| Abstrakt: |
This paper develops a typology of boundaries faced by public police organizations. Following trends in police organization structure and developments in organization theory, the paper focuses on the work-unit level as the locus of organizational boundary activity. Treating boundaries as sites of negotiation that arise when overlap occurs between units inter- and intra-organizationally, the paper focuses on operational aspects of public policing in creating typological categories. The typology elaborates three boundary types: scarcity, proximity, and technical/systemic. These can each be subdivided into two further categories: physical and virtual. Using examples from recent fieldwork in British Columbia's Lower Mainland District, the paper provides examples of each boundary type and suggests common strategies for boundary negotiation. In using the typology to understand public police as organizations within a complex web of similarly organized actors, the paper emphasizes the particular importance of informal and personal contact networks for comprehending boundary activity in public police work. The implications of this finding for the challenges of twenty-first century-policing are explored, and a future research agenda is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
