Society and the Policeman's Role

Maureen E. Cain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138918269
• eBook ISBN: 9781317421450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The role of the policeman in the community and attitudes towards the police are now matters of active public concern. In this important and enlightening study, first published in 1973, Maureen Cain gives an account of how the police operate in the United Kingdom. Her book will be of great value to sociologists, criminologists and policemen alike.

1 The background of the study

The whole conceptual field is suffering from ‘a mass of verbalization, logical circularity, terms used in many and confusing ways, terms used for concepts diametrically opposed to the usage of others, refusal to recognize the difference between another’s concerns and one’s own, utilization of various levels of abstraction with no recognition of problems thus introduced, and tedious, continual redefinition of terms’

(Biddle, 1961)

Introduction

The introduction to William Westley’s recently published Violence and the Police (1970) expresses so many of my own thoughts on preparing this study for publication that I can do little better than refer the reader to it. I too return to a work which was designed ten years ago (in Westley’s case the time lag was doubled) and find that I barely recognize either the incipient academic who dreamed up the theoretical framework or the young woman who stepped out with self-confident ignorance to tackle field research. The delighted surprise and nostalgia which visit me when re-reading my field diaries are constantly checked by dismay at what I now regard as crucial gaps in my evidence. Moreover, while Westley’s work was an attempt at what we should now call grounded theory, my own was couched initially in the form of hypotheses for testing. Thus, because theories by their nature supersede each other, the central problem which this research set out to tackle can no longer claim to be the most useful approach to the sociology of police work. The formal organization of policing in this country has also changed markedly in the last decade, since the widespread introduction of Unit Beat Policing; and since the Police Act of 1964 even the legal and constitutional position of police officers has been altered (Marshall, 1965).

None the less, I offer this book to the reader as what I hope will be a useful supplement to the only two similar works which have as yet been published in this country, those of Banton (1964a) and Lambert (1970). If it were legitimate to re-formulate the central concern of the work, one could argue that the source of the policeman’s world view is still a relevant question. At times in this study

I have re-formulated problems in this way, but by and large the text is still in the form in which it was presented as a doctoral dissertation in 1969, for which the original theoretical propositions were unmodified. I have done this because I believe that conceptual gymnastics of this kind are often dangerous, if only because they tend to obscure major differences of standpoint. Where such translation has seemed useful and has been attempted, I have tried to make the exercise explicit.

The statement at the beginning of the chapter is about theoretical developments making use of the concept of role. This work was conceived with the twin purposes of (a) throwing some light on police organization and behaviour, and (b) clarifying the conceptual morass described by Biddle and moving towards an explanation of behaviour in terms of role pressures and definition on the lines of Gross et al. (1958). The specific problems to be investigated were set by developments in role theory.

The initial planning for the study took place in 1961 and 1962. At the time there was little published research in the area of police work.¹ In the intervening years new problems in this substantive area have emerged. As theory and research about deviance and crime has focused increasingly on sociological as distinct from social problems, analysis of the practices of enforcement agencies has become an integral part of the deviancy field. The research reported here throws incidental light on some of these problems, though its main focus is on police organization itself, rather than on the effects of police activity on those outside the police force. I have, therefore, considerably abridged the original theoretical discussion, leaving what seemed to be minimally necessary for the reader both to understand the starting point and to be able to guide himself through the material presented. I have also added, in this chapter, some discussion of more recent theoretical and empirical work about the police.

The original theoretical framework

In the design of the study a Levinsonian approach was adopted. Levinson’s suggestion (1959) that the fruitless attempt to define the essence of a reified role be abandoned remains perhaps the most significant advance in this field since the term ‘role’ was first coined by James in the 1890s (Banton, 1964b). Expectations about how people will behave, actual behaviour in response to these, and the various intervening cognitive processes, are analytically distinct, and it helps little in either explanation or theory building to attach the label ‘role’ to any particular one. Variations in each can be separately observed, for example in range or degree of institutionalization of expectations, regularity in response in different circumstances, or, as here, in the effectiveness of expectations in producing a particular response. Problems can be discretely identified and the confusion indicated by Biddle (1961) can be avoided.

In the early 1960s two main tendencies could be noted in role and role-conflict theory. The first was a convergence of historically opposed schools of thought and the second was an increased attention to the sources of role definitions. Traditionally one school of thought regarded role as a property of a person (Cooley, 1902; Meade, 1934; Davis, 1949; Newcombe and Charters, 1950; Sargent, 1951; Goffman, 1956) and the other regarded role as a property of a social system (e.g., Linton, 1936; Parsons, 1951). By the 1950s theorists in both schools were taking account of, or seeking to incorporate, the opposing position. Explicit attempts to isolate the essential elements of the theory (Nadel, 1957; Gross et al., 1958; Levinson, 1959; Banton, 1964b, 1965) and to provide an all-embracing framework of theory further facilitated the task of internal classification and highlighted the links between the various approaches. It was shown that antagonisms between opposing schools resulted from lack of clarity of definition as well as from fundamental differences of standpoint.

