The Norwegian Police Force: a learning organization?

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine what decisions to prosecute, sent to the local police districts from the Norwegian Bureau for the Investigation of Police Affairs (the body responsible for investigated charges against the police), can tell us about the challenges the police face in becoming a learning organization.Design/methodology/approachThe data for this paper were collected in connection with the subproject that studied how the police districts handled the cases they received from the Bureau for Administrative Evaluation. This project was carried out in 2008‐2009 and is based methodically on a study of 33 (of a total of 35) different cases from 2007, which ensures a broad thematic scope.FindingsThe willingness of the leadership to take responsibility for the organization's systematic ability – and liberty – to ask fundamental questions about dominant values and norms, and thus to promote experiential learning, varied greatly. Whether the administrative cases were perceived to belong on the individual or the organizational level had great impact on how the cases were defined when they came back to the local police district, which again decided how the cases were handled. This had consequences for the degree to which the cases were the subject of individual or collective learning processes in the police district.Research limitations/implicationsThe role of the police as custodians of law and order may paradoxically limit the organization's ability to learn from potentially criminal events and cases that come from the Bureau for Administrative Evaluation. This contributes to a weak system focus and a strong individual focus, where individual shame bearers are created and double‐loop learning is avoided.Practical implicationsTo ensure that the learning systems are actually used and function as intended, it might be apposite to have regular litmus tests of the development by analyzing the handling of concrete events and patterns which emerge over time. An important element in this connection is to observe how leaders deal with potentially shameful incidents, both internally and in the public light, and thus constitute the police organization's boundaries to the outside world.Originality/valueThe paper argues that the police's role as custodians of law and order paradoxically may contribute towards limiting the organization's ability to learn from potentially criminal events and cases that come from the Bureau for Administrative Evaluation.