such problems to have stimulated theorizing in regard to commu-nity policing (CP). In that CP promotes and capitalizes on close police/public relations,one might suppose that the problems afflicting the police institution must affect CP.Further, the perception that policing is in crisis has strengthened during a time oftheoretical innovation in social science, including feminism, masculinities and queertheory, postmodernism and cultural theory, rational choice and decision theory, andpost-Marxian critical theory. Yet the new theoretical currents have largely passedcommunity policing by. While there are studies applying such theories to policing, theyhave had limited effect on research in community policing. Research has contributedvaluable analyses of community policing controversies and problems but the contri-bution has focused on policy, and the means of study has been empirical. Neverthelessrecent developments represent significant groundwork toward theorizing communitypolicing.

This article will sketch in some trends in analytic work on policing, drawing onresearch in Britain and the US. No claim is made to a comprehensive review of theory inthe field of police studies, nor to review the application of the general theories ofcriminology to the field of policing. Rather, an attempt is made to derive a conceptualframework for theorizing CP from the debate in general social theory over the articu-lation of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ social phenomena, drawing on general systems theory andits later variant in structuration theory. This is done using a bipolar distinction between‘structure’ and ‘action’ in policing. The article suggests there has been a convergencebetween these approaches. It makes a distinction between an ‘analytic perspective’ and a

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* Institute of Social Research, University of Surrey, UK.

BRIT. J. CRIMINOL. (2002) 42, 147–163

© the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD) 2002

‘theory’, and assigns the structure and action approaches to the former category. Thediscussion then considers whether theory can help to resolve a dead end in research oncommunity policing, which results from the dominant means of theorizing theconvergence between structural and action-oriented perspectives. Specifically, thearticle queries the theoretical value of Giddens’s structuration theory and suggests analternative formulation.

The Application of Contemporary Policing Theory to Community Policing

Although scholarly interest in the police can be traced far back, notably in the study oflaw and in the genre of police histories, it was not until social and behavioural scientistsbegan to gain research access to police organizations that the theorization of policinggained real ground. Empirical research and analytic conceptualization have movedclosely in step in the policing field. While we might suppose that the discipline of historymight serve in the stead of empirical research, and there are indeed worthwhile sourcesproviding a glimpse into policing ‘the community’ in earlier times, policing is aninstitution which has evolved a great deal and the lessons we can therefore draw from thescholarship of past times are limited. Thus, the treatments we might first consider arevirtually ‘definitional’, confined to describing what the police institution is. For AdamSmith the police institution was ‘the second general division of jurisprudence’ (Meele etal. 1978: 203). While it is reassuring that such an authority took policing seriously,scrutiny of Smith’s text shows that what he had in mind was an institution we would barelyrecognize in modern terms. Policing stood for the whole range of domestic governance,as distinct from foreign affairs. The term ‘policing’ then connoted something more akinto ‘policy’ than ‘police force’. The form or mechanism of social control was barely in play,let alone its culture, relations with government and public, and so on. Smith’s preoccu-pation was the market mechanism and its relationship with the polity. His interest inpolicing was simply to dismiss any relationship between such a non-market mechanismand levels of crime (Smith’s idea was that crime related to lack of ‘independent’employment). While we might readily grant Smith’s importance in the general theory ofthe liberal (free market) state, his contribution cannot be stretched beyond politicaleconomy to criminal justice.

Smith referred to ‘jurisprudence’, which we understand as the philosophy and theoryof law. Only one branch of social science, socio-legal studies, has displayed much interestin jurisprudence. There are socio-legal theories of the state and social control whichtouch importantly on policing. Understandably, their main focus is law. Socio-legaltheory occupying this ground needs a theory of the state to ‘place’ the practice of law, butcommunity policing is somewhat peripheral to its purely theoretical statements. Thereare some exemplary socio-legal studies of policing, particularly regarding accountability(e.g. Brogden 1982; Lustgarten 1986) and the general relation of law, the state and thepolice institution (Hall et al. 1978; McBarnet 1983; Dixon 1997) but these do not focus onCP per se. A critic might observe that some socio-legal analyses informed by a relativelycrude theory of the state treat the police in the terms of a caricature, where certainqualities are exaggerated to a point sufficient to carry the logic of the police as under-stood by legal text rather than empirical reality. Such socio-legal theory is not the place to

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look for a sense of the contradictory qualities of policing, for the undercurrents andconflicts in its working culture which impact importantly on the practice of CP. Inessence such theory is content to know that the police are the primary state agencygranted the (legally) legitimate exercise of physical force.

To many of those in police studies mention of the ‘legitimate physical force’ ideaprobably brings to mind Egon Bittner rather than socio-legal theory. To Bittner (1980) isoften attributed the idea that lawful force is the essence of the police institution. Theimportance of this insight cannot be challenged. But it is a good instance of the ‘defini-tional’ orientation of theory in the field. It helps us to understand some of what the policedo, and almost wholly accounts for the authority of the police in extremis. But ‘authority’ isnot ‘power’, and most policing—particularly the work which is distinctive about CP—does not take place in extremis. This limit is implicit in Bittner’s approach. The thrust ofBittner’s argument is that, while the police role is diffuse and wide-ranging (involvinga nominal responsibility for ‘thousands’ of titles under the penal codes, and residualresponsibility for virtually anything involving an official presence in the lives of thepublic; Bittner 1974), everything the police do falls into place when one recognizesthe unique feature of their office, their ability legitimately to apply force on behalf of thestate. This directs attention to two things: the wide scope of circumstances in whichthe police can intervene, and the way that police use their authority in their inter-ventions. Now while the latter provides a sharp focus for analysis (for example, to do withthe allusion by officers to their forceful authority as a tactic to engender compliance), theformer is quite the opposite, broadening the scope of inquiry rather than focusing it. Thevery fact that physical force is, empirically, a minor means of resolving the general runof circumstances with which the police deal, suggests that explanation of a large share ofpolicework is relatively little advanced by reference to the forceful authority officersultimately enjoy. In most cases the big stick is locked in a cupboard and the police do noteven look toward the cupboard, let alone unlock it. How much its presence enters theminds of other interactants is therefore moot.

