New Managerialism and Canadian Police Training Reform

Abstract

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of a renewed managerialism (or new managerialism) in police discourse and police training in Canada. It reviews changes to the conception of discipline in the supervision of the front-line police officer, and explores how a discourse of bureaucratic organization has been replaced by a 'responsibilization' agenda. It follows this movement in the residential training academy, examining how new training or police learning reforms attempt to reconceive the neophyte officer along new managerialist contours. While this reform can be advanced with the goal of supplanting the traditional military ethos of the police culture, it is argued that the reform may not fulfil this promise and could even leave a notoriously intransigent culture in a condition of renewed empowerment.

Converging Corporatization? Police Management, Police Unionism, and the Transfer of Business Principles

“…The British Police Federation's successful struggles beginning in the early 1990s have probably received the most attention (McLaughlin & Murji, 1997, 2001. However, parallel examples can be found in other English-speaking countries such as Canada, the USA, and Australia (e.g., De Lint, 1998;Finnane, 2002;Kadleck, 2003). There is then an apparent irony that while new managerialism seeks to dissolve trade union consciousness and organization, the successful corporatization of police management has reinvigorated precisely these characteristics of police labour at a time when trade unionism generally has been in retreat.…”

“…The latter, in turn, is regarded as continually reinforced because the rank and file policing experience is formed on the streets and in relation to a largely unchanged set of experiential problems and dangers. Rather than managerial principles filtering down to the lower ranks, this interpretation suggests that police 'low' culture will continue to be reproduced, change will be further resisted at the street level, and the transfer of the corporate model will fail (De Lint, 1998, p. 280, 1999. For many police managers this cultural problem appears as linked to a larger issue, as by implication police union resistance and the resistance of a solidarist rank and file police culture are mutually reinforcing (Landa & Dillon, 1995, pp.…”

Emergent cultural change: unintended consequences of a Strategic Information Technology Services implementation in a United Kingdom university

“…Nevertheless, it is not only social services which have seen the rise of this approach, as is evident from Clarke, Gewitz, and McLaughin (2000), where 'the right to manage' within the domain of trusted autonomous professionals is now a legitimate activity for its own sake in the United Kingdom National Health Service (Gilbert 2005), local government (Van Gramberg and Teicher 2000), education (Briggs 2004) and the justice system (De Lint 1998;Dickens 2008;Vickers and Kouzmin 2001).…”

The Rise and Fall of RCMP Community Justice Forums: Restorative Justice and Public Safety Interoperability in Canada

“…Finally, seasoned rank-andfile members perceived community policing as rhetoric and fad. Executives addressed such recalcitrance through the restructuring of training and management (Clark 2002;de Lint 1998). For example, the RCMP promoted police-community consultation through both a community-based training program and a national community leadership exercise (Conference Board of Canada 2000).…”