Women in Charge

Marisa Silvestri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415628136
• eBook ISBN: 9781134001262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is concerned with the gendered world of police leadership at a time when calls are being made for a different kind of police leader to guide the organisation through the twenty-first century. Drawing on in-depth interviews carried out with senior policewomen across a range of police forces in England and Wales, Women in Charge is the first book to provide a detailed study of women in police leadership. The work challenges existing conceptualisations and theorisations of police culture for the study of police leaders, demonstrating the various ways in which police cultures are shaped by both rank and gender. Women in police leadership face a different kind of gendered environment than their non-managerial counterparts, one in which a 'smart macho' culture of police management dominates. At the same time this book investigates the extent to which senior policewomen are involved in developing new styles and conceptualisations of leadership. It argues that women are involved in promoting a different kind of police leadership, using more consultative and holistic styles - styles not traditionally associated with the police organisation.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

The gendered world of police leadership is the focus of this book. It comes at a time when calls are being made for a different kind of police leader to guide the police organisation through the twenty-first century. Pagon (2003: 167) notes that ‘Different times call for different people. Not only has police work changed, so have the public and the communities into which it is separated … Police leaders have to change themselves, their organisations and their people.’ It also comes at a time when we can see the face and faces of police leadership literally changing. In 2002, England and Wales could lay claim to four female chief constables, and twelve female assistant chiefs.¹

The concept of change then is central to this book. Its enquiry has been shaped by two fundamental ideas about organisational change. First is the idea which suggests that by increasing the number of women in organisations greater and more sustainable forms of change will result (Itzen and Newman 1995). With reference to policing, there is a growing body of work which suggests that policewomen are engaged in the project of policing in a distinctly different way to their male counterparts (Homant and Kennedy 1985, Saunders and Size 1986, Bloch and Anderson 1974, Sherman 1975, Grennan 1987, Lunnenborg 1989, Prenzler 1997, Neiderhoffer 1974, Linden 1983, Spillar 1999). Second is the idea that leaders and managers have a significant role to play in bringing about change to organisations. This idea is central to current debates about change within policing. Police leaders have been awarded a pivotal role in driving forward organisational change (Adlam and Villiers 2003). More specifically, police leaders have been tasked with the job of developing ‘ethical policing’ (Neyroud and Beckley 2001, Adlam and Villiers 2003, Alderson 2003, Bunyard 2003, Richards 2003, Quinton and Miller 2003). A combination of these ideas has led directly to the focus of this book — that is, that women in police leadership positions may offer significant contributions to the project of organisational change within policing.

Women in leadership have come to be seen as both a symbol of and indeed a measure of organisational change. Affirming this, Wall’s (1998) historical study of chief constables ends in 1996, with the arrival of Pauline Clare, Britain’s first woman chief constable at Lancashire Constabulary. He notes the significance of 1996 as symbolising the end of the ‘traditional symbolic male dominance of the office of chief constable’, together with the ‘end of patriarchy’ (ibid.: 6). Though Wall’s proposal that the appointment of a woman chief constable hails the end of the male dominance of the office is unquestionable, the idea that this signals the end of patriarchy may be somewhat premature and overstated. Nonetheless, this book is premised on the belief that things can and might be changing in the police organisation, and it is grounded in the idea that individuals are both creative and transformative agents (Giddens 1984), that despite structural constraints, individuals have the ability to bring about change, to make a difference.

Over the past few decades, there has been a proliferation of police research that has attempted to investigate and map out the nature and extent of organisational change in the police service. There is also a small but growing body of research that demonstrates the gendered nature of the police organisation. Instrumental in exposing the varied forms of discrimination that both men and women encounter in their work, such work remains firmly grounded in the argument that the ‘cult of masculinity’ (Reiner 1992), characteristic of rank-and-file culture, is a prime culprit for women’s continued exclusion from policing. Those at the top of the police organisation continue to remain relatively absent from academic discourse, with the majority of studies focusing almost exclusively on the lowest levels of the organisation, favouring the lives of the rank and file than those of their managerial counterparts.

More recently, however, there does appear to be an increased interest in police leaders and leadership with some notable works emerging (Reiner 1991, Charman et al. 1999, Densten 1999, Loader and Mulcachy 2001, Wall 1998). An edited collection by Adlam and Villiers (2003) perhaps offers the most systematic investigation to date of those occupying senior positions. While such texts contribute much to our lack of knowledge of police leadership, none, with the exception of a chapter by Jennifer Brown in the aforementioned collection, considers gender as a variable — an analysis of masculinity and, by implication, femininity does not form part of their investigations. While leadership studies continues to be an important and prominent area of study for organisational theorists (Avolio 1999, Conger and Kanungo 1998, Northouse 1999), it still remains the case that relatively little is known about those involved in management and leadership in policing, even less about the ways in which management and leadership in the police organisation are gendered.