The second development, the attention to the source of role definitions, was in part a necessary consequence of the growth of the theory itself. Once a theory built to suggest explanations for particular orderings of empirical data reached the stage where the formulation of more specific hypotheses for testing seemed necessary, attention had to shift to areas where testing was possible, and conceptual tools had to be further refined before they could be used for this purpose. The major work of Gross et al. (1958) still leads the field here, though more recently other writers such as Ehrlich (1962), Preiss and Ehrlich (1966), and Musgrove (1967) have also shown that role theory can be a useful basis for prediction and analysis.

Empirical studies have focused upon role conflict, first, because theory can only be tested when there is variation in response, and, second, because of the endemic benevolence of social scientists who see their function as ameliorating stresses and strains. The main result of the development of this micro-theory of conflict has been an increasing emphasis on the source of role definitions or expectations.

Just as the concept of role came to supersede that of status as a more flexible analytical tool (Goode, 1960)so analyses in terms of role conflict became more popular than the earlier analyses in terms of status conflict. This latter type of analysis persisted mainly in studies of ‘marginality’ in the original sense of the term (e.g., Dickie-Clark, 1966) involving duality of race or culture.

Because of the emphasis on status conflict, stemming from the works of Park and Stonequist, studies in the area until the middle 1950s tended to concentrate on multiple group membership and discrepancies in role definition resulting from this, although the term ‘role conflict’ was coined along the way by Hughes (e.g., Whyte et al., 1945; Hughes, 1944, 1949; Roethlisberger, 1945; Linton, 1945; Hartley, 1951; Killian, 1952; Stern and Keller, 1953; Getzels and Guba, 1954). Later, the problem of different sets of expectations for the same role was recognized (e.g., Stouffer, 1948b; Gullahorn, 1956; Merton, 1957b; Ben-David, 1958; Gross et al., 1958). Attempts to develop typologies of role conflict were severely restricted by the emphasis on multiple group membership. They took the form of efforts to identify the area of behaviour in conflict (e.g., Parsons, 1951; Seeman, 1953; Sarbin, 1954; Gross et al., 1958.) Gross and his colleagues, however, noted the importance of the source of the expectation and, also, together with Banton (1963, 1964a, 1965), recognized the importance of the degree of consensus both between and within counterpositions. Biddle (1961) and Kahn et al. (1964) also paid attention to this variable. Since the publication of Gross’s work it has been generally recognized that not all of those who attempt to define a role for another are equally capable of doing so. The argument thus came to centre round an explanation of these differences in power.

The recognition that the clue to role behaviour lay with the role-definers rather than the area of behaviour defined as a role was but a short step away from the realization that role theory and reference-group theory were tackling essentially the same problem, namely, that of the reasons for conformity to or deviance from the norms and standards of others. Role theory has traditionally dealt with more heavily institutionalized sets of expectations (how a man should behave qua policeman or qua father, for example) though the recognition of lack of consensus among role definitions broke down this simplistic view of a unitary role. Reference-group theory, though it too tended to emphasize group solidarity, focused attention on the nature of the relationship between the focal person and his reference groups, for example in the typologies of reference groups developed by Turner (1956) and Merton (1957b).

Bott (1957) has well summarized the wide-ranging discrepancies in definitions of reference groups. The specific term ‘reference group’ was first used by the psychologist Hyman in 1942, in a study concerned with the perception of status. Since Hyman regarded role and status as inseparable, the concept has been from the very first linked indirectly with that of role. During the next decade the concept of reference group underwent considerable attempts at refinement, notably by Sherif and Cantril (1947), Sherif and Sherif (1948), Lindesmith and Strauss (1949), Newcombe (1950, and—following the publication of The American Soldier (Stouffer, 1949a)—by Merton and Kitt in 1951. In 1951 and 1953 Sherif added yet further contributions. By this time distinctions had been drawn between in-groups and out-groups, positive and negative reference groups, membership groups and non-membership groups, and discussion had been centred around these problems.

Merton and Turner moved forward from this base and a combination of their typologies enabled the overlap with role theory to be mapped (Cain, 1968b). It is perhaps worth emphasizing that the concept of reference group is built upon the notion of the orientation of the actor to others.

The theory on which this research was based explicitly focused attention on the source of role definitions (derived from role theory) and on the importance of these to the focal person (derived largely from reference-group theory). In a previous paper (ibid.) it was pointed out that the identification of role-definers (those projecting expectations) is only a preliminary step. There are differences in the importance of the definition to the role definers themselves, and in the meaning of the received definitions to the actor. More important, even given equivalent definitions and interpretations, there are structural differences in the power of different role-defining individuals or groups. Some will be more effective in influencing the behaviour of the focal person than others. Ehrlich tested the hypothesis developed by Gross et al., that this variability resulted from differences in sanctions and differences in perceived legitimacy, and found that much of the variance remained unaccounted for. This, then, was the theoretical problem with which this research was primarily concerned. What are the reasons for the differences in power between role-defining groups in affecting the direction (rather than the mode) of response to discrepant role definitions?

