Delivering security through networks: Surveying the relational landscape of security managers in an urban setting

Abstract

The concept of network is fast becoming ubiquitous. Its broad appeal lies in its ability to account for the present multiplicity of institutional, organizational, and social morphologies. Networks promise to absorb, recombine, and merge the two dominant and competing forms of social organization (the bureaucratic hierarchy and the market) into a third one that would transcend the proclaimed obsolescence of bureaucracies (see for example Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) or the excesses of the market. Crime or dark networks (Raab and Milward, 2003) and their real level of (dis)organization have been studied for a number of years (Naylor, 2002; Morselli, 2005 and in this issue), but the 9/11 events and the failures of the verticalhierarchical bureaucratic forms of security delivery they highlighted provided an audience to those advocating flatter and more flexible law enforcement assemblages (Williams, 1994; Arquilla and Ronfeld, 2001).