There are important reasons for exploring and deconstructing the experiences of senior policewomen. The most obvious one remains the need to ‘plug’ gaps in our academic knowledge (Reiner 1998, Stanko 1998). Senior policewomen remain relatively unchartered territory in terms of research and analysis. Exploring the diversity among women, among police officers, will also allow for more sophisticated analyses of the experience of policing to develop. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that much of the work that considers organisational change in policing fails to examine its gendered context. This book attempts to provide a conceptual bridge between these emerging discourses through an exploration of senior policewomen’s careers and their engagement with the project of change.

As women move forwards and upwards in organisations, the tensions between organisations and leadership as mediated by gender have become an increasingly topical area of study. The issue of women’s careers, more generally, and women’s opportunities for promotion, more specifically, has recently been high on political and social agendas in Britain. A report by the Hansard Society in 1990 demonstrated a concern about the lack of women in top positions in public service. In particular, it noted women’s absence from corporate management and in key areas of influence such as the media, universities and trade unions, claiming that women are ‘bunched together just under the glass ceiling, with only the few breaking through this intractable barrier’ (Hansard Society Commission 1990: 11). Over a decade later, we can hear such sentiments echoed in an almost parallel discourse in which the New Labour government has voiced its concern over the position of women in public life, calling for a redress of the balance of power between women and men.

Coupled with this call, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed considerable change throughout public and private sector organisations, with attempts to reorganise their directions, functions, and structures. The ability to bring about sustainable change in the police organisation continues to cause problems for those involved in implementing the processes of change. The strength and persistence of police culture continues to be routinely blamed for the failure of police reform. But while there is much to suggest that the police organisation is highly resilient to the forces of change, there is no doubt that since the 1990s we have observed a substantially altered agenda for the police organisation, both in terms of policing philosophy and in policing practice. A new managerialist order based on economy, efficiency, and effectiveness prevalent in the public sector has been ushered into policing (McLaughlin and Murji 1995, 1997, Morgan and Newburn 1997, Leisham, Loveday and Savage 1996, Waters 1996, Charman et al.1999) forcing a service-wide commitment to achieving greater ‘quality’ of service. Such changes have also been accompanied by a number of welcome changes in equal opportunities policy in the police organisation. Collectively, Brown (2003) argues that the ideas from equal opportunities, new public sector management, and police reform offer the possibility of a ‘paradigm shift’, with the potential to revolutionise the police organisation and its leadership.

Given the challenges facing individuals as a result of the reorganisation of functions, directions, and structures in organisations, it has been proposed by some commentators that women may be in a particularly good position to take advantage of these opportunities to work towards transformation and change. It has been argued that such changes can transform existing structures and hierarchies, offer new ways of doing things and open up spaces in which women can seek to influence the organisations of the future (Itzen and Newman 1995), offering women the opportunity to become more active partners in the reshaping of organisations. Inherent within such discourse, women have been awarded a transformative status, with the potential to both effect and benefit from such organisational change. If we are to believe the new management forecasters, ‘feminine is in — masculine is out’ (Brumlop 1994: 88). Indeed, the increased number of women returned to parliament following New Labour’s success at the General Election in 1997, not only provided the tabloid press with a great photo opportunity and headlines hailing the arrival of ‘Blair’s Babes’, it also provided government with a perfect opportunity to demonstrate its new feminist credentials.

A key starting point for this book is that it is rational to recognise senior policewomen as knowledgeable agents who can contribute to the current state of knowledge about the police organisation. In her analysis of British and American policewomen, Heidensohn (1992:115) argues that ‘We now, certainly as far as the advanced western countries are concerned, inhabit a knowing world. Women know they are interesting and they are interested in themselves.’ The term knowledgeable agent, within Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory, involves recognition of the realities and symbiotic connections of both structure and action. Action cannot be viewed from the perspective of universal laws, because ‘the causal conditions involved in generalisations about human social conduct are inherently unstable in respect of the very knowledge (or beliefs) that actors have about the circumstances of their own actions’ (ibid.: xxxii). Nor can structure be assumed, in social systems, to exist outside of actions or to be determinative of outcomes; rather, it is ‘the medium and outcome of the conduct it recursively organises’ (ibid.: 374). For Giddens, individuals create meaning and social reality from within social settings. There is a purposive notion of human agency in which there is the ability to make a difference, and thus individuals are both creative and transformative agents. In defining senior policewomen as agents, I do not claim that they move wholly purposively through organisational life, exercising subjective choice and decision making, only that, despite structural constraints, they possess the ability to bring about change, to make a difference. In discussing what counts as agency, Giddens rejects the idea that human action can only be defined in terms of intentions. Rather, he argues that:

Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing things in the first place (which is why agency implies power). Agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently. (Ibid.: 8)

In drawing out the power of structural elements more fully, this book is informed by Acker’s (1990) fundamental principle that organisations are not gender neutral. Organisations are a key site where gender divisions are routinely created, exploited, perpetuated, and preserved. Drawing on a gendered organisation approach, together with an appreciation of human agency, this book argues that senior policewomen have the potential to be active gendering agents, with the ability to develop, reinforce, resist or transform cultural knowledge and structures in policing. At the same time, it acknowledges that structure has the potential to work towards enabling as well as constraining gendered change.