It helps if we remember the scope of regulation to which Bittner alerted us. Ratherthan thinking in terms of interventions involving a clear law enforcement dimension weshould consider, to take Bittner’s example, cases such as tenant/landlord disputes andthe many other interventions where the police simply refer the aggrieved to anotheragency or a civil remedy. Or we might think in contemporary terms of the police sittingon crime prevention panels, delivering neighbourhood watch newsletters, or recordingdetails of a road traffic accident. These things are certainly germane to CP. But the ‘bigstick’ is of little direct relevance here, and a theory based on it does not explain. FollowingNiederhoffer (1969), Bittner himself made substantial play with the limited extent ofpolice work which was directly to do with law enforcement (Bittner 1974). A generationof researchers subsequently documented the breadth of those tangential but necessary‘social service’ duties. Historians already knew this. Even in the latter stages of the Britishdominion in Ireland, there was so little law enforcement work that cutting the hair ofchildren of the local gentry could be a diverting pastime for a rural constable ‘as theyhave absolutely nothing to do here now’ (testimony of Lady Gregory, 1895, quoted inToibin 1999).

Bittner offers another compelling, if subordinate, account of the police involvementin an endlessly broad spectrum of occurrences. We can refer to it as the ‘emergencyfunction’, although Bittner uses more colloquial terms: police may become involved

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‘entirely without regard to the substantive nature of the problem, as long as it could besaid that it involved something that ought not to be happening and about which someone had betterdo something now!’ (Bittner 1974: 132). Like the doctrine of force, Bittner’s assertion iscorrect but limited. Such occurrences are relatively rare and do not form the core ofpolice work when measured empirically. The warrant for the ubiquitous police presencein emergencies may ultimately be that emergencies threaten civil order—society’s(allegedly normal) state of public tranquillity—but the connection is as strained as sayingthat, to use one of Bittner’s own examples, the police feed lost children ice creambecause they enjoy the ability to use force. Neither the legal power of the police nor theemergency function empirically or theoretically explain routine, patrol-basedcommunity policing. To explain the ubiquitous police role in emergency interventionsor pacifying lost children we need a theory attentive to practice and culture as well as law.As Bittner himself concluded, the police mandate ‘cannot be interpreted as resting onthe substantive authorizations contained in the penal codes or any other codes’ (1974:143). Thus, the notion that the central thing to know about the police is that theirauthority rests on the use of force establishes why their presence is so ubiquitous but littleabout what they do when present. Bittner’s insight must be an element in any theory ofcommunity policing but is not adequate on its own.

We have been looking at theoretical contributions of some vintage. What of morerecent theory as a source of insight into CP? Postmodern theory does centrally havethings to say about the contemporary relationship of state institutions and public. Itsuggests that people are increasingly disengaged from established institutions, accordless legitimacy to the state, and are more apt to question the established order (Loader1996; Norris 1999). Some have applied such perspectives to the police as a general socialinstitution (contributions to Reiner 1991a; Erikson and Haggerty 1997), but communitypolicing has not itself been a central concern of postmodern theory. Nor is the empiricalevidence on policing entirely consistent with some postmodernist assertions. Forexample, while the public appears to be more critical of institutions like the police andcourts, the criticisms are of their performance not their existence. There is little evidenceof public disengagement from social institutions like the police. There is much evidencethat people expect more from the police, which suggests the institution has becomemore, not less, central to public thinking. Indeed, some contemporary theory depictspolicing as a prime means by which the public seeks to assuage anxiety about thatdistinctly postmodern condition, a pervasive feeling of uncertainty and risk (Erikson andHaggerty 1997). Some may complain that only one strand of postmodernist theory hasbeen mentioned. More generally, postmodernism is concerned with the implications ofrelativism, subjectivism, and the idea that no perspective, theory, or intellectual practicehas a monopoly of authority. These ideas bear on the practice of social research, of whichpolice studies is a part, and have inevitably become part of the currency in generaltheories of policing. But with two prominent exceptions to which I will return, thespecific implications of these ideas for CP have been little developed.

