摘要：In the last twenty years or so, the shining efforts of many to frame policing as atheoretical field within the broader umbrella of organisation studies have dimmed.The effort has collapsed into a series of footnotes, paeans to the pragmaticimmediacy of policing’s own vague problematics. Why should a scholar carewhether a crime rate goes up or down, absent a theoretical query? Who wants anefficient police force enforcing selectively the available laws? The evidence for acollapse of inquiry is shown in overviews of policing ‘innovation’ that shows nonehave occurred. What are described as ‘innovations’ were not operationallydefined, the programs were not implemented systematically, and the outcomeswere made up as the innovations went forward (Willis and Mastrofski 2011).These innovations were couched in the short term, theoretical and street-drivenoccupational culture of policing. Reviews of problem-solving (Reisig 2010), forexample, show it to be rarely done, empty, self-serving, and unrelentingly embeddedin the patrol officers’ myopic view of policing. Why, for example, should the‘dependent variable’ always be officially recorded crime, a matter under thecontrol of the police?