Existing theorisations of policing continue to disregard the centrality of police officers as active participants in the construction and reproduction of cultural knowledge and institutional practices. Greater appreciation of the importance of individuals as active participants is emphasised by Chan’s (1997) study on organisational reform in Australian policing. In her analysis she critiques existing conceptualisations of police culture for ‘their neglect of the active role played by officers in the reproduction or transformation of culture’ (Ibid.: 12). It is through exploring the careers of senior policewomen and raising questions about the extent to which such women in leadership positions are agents of change and can become so, that we can begin to engage with some of the more complex debates concerning leadership, gender, policing, and change.

The conduct of police officers and the performance of police organisations have increasingly come under public scrutiny in recent years following revelations of systematic corruption and malpractice in some police forces (Newburn 1999). Calls for reforming the police have become urgent items on police agendas world-wide, as evidenced in a number of damning reports, including: the Scarman Report (1981) following the Brixton riots; the Mollen Report (1994) into the New York City Police Department; the Christopher Commission Report (1991) following the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles; the Fitzgerald Report (1989) on the Queensland Police Force; the Wood Royal Commission Report (1997) into New South Wales Police; the Macpherson Inquiry (1999) into the Metropolitan Police following the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence; and more recently, Lord Laming’s (2003) report into the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié and the Stevens Enquiry into the murder of Patrick Finucane in Northern Ireland.

These reports have explicitly condemned the nature of police culture in contributing to unacceptable police behaviour. In addition, such reports have drawn attention to the link between police malpractice and those who are involved in the work of policing, highlighting the potential implications of having policing reside in the minds and hands of a predominantely white and male organisation. In doing so, they have emphasised the need for further attention to be given to the recruitment, retention, and career progression of women and ethnic minority officers. They have also highlighted a growing concern over the quality and calibre of police leadership by drawing attention to the gap that exists between management and the rank and file.

Charman et al. (1999) note that it is against a background of concern over police corruption and police racism following the Macpherson Inquiry of 1999 that a ‘crisis of police leadership’ began to emerge. Rumours began to spread that the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was less than happy with ‘the quality of police leaders’ and the Home Office launched a review of recruitment, training, and selection which considered, among other things, the selection of senior officers. Indeed, the creation of the National Police Leadership Faculty and the Police Leadership Development Board in 2001 is further evidence of the growing disquiet over the quality of police leadership.

Interestingly, such calls for change, both in terms of developing more effective leaders and in terms of increasing the number of women in policing, have, for the most part, emerged from external pressures. Women’s increased presence in police agencies throughout the world has often been preceded by some contemporary crisis or controversy — the result of which has seen women being called upon as ‘desperate remedies’ (Heidensohn 1996b). This is consistent with the work of Fleming and Lafferty (2002) who argue that visible movements towards achieving greater gender equity owe much if not more to organisational crises than to measures explicitly designed to achieve greater equality such as equal opportunities legislation and policy. They cite the powerful effects of the Fitzgerald Report (1989) and the Wood Royal Commission Report (1997) in influencing and driving forward the debate about women in policing in Australia. Concerned with bringing about change to the heavily male-dominated ‘cop culture’, both reports point to the direct association between increasing the number of women police officers and reducing the levels of complaints against the police organisation. Following the number of ‘formative controversies’ (Savage and Charman 1996) and ‘integrity lapses’ (Mitchell 2003) of police organisations in Britain and throughout the world in recent decades, we should perhaps expect a continued call for more women in policing.

Despite the increased numbers of women in policing, research continues to confirm a picture of continued sexual harassment, discrimination, and differential deployment for policewomen globally (Heidensohn 1992, 2000, Mckenzie 1993, Prenzler 1997, Brown 1996, Brown and Heidensohn 2000). The issue of sex discrimination involving female senior officers was placed firmly on the agenda in 1992 when Alison Halford, then the highest serving woman as assistant chief constable, pursued a sex discrimination case against Merseyside Police relating to her failure to be appointed to a position of higher rank. The significance of this case is emphasised by McKenzie (1993) who notes that Alison Halford’s sex discrimination case was to police sexism what the Brixton riots and the subsequent Scarman inquiry had been to police racism (cited in Brown, 1996).

Brown’s (1998: 278) work demonstrates the continued limited access of women officers to high rank and certain specialist roles, noting that ‘progress towards integration and gender equity ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The police organisation: a gendered site
• 3 Rethinking organisational change
• 4 The making of police leaders
• 5 Doing leadership
• 6 Being in the sisterhood (with no sisters)
• 7 Conclusion
• References and further reading
• Index