One might regard feminism as the other major, recently emergent theoreticalposition (Kemp and Squires 1998). Feminists certainly have things to say about policing.Generally feminist research on the police is critical and reformist, and one might arguethat such work has been crucial in the development of the victims’ movement, legal andprocedural change in respect of domestic violence and sexual assault, and greater

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sensitivity to the circumstances of female police officers. There are also highly developedfeminist analyses of police culture, both of machismo in policing and of the practicalproblems that female police face. But the analysis is of selected aspects of policing andhas touched only tangentially on CP. Perhaps the feminist theoretical approach mostamenable to the analysis of powerful social institutions is Dorothy Smith’s ‘institutionalethnography’. State institutions are seen as spaces where the ‘relations of ruling’ areworked out, and the contribution of women is documented micro-sociologically so as toexpose the ‘lineaments of oppression’ (Smith 1987). This can be seen as a version of elitetheory. Micro-analysis of the daily workings of elites does not have to be conducted from afeminist perspective; Reiner’s Chief Constables (1991b) is an example of a micro-analysis ofa policing elite outside a feminist perspective. Thus, where feminist theory addressesstate institutions such as the police it does not analyse the institution in all its multiplexqualities but, understandably, the role and place of women within it. This is an importantaspect of the institution but has not so far been the source of theoretical advance inunderstanding community policing.

As I shall shortly argue, research on CP is both voluminous and dominated by policy-oriented and evaluation research. The bulk of published studies of CP are empiricallybased rather than theoretical contributions, and the analytic perspective adopted in thisempirical work is neither theoretical nor discipline-based. This is happening in manyother substantive fields, such as social research in medicine and health, and may beregarded as part of a process of separation of social research as an applied technicalpractice from its disciplinary roots (Williams 2000). A flavour of this approach is given byKen Pease’s remarks in a recent booklet on zero tolerance policing. Pease suggests thatthe essential contribution researchers can make is to provide a systematic approach tomeasuring programme effects. Reacting to the former NYPD Commissioner’s complaintthat academics (and ‘political pundits’) have cited ‘theory after theory’ to account forimprovements in New York City’s crime rate rather than grant that policing had become‘smarter and more assertive’, Pease observes, ‘in my view, the failure of mechanism-basedmeasurement reflects a more fundamental failure of academic researchers of the police,namely that most remain distant from the fray, and unconcerned with noble efforts tomake things better’ (Pease 1998: 41). There is an argument for a measure of detachmenton the part of researchers, which is not the same thing as the indifference or evenhostility Pease hints at, but his view well represents the strong orientation to policy and‘measurement services’ by researchers who bring to policing a ‘toolkit’ rather thana theoretically oriented intellectual project, adopting, as Sparks (1997: 410) puts it, ‘abluff, no-nonsense, crap-cutting resolve to get on with the criminology in a thorough,professional, policy-relevant way’. A theoretical agenda is not in itself ignoble. Neither ispragmatism, which poses equally substantial intellectual challenges. There should beroom for both. But as virtuous and helpful as it is, pragmatism is not a theory but aposture. It borrows eclectically among perspectives that offer to solve practical problems.This may be highly appropriate to policy application and to problem solving but it ishopefully no slur on such work also to observe that this approach does not encourage thedevelopment of a theoretical account of CP.

This brief and broad-grained review of potential sources for a theory of communitypolicing suggests that the empirical and analytic achievements of research on CP offergood grounds for further theoretical elaboration.

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Analytic Perspectives: Actions and Structure

The analytic orientation of much of the key literature in police studies can be captured bya bipolar distinction between analyses directed to ‘structure’ and analyses directed to‘action’, a heuristic which Hollis (1994) suggests was reinvigorated by the European‘revolutions’ of 1989 which showed how power groups adapt and survive. But ‘action’and ‘structure’ are not in themselves a theory. They are perspectives. They tell us whereto look rather than what to look for. Perspectives cut across theories; for instance, onecan apply a structuralist or action-oriented perspective to an analysis using feministtheory. One might, for example, understand the problems faced by female victimsdealing with the police by reference to the relatively small number and patterneddeployment of female detectives, a structural consideration, or by reference to gender-based differences in linguistic codes, an interactional consideration. In themselves,perspectives are not theories.

Nevertheless the two perspectives once attracted their own champions in policeresearch and had an air of fundamental disagreement, with critical (or marxian)theorists emphasizing structural analyses, interactionists emphasizing action-orientedanalyses (see, for example, the contributions to Weatheritt 1989). This is no longer so.There is a convergence between the perspectives, a move to see them as intertwined, forwhich Giddens’s structuration theory (1976, 1991) is partly responsible. There appearsto be a recognition that both perspectives need to be applied, and that it is legitimate todevelop them alongside each other. A thorough analysis is increasingly a syntheticanalysis. This may involve constructive borrowing, for example, by importing an actiondimension into a structural analysis, or an explicit comparison of what the two perspec-tives contribute to explaining a particular policing phenomenon. A key example is theanalysis of ‘police culture’. Action-oriented researchers have long made the occupa-tional culture a prime object of analytic attention. Interactionism and phenomenologyoffer conceptual tools useful in analysing culture. However, latterly we can identifyanalyses oriented to structure but which also attend to culture. A pathbreaking andvaluable example is Jefferson and Grimshaw’s account of frontline patrol (Jefferson andGrimshaw 1984; Grimshaw and Jefferson 1987), in which the organizational analysisused to understand the circumstances of community police is informed by a typology ofcultural adaptations to patrol work. Drawing on the critical Marxian analyses of processesof signification, ‘authoritarian populism’ and cultural hegemony developed by theBirmingham School, which located policing at the centre of an ongoing crisis of capital-ism (Hall et al. 1978), and informed by socio-legal analysis of the articulation of stateinterests with the system of social control, Jefferson and Grimshaw developed a compre-hensive theory of police work which did much to stimulate police theory’s particularsynthesis of action and structure perspectives. The harnessing of sociological liberalismwith Marxian cultural analysis (following Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault) whichcharacterizes Jefferson and Grimshaw (and Brogden et al. 1988), has proven an enduringapproach, recently represented, for example, by Choongh (1998).

