A Typology of Police Organizational Boundaries

Abstract

All forms of organization create boundaries of one sort or another, and these boundaries create effects on those who encounter them directly or indirectly. In the previous chapter, the consequences of boundary mismanagement were evident in the cases of Bernardo and Pickton, Most police boundary activity is of a more mundane and day-to-day character, but the principles governing the interactions across police organizational boundaries should remain reasonably constant across cases. As discussed in Chapter 2, the study of organizational boundaries has been an important part of organizational studies for over half a century, ever since the field came to view organizations as ‘open systems’ whose actions and structures were responsive to external factors and were influenced by other organizations. While initially the study of organizational boundaries had been limited to boundaries between organizations, more recently researchers have argued that organizational boundaries, both internal and external, are increasingly negotiated and transacted not at the level of the organization as a whole but rather at the work-unit level (Yan and Louis 1999).

This chapter has been published in modified form as: Giacomantonio, Chris. 2014. ‘A Typology of Police Organizational Boundaries.’ Policing and Society 24(5):545 65.