Connecting Work To Workers’ Social Past: A Dispositional Analysis of Police Work

Abstract

This article explores the impact of experiences police officers went through before they joined the Force on how they see and perform their job. I propose a new approach to police culture and practices based on a Bourdieu-inspired model of analysis, which includes its subsequent development by Lahire’s ‘dispositional analysis’. The model looks at how dispositions interiorized—particularly through the experience of social mobility and gender socialization—have a great impact on how police officers see and perform their job. The results suggest that divisions within police culture, long acknowledged by criminologists and sociologists, can be explained by the prior socialization of police officers.

Desistance from criminalisation: police culture and new directions in drugs policing

“…'Structural conditions'or the 'field', to use Bourdieusian terminologyinclude the police organisational context and the external social, political and economic environment within which policing is situated. In another Bourdieu-inspired analysis, Pichonnaz (2021) suggests that divisions within police culture can be explained by socialisation prior to joining the police. Studying individual officerstheir dispositions, personal narratives, social identity, and means through which they put their repertoire of cultural resources to workis therefore vital to a dynamic, richly textured account of police culture and the inner-workings of police organisations.…”

“…An implication of this trend is that new recruits, who joined the police over the past decade or so, have always lived in a society where the use of certain drugsspecifically cannabis, but also 'party drugs' such as cocaine and MDMAis a normalised element of youth culture. These past experiences shape their present thoughts and actions (Pichonnaz 2021):…”

From Acculturation to Transculturation?: Police Culture Change in the Pluralized Crime Investigation Department

“…This is helpful for thinking about contemporary police occupational culture, which, like all culture, is comprised of an amalgam of diverse influences. However, under the conditions of pluralisation and changing recruitment practices, these influences derive from a more diverse range of socialisation experiences than has traditionally been the case (Charman 2017;Pichonnaz 2021). The impact of this, however, remains poorly understood.…”