Enchanting bureaucracy: Symbolic violence and the (re)production of charismatic authority in a police apparatus

Symbolic power in a militarized police apparatus: From organizational culture to bureaucratic symbolic violence

Treating the rigid two-tiered police apparatus as a space with field-like properties sheds light on the everyday dynamics of the apparatus, and provides a novel way to analyze organizational culture and domination within it, enriching current approaches to culture and power within bureaucratic apparatuses (e.g. Fine, 1984; Hallet, 2007; Hallet and Ventresca, 2006; Merton, 1952 [1940]). It means conceiving the militarized police organization as a semi-autonomous, bounded, and structured space of social investment and strategic position-takings (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008), where agents rather than struggling to transform this space, invest in its material and symbolic rewards derived from preserving its structure and internal distances.

The structure of this space is determined by the distribution of formal authority and ‘in-house’ capitals, internally produced, acquired, and deployed, and deemed necessary to occupy the posts in the hierarchy. The distribution of symbolic capitals structures the relations in this space, duplicating the formal relations of authority. In this case, different amounts of formal authority within the police organization, which define the commanding and subordinate positions, are doubled by a correlative distribution of in-house symbolic capitals.

Thus, the (re)production of charismatically legitimate domination within the police apparatus involves studying (1) the acquisition of the in-house moral and symbolic capital and (2) the work of legitimation of domination within the space through symbolic violence. The production of bureaucratic symbolic power (the capital of prestige derived from possession of other capitals) through symbolic violence (the imposition of principles of appreciation of capitals and of categories of perception) includes the passage through ‘voluntary total institutions’ (Goffman, 1961): the officers’ and NCOs’ academies and the reproduction of a ‘negotiated order’ (Fine, 1984; Hallet, 2003, 2007). However, from the field-theory perspective, those schools are more than sites for the transformation of the self, and the negotiated order involves more than just interactions.

First, these schools are sites of entrance to the field and mechanisms of legitimation of the bureaucratic structure. Here agents acquire the cultural capital, credentials, and dispositions required to occupy different positions and engage with the bureaucratic space. Second, interactions within those locales and between any member of the commanding and subordinate groups are interactions of agents located in an objective space of positions defined by the distribution of both bureaucratic authority and charisma. By taking into account this objective dimension we can account for the investment of officers in initial moral self-cultivation, but also for the strategies of moral distinction they employ vis-a-vis the ranks and the non-police social world. For that I go beyond the study of the initial training (Sa, 2002; Sirimarco, 2009) and observe how this experience is made effective in their relations with the ranks.

Correspondingly, in the analysis of this negotiated order that emerges in, and is structured by, the dynamics of interactions (Fine, 1984), I connect the interactions with the space of objective positions. This allows me to (1) explain the interests that propel the preservation of such symbolic order, (2) account for its structure, and (3) by tracing the ‘social construction of the principles of construction of that [bureaucratic] reality’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 174), explain why and how the dominant are granted recognition and legitimacy – instead of simply, as Hallet (2003, 2007) would do, indicate that certain capitals and demeanors produce recognition (symbolic power) within such space.

I agree with the functionalist approaches to culture within a militarized bureaucratic apparatus (Abrahamson, 1972; Davis, 1948; Freeman, 1948; Merton, 1952 [1940]; Rose, 1946) that the ethos, worldview, and rituals usually observed to exist side by side with official regulations reinforce bureaucratic hierarchies ‘in much the same sense as added allowances are made by the engineer in designing supports for a bridge’ (Merton, 1952 [1940]: 365). However, I explain the emergence and persistence of the observed cultural elements, not through an impersonal process, but by focusing on the different positions, interests, and actions of the agents that inhabit the institution. ⁴