What does not so well stand the test of time is the analysis of what might be called the‘meta level’ which accounts for the outcome of the processes articulating action andstructure. Where Marxian analysis perceived the superstructure in a concordance ofinterests amongst ruling elites, the signs of something altogether more disaggregatedand mediated were apparent in the inspiration drawn from Hall and Foucault in

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particular. For the analysis of routine policing and community policing the implicationthat the workings of power were both writ small (inscribed in a myriad of daily relations)and contested in terms beyond the simple class relation (interest group politics, singleissue politics) was extremely important. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, the debateover the relationship between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ in wider social theory began to sketchin an account of the ‘meta level’ drawing variously on postmodern cultural theory, neo-Parsonian functionalism, systems theory and structuration theory. Simply becausegeneral social theory has not connected such developments with policing does not meanthat, for example, Giddens’s account of the duality of agency and structure is unconnec-ted with feasible empirical research (Sparks 1997: 418). The attempt to move beyond thedualities of action/structure and micro/macro undoubtedly has something to offeranalyses of policing previously based on the bipolar agency/structure perspectives.

A recent example is Chan’s sophisticated study of change (or rather, its lack) in theNew South Wales Police (1997). Chan looks to Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’ and‘habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) for the conceptual apparatus of her account ofthe moves the NSW Police made against racist brutality in street policing, but her analysisbecomes an increasingly overt comparison of the efficacy of reformist action at thestructural and cultural levels. It is a rather despairing account, too. The NSW Policesincerely invested in a programme of cultural change at the end of which a TV docu-mentary revealed such spectacularly gross ongoing brutality that the reform programmewas vitiated overnight. The lesson Chan draws from this is that neither action-based inter-ventions (‘changing the culture’) or structure-based interventions (prosecuting policeunder the criminal law) can change the practice of a dysfunctional organization. But onemight argue that Chan is driven pessimistically to the ‘nothing works’ conclusionbecause there is nothing standing over the structure and action perspectives to explainhow they so interacted as to produce a failure of policy innovation.

To close this point I will, if it is not too self-referential, cite Mike Brogden’s review(1992) of a book I wrote on the police and social conflict (Fielding 1991), Brogden beingassociated with the structuralist perspective: ‘surprisingly, given the author’s previouswork, there is little analysis of police culture as an impediment. Any new account ofdevices, rule-tightening, to assist the accountability of policework needs to be combinedwith a sociological argument as to how the rank-and-file as well as the chief can come toterms with those new rules . . .’ (Brogden 1992). While this well-taken criticism illustratesthe move to a combined perspective, it also hints at a level ‘above’ that of structural andcultural concerns which would account for their articulation, not only in respect ofaccountability at different strata of the police organization but, in the context of CP, ina way which might better understand the relation of police and people, and especially,how the public might contribute to debate about police practice in the conditions ofthe contemporary polity. Indeed, in Sparks’s felicitous gloss of Bourdieu, accommodat-ing a reflexive understanding of action and structure offers to ‘deprive establishedcategories and institutions of some part of their air of inevitability, whilst compre-hending the weight of the powers and constraints that sustain them in being’ (Sparks1997: 421).

I have suggested that two key perspectives in the field, structure and action, havemoved together, to a point where it is routinely accepted that a coherent account ofphenomena in the policing field should involve them both. This is not unique to policeresearch. It has happened in other applied social science fields (health and illness, work

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and organizations, media and technology). The conciliation of the two perspectives hasoften been effected by use of Giddens’s structuration theory. But before squarelyaddressing that theory it is useful to develop in a more sustained way an account ofresearch into community policing.

Hybridization: The Case of Community Policing

Research on community policing is an industry. Over the years of its endless vogue,grants, bursaries, consultancies, programme evaluations, international fact-findingmissions, and training schemes relating to community policing, have secured thelivelihood of thousands of researchers worldwide. Moreover, research investment hasbeen trifling compared to the billions invested by the world’s taxpayers in communitypolicing programmes, CP training, CP documentation and advertising, promotions forCP officers, CP media coverage and so on. Our knowledge arising from this colossus ofeffort must surely be extravagantly stupendous.

Here is what we know. ‘Over the past decade, studies have examined the role of seniorpolice administrators, line level officers and the community as factors in the success ofcommunity policing initiatives . . . As well, researchers have now turned their attention tothe role and impact of community residents as an essential part of the communityequation . . . There are a myriad of organizational, operational and individual factors,both in police services and in communities, that may facilitate or hinder communitypolicing efforts’ (comment by anonymous referee contained in report on a journalarticle, November 1998). Two points can be made about this apt summary of a decade’sresearch. First, the empirical referents of the research described consist of every elementof the social world (senior police, frontline officers, ‘the community’). Thus, everythingin the social world has something to do with the success or otherwise of communitypolicing. Second, the relevant ‘factors’, the things whose adjustment brings aboutpredicted effects, have been identified. For community policing, they are: organiza-tional, operational and individual. If that sounds somewhat non-selective that is preciselythe point. There are lots of ‘factors’; indeed, they are ‘myriad’. Since our research hastold us that everything in the social world is relevant to community policing it is notsurprising that if we want to make changes with predictable (or testable) results then wecan choose from as many factors as the police institution has facets.

