Responding to reforms: resilience through rule-bending and workarounds in the police force

Vanessa Monties and Stéphanie Gagnon

Public Management Review, 2024, vol. 26, issue 1, 142-161

Abstract: When they shape expectations about professional behaviours, reforms can threaten professional identities. Using an ethnographic study of police investigators, we reveal how threats to professional identity trigger two collective processes of resilience: working the legal boundaries and securing elitism and cohesion. These processes reveal two types of relationship to compliance: apparent compliance and peer-induced compliance, which manifest through rule-bending and workarounds. At the team level, these forms of compliance fostered resilience by helping police officers to maintain their preferred identity. This study also finds that these manifestations of resilience have mixed consequences for both officers and their institution.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2022.2070242

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