The literature in this area, even as late as Musgrove’s work (1967), has presumed that stress results from the perception of discrepant role definitions, despite the finding of Kahn et al. (1964) that stress is unrelated to objective conflict. This has given rise to the notion that the actor or focal person seeks at all costs to avoid such ‘conflict situations’. Rommetveit (1957), for example, pointed out that all conflict solutions must either be total or partial, the implication being that partial solutions leave a residue of stress for the actor and possibly also for others involved in the system. The idea of the compromise or conflict solution runs right through the literature (the trend was set by Stouffer, 1949b) and results directly from a failure to disentangle conceptually the focal person’s experience of stress from his perception of himself as being the object of discrepant role definitions. There has been some confusion too as to whether these solutions should be viewed from the focal person’s or the counterposition’s point of view (e.g., Parsons, 1951), and also in distinguishing solutions which involve permanent structural change (e.g., Hughes, 1949; Hermann and Schild, 1960) from others of a more temporary nature. Attempts by the individual to re-organize his cognitive structure are different from impact on structure as a result of actions in a conflicted situation. The former are mechanisms which may follow the choice of solution and which enable the individual to live without stress experience.

The issue about response to conflict which is considered here is whether the role-definer—a term which includes counter positions and certain types of reference group—gets his own way. Does the focal person act in the way the role-definer wishes, or at least expects, or does he not? And in either case, why? Alternatively expressed, the dependent variable is the policeman’s (focal person’s) action; the independent variables are his relationships with the role-definers.

The argument which provided the basis for this study (Cain, 1968b) was that variations in the potency or effectiveness of role-definers may be linked with the degree to which the actor perceives himself to be interdependent with them. It is not just the actor’s dependence, whether structural or affective, on the role-definer which determines the latter’s power; it is also the actor’s perception that the role-definer is reciprocally dependent on him (Berkowitz and Levy, 1956; Berkowitz, 1957; Dittes and Kelly, 1956). In deciding how to act he takes into account his estimate of the effects of his action on relevant others. Thus the theory was closely linked with the very earliest discussions surrounding the concepts of role and role-taking.

The differential power of role-definers, noted for example by Killian (1952), Sarbin (1954), Getzels and Guba (1954) and Gullahom (1956), as well as Gross, Ehrlich, Kahn, and the other more recent role theorists previously discussed, was therefore considered in this study to be related to the extent to which the actor considers his relationship to the role-definer to be one of reciprocal dependence. It was argued that this holds true whether or not the actor’s perception of the situation is veridical in fact.

From this general theoretical position specific propositions were derived (Cain, 1968b). The two propositions which shaped this research were:

(1) that an individual with higher (measured) interdependence with a particular role-definer would act in the direction of the perceived role definitions of this group more frequently than an individual with a lower (measured) interdependence with that role-definer;

(2) that the individual with the higher (measured) interdependence with a particular role-definer would act in accordance with his perception of the role definition of that role-definer in a wider range of situations than the individual with lower (measured) interdependence.

It was also hoped in a more general way to offer explanations for the variations in power and interdependence by means of data gathered during the period of observation.

The method of study

A preliminary analysis of such evidence as was then available indicated that policemen were indeed subject to conflicting expectations, and therefore that role theory as here discussed would provide a useful approach to the understanding of police organization and behaviour. A number of these indications of conflict emerged from the evidence submitted to the Royal Commission on the Police, whose final report (1962a) was then awaited. One of the main practical problems for the police at the time of study, as now, was unnecessary wastage of long-serving officers, for which there seemed no adequate explanation (Royal Commission on the Police, 1960a). In their evidence to the 1960 Royal Commission on the Police (ibid), the Association of Chief Police Officers remarked: ‘A police constable does not merely take a job, he embarks on a new way of life … the first claim on him must be made by his duty, and the convenience of his wife and family must be a secondary consideration’. (Royal Commission on the Police, 1960b). The Police Federation supported this view of the impingements of a policeman’s work on his private life, emphasizing the importance of a reduction in or a re-organization of the policeman’s hours of work in order to reduce wastage. They argued that the m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The background of the study
• 2 Rural police work
• 3 City police work
• 4 Interdependence with the Community
• 5 Interdependence with family—marital integration and domestic life
• 6 Interdependence with senior officers
• 7 Interdependence with colleagues
• 8 Summary, Conclusions and a Forward Look
• Appendix I The policemen's interview schedule
• Appendix II The wives' interview schedule
• Appendix III Supplementary information about research techniques
• Appendix IV Additional tables referred to in the text
• Appendix V The Police (Discipline) Regulations, 1952
• Notes
• References
• Index