Such an analysis perhaps reflects a research agenda which has been responsive in apiecemeal fashion to policy initiatives and the evaluation of specific programmes ratherthan made coherent by pursuit of a theoretical programme. It is not informed byattending to some elements of policing phenomena and discounting others, procedurescharacteristic of work based on testable theory. It is indiscriminate. It is overwhelmed bywhat the reviewer above refers to as ‘the avalanche of research on community policing’. Itis indeed a perfect example of Bourdieu’s characterization of the undertheorizedresearch programme, a ‘half-science which unknowingly accepts categories of perceptiondirectly borrowed from the social world’ (1996: 224). Researchers in applied fields arevulnerable to an eclecticism that diffuses and diverts theoretical effort. Substantialinterests entice researchers down this path. Research sponsors demand ‘relevance’,government presses for research to be in the service of national needs, the policethemselves commission highly focused studies. Anti-theoretical pressures come from

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academic quarters, too. For example, the practice of meta-analysis relies on the premisethat findings from studies motivated by disparate theoretical orientations can becombined provided they meet mechanical criteria such as a particular sample size.

Does the neglect of theory matter? Perhaps theory is an optional extra one has to readpast until one finds the results section? To address these questions we might consideranother, somewhat more specific gloss on community policing. Recent research suggeststhat successful CP much depends on frontline officer commitment and motivation(culture and agency), itself reliant on managerial support (i.e. structure; see Lurigio andRosenbaum 1994; Lurigio and Skogan 1994; Fielding 1995). Did these assessments comeabout because the structure and action perspectives predicted these would be key issues?Or are they analysis-after-the-fact? Let us think about how CP is practised. Officers aretasked with getting close to the community in order to pick up information and respondto community needs. Frontline officer discretion is enhanced. Kelling offers inner cityexamples such as tolerating public alcohol consumption provided the bottle is in a bagand drinking is off main roads, tolerating begging provided people are not approachedwho are standing still, and tolerating loitering provided the loiterer does not lie down.‘In other words, what police did was to develop a neighbourhood consensus among boththe “good” citizens and the troublemakers about appropriate behaviour that becameself-enforcing over time’ (Kelling 1998: 4). To bring about CP, we apparently need togrant frontline officers more discretion and authority, with more backing fromcommand, and our best safeguard against their abusing this discretion is theirrelationship with the community. These findings may inform a theory but they do notemerge from theory. The reason this matters is that, while the findings may wellrepresent the realities in the field, they cannot address matters which may affect thesuccess of CP but which were not encountered by researchers during fieldwork. Theymay be among the causes of successful CP but we cannot be sure they comprise thecomplete set of causes. They may be necessary conditions but we do not know if they aresufficient. Without a theory to guide their inquiries, researchers may miss problems aswell as produce partial analyses. If these analyses prove inadequate because they fail toaccount for emergent problems, such as the abuse of discretion in CP, they offer us fewavenues to pursue.

Might an approach based on structuration theory address these concerns? Its firstcharacteristic is that it would offer a synthetic account, bringing together the action levelof analysis, which draws on micro-sociological accounts of interactions, with thestructural level of analysis, which uses macro-sociological data to capture the organiza-tional and community context of these interactions. In this, culture plays a mediatingrole. Patterns in the interactions of CP officers with the public, other CP officers, andofficers from other functions—all elements relating to action—form a culture of CP inthe locale. Culture’s mediating role supplies understandings of CP’s nature and require-ments by reference to the patterns established in interactions of the CP section with thepublic. These provide cultural resources, a stock of knowledge, which inform the processof bargaining for material resources within the organization. The distribution of organi-zational resources is a structural matter. It involves higher echelons of the organization,for whom resource allocation is a principal responsibility.

These ingredients—interaction, culture and structure—provide the framework of thesynthetic account. We can then model the course of a given initiative against factors thatrelate to the three elements of the basic framework. So far, however, our account does

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not differ from a straightforward systems theory approach (Buckley 1967). Classicsystems theory contributes a sense of the levels of the organization and their articulation,but its portrayal is ‘static’, reliant on summarizing outcomes at each level, and cannotaccommodate the way that monitoring of responses by higher levels prompts modifi-cation of positions by lower levels. It is consequently rather insensitive to bargainingprocesses, where interpersonal negotiating competence can, for example, counteractsenior rank (the example is deliberately chosen as it features in Giddens’s account ofpower, Giddens making the point that power cannot be read off from structural locationbut may reside in individuals of lower rank but higher interactional competence).

For Giddens, every interaction is also ‘a moral and a power relation’ (Giddens 1976: 118).This dimension is apparent in the different resources individuals possess with which todirect the course of interaction. While the ability legitimately to use force is an aspect ofpower, that quality can also be seen in the resources to which individuals can lay claim formaking interaction meaningful. Giddens argues that the creation of frames of meaning‘occurs as the mediation of practical activities’ and that several reasons may account forindividuals having more power to make their interpretations authoritative (superiorskills of expression or argument, having special technical knowledge, being able to layclaim to force). The position is shared with Foucault, who saw power as omnipresent in‘a never ending network of microstructures’ (Walton 1998: 9). This informs Foucault’sperception that all structure and culture is both enabling and disabling. Thus, neitherstructure (legitimate force) nor action (interactional skills) is intrinsically pre-eminent.

