Abstract
This chapter explores the use of oral histories in furthering our understanding of police cultures by expanding upon three main themes. First, the oral history approach challenges us in terms of the need to differentiate between police organisational influences and the influences of wider society. Second, the approach highlights the difficulties associated with assuming a degree of universality between police cultures. Third, the approach allows one to build upon the work of policing scholars such as Shearing and Ericson, and Waddington in drawing out further dimensions of the problematic relationship between language and behaviour in the context of police narratives. Police culture is, in many respects, a contested term. Inter alia it can refer to specific (and almost prescriptive) modes of behaviour, the values that inform such behaviours and the narrative modes used by the police to describe or accommodate them. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some of Police Occupational Culture: New Debates and Directions Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 8, 85–102 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1016/S1521-6136(07)08003-7
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