Penny Dick

Police partnership working: Lessons from a co-located group pilot: Recent literature on police partnership working has challenged the orthodoxy established during the 1980s and 1990s that this is an unpopular area of police activity. Instead, recent research suggests that partnership working can reinforce and enhance the policing value of pragmatism (O’Neill and McCarthy, 2014), due to its focused and bottom-up approach to problem solving. Using a casestudy approach to investigate a co-located partnership group tasked with reducing demands for policing services, I explore the precise nature of the processes that enable these apparently effective elements of partnership working to emerge. I suggest a core role for “authority work” defined as the process through which particular interpretations of people, events and outcomes are warranted and rendered legitimate. I use the insights generated from the analysis to reflect on why partnership working may sometimes succeed in both producing successful multi-agency collaboration and what such success might mean for those individuals that are the targets of partnership interventions.

Means–ends decoupling has recently been suggested as one consequence of the problems organizations face in trying to comply with institutional rules in contexts of institutional complexity. Such decoupling is characterized by the adoption, implementation, and scrutiny of particular codes of practice, which tend not to deliver the outcomes they were developed to produce. Recent scholarship focusing on this issue has suggested that such decoupling is a consequence of the trade-off organizations need to make between compliance and goal achievement, most especially when the latter is difficult to evaluate. Although recent scholarship has suggested that this tension might be mitigated by the activities of developers of compliance rules, in this article, we explore how actors internal to organizations, in this case, two charitable organizations, mitigate this tension via nonconformance with particular codes. We focus on how the process of accounting for nonconformance results in the discursive coupling of means and ends as actors creatively develop vocabularies of motive, which respond to anticipated social criticism.

Organizations operating in pluralistic institutional environments are facing ever greater pressures to adopt and implement policies and practices that have few if any benefits for their core functions. This situation is characterized by Bromley and Powell as reflective of means–ends decoupling. Current theory suggests that this form of decoupling can be difficult to sustain unless the logic of confidence in the policy/practice is maintained, i.e. actors believe that it is useful, relevant and important. In this study, I argue that part-time working in the UK police service illustrates a sustained case of means–ends decoupling in that its official purpose (to retain the skills and experience of (mainly female) police officers) not only appears to have few benefits for the subunits in which it is implemented, but the practice itself is seen to interfere with the achievement of operational goals, generating efficiency gaps. Despite this situation, the logic of confidence in this practice is maintained. Using Merton’s distinction between the manifest and latent functions of a policy, I argue that this situation can be understood by examining how the policy on part-time working functions latently to increase managers’ accountability regarding the accommodation of part-time working. This means that managers are unwilling to refuse requests for part-time working but its manifest function (the retention of skills and experiences) operates to ameliorate efficiency gaps through a process I term ‘institutional satisficing’. Furthermore, the manifest function of part-time working can be used as a rhetorical tool by managers to justify potentially controversial methods of accommodating part-time officers in frontline roles which can result in the serendipitous recoupling of part-time working to its intended purposes.

In this paper, I explore micro‐political resistance (defined as resistance at the level of meanings, identity or subjectivity) within the context of professional part‐time working.UsingSkeggs' (1997) notion of dialogical recognition, which refers to an individual's identification with negative portrayals of the social categories to which they belong, I argue that in transgressing dominant (and taken‐for‐granted) workplace norms, part‐time professionals experience guilt and a sense that they may not be fulfilling their professional obligations. Based on a qualitative study of part‐time working in theUKpolice service, I show how part‐time professionals navigate these feelings by both drawing attention to the instrumental value of conforming to certain work‐based norms, specifically long hours, and by refusing deployment to tasks and roles that they see as peripheral to their professional identities. It is through such refusals, I argue, that the micropolitical resistance I illustrate in this paper can be understood as effective because of its impact on how everyday routines are performed.

Responding to calls to incorporate a more dispersed and localized conceptualization of power in the study of strategy as discourse, in this article we illustrate that while investing senior managers with the authority to speak and enact strategy, at one and the same time strategy discourse renders this group highly visible and vulnerable. Using a Foucauldian-inspired discursive psychology approach to provide a critical analysis of brief stretches of talk in a research interview, we expose the inherent instability and contingency of strategy discourse as it is used to construct and reconcile contradictory accounts of corporate success, failure and senior manager subjectivity. Our core contribution is to show that resistance to strategy discourse is discernible not only through how lower level or other actors contest or undermine this discourse but also by observing the efforts of corporate elites to manage temporary breakdowns (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011) that disrupt the background consensus that ordinarily provides strategy discourse with its ‘taken-for-granted’ quality. Resistance, we argue, is not only an intentional and oppositional practice but also inheres within the fine grain of strategy discourse itself, manifested as a ‘hindrance and stumbling block’ (Foucault, 1978) in the highly occasioned and local level of mundane interaction.

Researching sexism is not only a controversial undertaking, but one that is rendered problematic due to the fact that many individuals are reluctant to name certain experiences or practices as ‘sexist’. In this article, I use a discursive psychology approach to transcend arguments as to whether certain experiences and practices should be understood as sexist, focusing instead on how, in the context of a research ‘conversation’, participants attempt to warrant their own interpretations of these processes. Using data from research conversations held with two policewomen, who present very different accounts of sexism, I argue that social facts, like sexism, possess an inherent interpretive duality: they can be understood, simultaneously, to be both objective and subjective experiences. The study illustrates that the resolution of competing reality claims (e.g. is sexism a ‘fact’ or is it ‘in the eye of the beholder’) depends upon the processes through which particular versions of reality acquire authority. This essentially political process is, I argue, critical for understanding the reproduction, resilience and endurance of social facts such as sexism.

In this paper, we argue that the concept of the psychological contract can be understood as a discourse that reflects dominant managerial ideologies regarding the nature of the employment relationship. Using qualitative case study data collected from employers and employees working in small businesses in the private care sector, we illustrate how participation in the discourse of the psychological contract is related to social category membership. For those occupying higher status roles, the discourse has resonance and appeal and participation can yield symbolic and material profit. Conversely, for other categories of employees, specifically those occupying lower status roles, the discourse of the psychological contract lacks resonance and meaning. We further illustrate that because this discourse corresponds with the ideology that employment relationships should be reciprocal and based upon social bonds, it enables employers to legitimise their exploitation of low-paid, low-status workers with the active (and passive) consent of the latter. We theorise this example of workplace domination by drawing on Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic power and symbolic violence.

Professional reduced‐hours working is a form of flexible working that runs counter to the increasing trend of employer‐led flexibility, and exemplifies the rise of the so‐called ‘idiosyncratic’ employment deal. Although an emerging body of literature, there is evidence to suggest that despite the claim that professional reduced‐hours working provides ‘better’ part‐time employment than usually typifies this pattern, it actually confers considerable costs to both individuals and organizations. Some academics have called for a more strategic approach to the introduction and management of professional reduced‐hours working, in order to combat these problems. Utilizing a pluralistic perspective on the employment relationship, I draw on data from research in three metropolitan UK police forces to argue that the needs of the part‐time employee and the organization will be difficult to integrate. Showing how the negotiation context of the employment relationship has changed and resulted in a power shift from the manager to the part‐timer, I argue that the best that can be achieved is a minimal integration of the needs of both parties, and draw out the theoretical and practical implications of this position.