Giddens’s approach takes us away from descriptive analysis of those interactionalrelations which comprise collectivities towards ‘systems of generative rules andresources’. Structuration theory sees the individual as both an agent, producing action,and as the subject of action by others; whenever we consider an account based onindividual actions we also inescapably invoke the structural level. The theory is thus ‘anattempt to provide the conceptual means of analysing the often delicate and subtleinterlacings of reflexively organized action and institutional constraint’ (Giddens 1991:204). But ‘structuration’ is not the only attempt to advance the ‘agency-structure’relation. Systems theorists have advanced a process of ‘morphogenesis’ differing fromstructuration in having an end product, structural elaboration, while Giddens’s processmanifests simply as a ‘visible pattern’. Giddens’s insistence on simultaneity in the dualityof structure, so that ‘social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet atthe same time are the very medium of their constitution’ makes for an empirically inacces-sible representation. Unlike Giddens, contemporary systems theorists see the elaboratedstructure as acquiring properties irreducible to recurrent social practices. Systems theoryassumes a discontinuity between initial interactions and their product. All subsequentinteraction will differ from earlier action because it is informed by the structural resultsof the earlier action. ‘[T]he morphogenetic perspective is not only dualistic butsequential, dealing in endless cycles of structural conditioning/social interaction/structural elaboration—thus unravelling the dialectical interplay between structure andaction. “Structuration”, by contrast, treats the ligatures binding structure, practice andsystem as indissoluble, hence the necessity of duality and the need to gain a more indirectanalytical purchase on the elements involved’ (Archer 1982: 458). Morphogenesis alsooffers means to negotiate Giddens’s over-emphasis on the orderly reproduction ofpractices and, importantly for an account of CP, to highlight points of resistance anddeviance which make the ‘flow’ of power more visible (Sparks et al. 1996).

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For the study of a social institution like policing, which is so centrally about both powerand the interactional competencies of officers, the systems theory approach has realmerit. First, systems theory seeks to specify the extent of autonomy and constraint, facili-tating theorizing about variations in voluntarism and determinism. In contrast,Giddens’s insistence on ‘the simultaneity of transformative capacity and chronic recur-siveness’ (Archer 1982: 477) makes it impossible to identify the conditions under whichone or the other will predominate. Second, in Giddens, theorizing about temporalstructuring and restructuring (the iteration between action and structural elements) isblocked by his argument that the conceptual bonding of the synchronic and diachronicproduces ‘a seamless web of “instantiations”’. In systems theory the analytic separation ofstructure and interaction over time facilitates its empirical application. As Dandeker(1986) observed, this approach is suited to producing testable theoretical propositionsabout the conditions under which latitude is available to social actors, and its extent.While both structuration and morphogenetic theory regard action and structure as‘inseparable’ there is a world of difference in saying that they interact rather thancoincide.

We have seen that Archer’s conceptualization may offer an approach more subject tooperationalization and empirical test. The idea that individual action, cultural andstructural considerations, in recursive relation and temporally elaborated, all contributeto the outcome of police interventions, seems more accessible to disentangling andmodelling than a somewhat mystical instantiation of the same elements. We mightponder whether Archer’s conception of the action/structure relation would offer us amore compelling interpretation of community policing than the homiletic conclusionthat everything depends on frontline commitment and backline support.

Let us assume that we wish to analyse constraints on CP in a city. The fact that ouranalysis is not at the single intervention level does not mean we are indifferent to action-level data. But we do need to track the cumulative character of a series of single interven-tions. Conventionally this is done by dividing CP into recurrent kinds of intervention andsummarizing ‘representative’ types of intervention in the form of case studies, whilenoting any singular incidents that stand out. The delivery of CP is also affected by institu-tional relations representing the level of structure, including relations between policeelites and other elites, raising considerations such as how constraining or enabling arethe relations the police institution maintains with other social institutions; how effectiveis citizen influence via the ballot box, accountability mechanisms, the tax system anddisorder/resistance on the street; what citizen groups and interests are resistant to orthreatened by CP; how the trade-offs between investment in CP and other police pro-grammes are played out; how ‘policing by consent’ fares in a polity lacking in normativeconsensus, and so on. Two discussions, Stenson and Cowell (1991) and McLaughlin(1994), provide particularly useful insight into such questions and conditions, where thescope for modes of governance and strategies for protection may include ‘new’ thinkingwith distinctly archaic resonances (‘zero tolerance’, ‘naming and shaming’, ‘the gatedcommunity’).

Confining ourselves for the present to police organizational considerations, an attemptto model constraints on CP in terms of classic systems theory might include as factors, atmacro level: (i) the constitutional mandate of police, (ii) the law regulating policing; (iii)administrative regulations; (iv) the organizational role and status of CP; (v) acceptedpractices in local police culture relevant to the CP function; (vi) supervisory policies

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relevant to CP. The bridge to process factors, the mezzo level, includes: (vii) numbers ofofficers available; (viii) equipment; (ix) type of shift system; (x) availability of overtimepayments, allowances and bonuses in kind (e.g. training courses); (xi) the performancemeasurement and promotion system in use. Micro factors would draw on case studydocumentation of types of incidents selected according to the proportion of workload theyaccount for and covering: (xii) officer capacities and motivation; (xiii) officer specialistknowledge; (xiv) degree of back-up and teamwork; (xv) spatio-temporal dimension ofincidents (where on beat, when on shift); (xvi) presenting problems of incidents dealtwith by CP; (xvii) citizen groups dealt with; (xviii) nature and quality of interactionduring incidents; (xix) citizen-perceived outcomes; (xx) officer-perceived outcomes;(xxi) paperwork account of incidents; (xxii) actions of other officers affecting case.

This approach is informed by the distinction between micro, mezzo and macro levels,and attends to their articulation. It also accommodates an appreciation that processesrelating to power are not confined to structural factors. But despite these virtues thisapproach replicates the problems we noted in characterizing a decade of research on CP:it appears to formalize the unhelpful notion that ‘everything is relevant’. The alternativeis to pursue an analysis that works from a theory providing a rationale for selecting asmaller number of elements and has reason to assign particular weightings to them.

This is not to dismiss the classic systems theory framework of factors. We might regardthe framework as a source of factors our theory can select from, informed by whatresearch tells us about the relative importance of each. For example, let us consider thedegree to which the law affects everyday police practice. One thread in the literaturesuggests that officers use the law selectively (Bittner 1974) and as a resource to assist themin managing citizens (Chatterton 1979). Another, associated with socio-legal studies,insists that the law is a key structure that constrains and enables policing (Lustgarten1986; McConville and Shepherd 1992). In some jurisdictions the point might beconsidered settled because of statutory instruments enshrining CP. For instance, inEngland and Wales the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 created a statutory requirement forpolice/community partnership and mandated community consultation at several levelsand stages of policy making. Earlier legislation in the same vein included section 106 ofthe Police and Criminal Evidence Act. However, while these initiatives suggest that lawcreates a framework that enables or constrains police practices such as CP, those who putmain emphasis on the application and interpretation of law ‘on the streets’ would arguethat whether the law has these effects is moot. For one thing, citizens themselves areunlikely to have a perfect understanding of law, and there is evidence that where lawleads in directions police find unconducive, there is much self-interested reinterpre-tation and a good deal of minimal compliance. There are in fact accounts of section 106of PCEA on exactly such lines. Such disputes are, of course, perfect sources of hypothesesfor empirical investigation. That is the spirit in which I wish to address the elaboration ofa possible application of meta-level theory to community policing in the remainder ofthis article. I want simply to indicate plausible lines of investigation in order to sketchwhat an elaborated theory attending to the articulation between different strata ofanalysis might look like.

In the case of theorizing constraints on a CP programme, then, we might pursuewhether the law is a relatively modest influence provided the general appearanceof lawful conduct is achieved or whether law actively constrains action in the CPprogramme in our city. We would look for cases in this and other jurisdictions where

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legal challenges were mounted against CP operations. For example, some CP pro-grammes involve police working with housing officials to deny tenancies to suspecteddrug dealers. Were such initiatives legally challenged? With what outcome? Is such aninitiative likely to be part of the CP programme we are studying? Has the force taken legaladvice on it and allowed for resources to meet such challenges? If our survey reveals fewinstances of legal challenges to elements like those in the CP programme under study wecan discount the importance of this factor.

We also have to consider interaction between factors. For example, we look at eachfactor from the perspective of the law regulating policing. Some factors in the basicframework relate to the calibre of officers assigned to CP—research suggests that, at leastin the past, officers chosen have not been the best. From a legal perspective, we mightconsider evidence whether such officers provoke high numbers of complaints by citizensor internal affairs investigations. This way we build up a sense of how our particular CPinitiative registers in terms of factors of greater or lesser significance. This is a step awayfrom the notion that ‘everything is relevant’ and towards a considered approach thatestablishes in what way what things are relevant.

Our basic framework of factors is very much to do with the ‘generative mechanism ofrules and resources’ which Giddens and Archer both see as the way to capture theoreti-cally and at meta-level the articulation of action and structure. An example of a ‘rule’ isthe ‘law regulating police work’ on which we have already commented; another is‘accepted practices in police culture relevant to CP’. The former is a formal rule while thelatter is informal. The interplay of rules and resources is a mechanism that generates—and therefore explains—actions. We should be able to use it to explain the implemen-tation of CP in the jurisdiction. We build up a theory using the factors and what is knownabout them and their interaction. We identify some factors our theory should emphasizeand some it can discount.

Recall that temporality is important to our conceptualization. The CP programme weare assessing has a history. Meanings of CP change as a result of programme implemen-tation. What CP means to the public, and to those implementing it, evolves. We want tocapture this in our theory. The morphogenetic systems theory conceives this temporaldimension as an ‘endless cycle’ of structural conditioning, followed by social interaction,followed by structural elaboration (i.e. ‘structure’, then ‘action’, then ‘structure’).Having selected some factors from the hierarchy of the classic systems theory asimportant, we can take them to represent the initial structural conditioning of the CPprogramme. These are the factors which, our theory suggests, will influence the workingof the new programme. At the macro level to which we will presently confine ourselves,we might reason that the constitutional mandate of the police endorses the achievementof cooperative relations with the community and so is unlikely to constrain ‘outreach’elements of community policing. However, these elements of the programme requirenew administrative regulations endowing lower level officers with more decision-makingauthority, while CP is not regarded as a high status assignment by officers. At this stage itis not clear if this is a constraint or not. The new regulations carry risk from changing thesupervisor/subordinate relationship but may enhance CP officers’ esteem. Supervisors,we anticipate, are likely to be uncomfortable about the discretion frontline officers aregranted. Thus, in this structural conditioning stage, some factors at the macro level havebeen discounted, others emphasized, others put in relation but with a question mark asto their overall effect.

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We are now ready to bring in the temporal dimension by seeing how interactionis affected by this conditioning during the first month, say, of the programme. Asanticipated, there is no legal challenge to police operating under CP, and the pro-gramme is well received by citizen groups as it seeks close cooperative relations with‘respectable’ elements of the community. A new administrative regulation grantingenhanced discretion to CP officers to make small payments to community informantsappears to have enhanced the status of CP officers (fieldworkers note expressions of envyby non-CP officers). It seems that the constraint represented by administrativeregulations altering the supervisory relation is counterbalanced by esteem gained by CPofficers, so in constraint terms these factors are neutral at this stage. However, in thecourse of gathering information from a local informant in exchange for the new fee a CPofficer discovers drug dealing by the leader of a church youth group. The leader is aprotégé of a senior officer outside the CP section. The CP officer strikes a deal with theyouth leader whereby he does not act on the dealing but is told the dealer’s customers inthe youth group. The episode excites controversy over the new informant policy and theenhanced discretion the CP officer is using in his intervention with the youth group.

These circumstances stand for the developments of importance to the structuralelaboration stage. In a month much else will have happened but our focus is set by ourtheory. If our theory of the most salient factors is accurate we should already be able toanticipate the nature of the structural elaboration from the first two steps in the cycle.Aware of favourable reaction to the programme from community respectables, the forceacknowledges there have been some awkward consequences of the CP programme in itsfirst month, but affirms its commitment to the programme. Meanwhile it divertsresources to legal advisors in case the action of the CP officer in not charging the youthgroup leader is challenged. Representatives of the non-CP patrol officers demand that allpatrol officers be allowed to pay informants; resources are committed to reviewing forcepolicy on paid informants. The CP section delegates a supervisory officer to make highlevel contact with church representatives concerned about police ‘harassment’ ofchurch youth groups. The senior officer who sponsored the youth group leaderpressures the officer in charge of CP to set explicit criteria for forbearance from arrest byCP officers.

After the first month the organization is, then, structurally different to the point atwhich it began, prompted by the actions of CP officers and the response to CP bycommunity interests. The organization’s generative mechanism is beginning to changein respect of rules (e.g. the enhanced CP officer autonomy is now contested) andresources (funds have had to be committed to legal advice and an internal review). Howcan we be sure, though, that the changes mentioned have come about because of devel-opments relating to these factors rather than others? Social research often has to reasonfrom the parts we know to the whole, ‘to create an image of the entire organization orprocess, based on the parts we have been able to uncover’ (Becker 1992). Drawing onDiesing (1971), Becker suggests questions like: ‘what kind of an organization couldaccommodate a part like this? What would the rest of the organization have to be like forthis part to be what it is? What would the whole story have to be for this step to occur as wehave seen it occur?’ (Becker 1992: 213). This procedure is akin to the theoretical practiceof critical realism (Harre 1970; Bhaskar 1975; Pawson and Tilley 1997), which also asks‘what must exist in order for events to happen in the way that they do?’ Critical realismengages in cycles of testing to determine whether the manifest signs of the inferred social

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structures do in fact account for the patterns of expressed meanings and observed action.We can, for instance, list alternative factors which may have brought about the demandfor set criteria for forbearance from prosecution; other CP actions may have led to thesenior officer’s concern.

Critical realism uses case study methods in ‘identifying and analysing the particularsocial processes and practices that cause change’. Connolly suggests that detaileddescription can ‘uncover the meaning’ people attach to their own and others behaviour,and thereby ‘begin to unravel the causes of an individual’s or a group’s behaviour’(Connolly 1998: 124), drawing on accounts of causal mechanisms in other casespreviously studied. However, cases will rarely be similar to one another in all relevantrespects. Further, where cases form part of a larger system, correlations of factor andoutcome may arise from the distribution of differences within the system rather thancommonalities among cases. The utility of case study data can, however, be enhanced bycross-case comparative analysis, as in Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Ragin 1994), anapproach based on building truth tables representing categorical information on thefactors of interest. The truth table relates case study data about the possible causes(factors) with the presence or absence of the outcome in that particular case. As Raginnotes, this allows for the possibility that different combinations of conditions cangenerate the same outcome, it accommodates contradictory patterns of causation (whencombined with some variables a condition may generate a positive outcome, with othervariables a negative outcome), and it enables the elimination of irrelevant ‘causes’.Resolution of the contingencies in the truth table is based on Boolean algebra (Fieldingand Lee 1998). While this is a particular response to the theoretical validation issue, thegeneral point is that the contemporary morphogenetic systems approach is accessible totest in a way that Giddens’s rendering of the action/structure relation is not.

The approach outlined here is fundamentally about seeing policing as a system. Onecharacteristic of systems is that change in one part has effects on other parts to which it isonly indirectly connected. Our research needs to attend to these connections, which areexposed in the interrelation of action and structure. A single programme may beworking on its own terms, but may impede or be counteracted by other programmes. Atpresent, research on community policing is diffuse. Little effort is directed to distillingtheory from its disparate empirical findings. Geertz (1973) argues that, in social science,general conclusions are not produced through studies starting where previous ones leftoff, but rather by using the theoretical resources previous work has contributed. Ourunderstanding of community policing could gain from more investment in theorizingthe findings from the field’s rich tradition of empirical research.

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