In sum, combining Weber and Bourdieu, I propose to examine how the police culture of this two-tiered militarized type of force is made to produce an ‘ideological halo’ (Weber, 1992: 959) that allows officers to claim a superior nature that justifies the bureaucratic divide between officer and subordinates, to transform authority into relations of moral guidance, and to construct a shared sense of hierarchical community with their subordinates. I dissect the work of cultivation of legitimacy, analyzing (1) how officers learn and embody the police culture in the process of acquiring apparatus-specific cultural capital (dispositions and credentials) in the police schools; (2) how they deploy their learned moral dispositions to uphold an internal cultural tradition that allows them to produce both a distancing distinction and a hierarchical sense of community in their relations with subordinates; (3) how subordinates use and relate to such culture; and, most revealingly, (4) how the faulty deployment of symbolic violence and a violation of the tenets of the bureaucratic ideology are connected with a rare event of mutiny by the most disciplined section of the force, the riot control unit.

In a parallel move I reconstruct the semiotic system of beliefs and rites through which the charismatic legitimation of bureaucratic authority is performed, referring to its content, structure, myths, figures, and rituals – indeed very distinct from those observed in Anglo-Saxon police forces (Bordua and Reiss, 1966; Reiner, 1991; Skolnick, 1966) and justifying per se this detailed reconstruction. While the specific cultural configuration I reconstruct is particular, it is part of a mechanism that seems to be present in other two-tiered police bureaucracies across Latin America – even in highly professional ones – and something that much needed comparative studies of police culture will have to confirm, discard, or qualify. ⁵

The following reconstruction of the local police space, habitus, and cosmology is based on interviews, observations, and documentary data produced during my fieldwork at the Cordoba Province Police Department, in Argentina. This a major police force in a highly urban and industrialized province, with a long tradition of professionalism (Barreneche, 2009). After being under military control in the 1960s and 1970s and deployed to fight political dissidents, in the first years of democracy the government reoriented training toward greater respect of citizens’ rights, improved forensic investigation capacities, and introduced modern pedagogic techniques for in-class instruction (Policía de Córdoba, 1989). All this makes it an excellent case to show the resilience of this informal culture in the face of reform efforts, the centrality of police culture to legitimate bureaucratic domination, as well as the subtlety of the mechanisms that reproduce it and secure its effects.

With a ‘relational approach to ethnography’ (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008: 34) I made observations in the officers’ school and in the riot control unit over a 10-month period in 2003 and 2004 and in the summer of 2005. The police academy that trains only those who will become officers is where future officers’ ethos and worldview are made more explicit. ⁶ There I could observe how officers acquire the police capital on which their bureaucratic symbolic power will be based. By observing other parts of the police department, especially the riot police unit, I then traced how the cultural dispositions acquired in the officers’ school are diffused throughout the department and transmitted to subordinates through ritualized interactions. In addition to my observations and interviews, I performed a semiotic structural analysis of documents written by police officers through which I reconstructed the content and structure of the organizational culture. ⁷

Officers school: Initiatory discipline as moral cultivation

In a world of predominantly specialized training, only the juvenile phenomena of the barrack and student life remain as residues of the ancient ascetic means for awakening and testing charismatic capacities. (Weber, 1992: 1143)

The officers’ school is the nodal point where the legitimating culture is perpetuated. This is the point of entrance for those who will occupy the higher echelons of this police apparatus that monopolizes the exercise of state policing prerogatives within the province. ⁸ Here the cadets invest time, energy, and effort to acquire the dispositions and cultural tool kit (Swidler, 1986) that will justify their membership in the commanding caste and morally legitimate their authority. Such dispositions and justifications are not technical qualifications, ⁹ but distinctive moral, embodied capacities, virtues. In the police academy cadets will acquire such ‘virtues’ – embodied cultural capital – and learn the moral vocabulary in accordance to which the officer himself will transform the exercise of authority over subordinates into an enterprise of constant moral education.

To become part of the Officer Corps, cadets engage in two years of training in this total but voluntary institution (Goffman, 1961: 118), ¹⁰ where they are subjected, but also subject themselves, to negative rites oriented toward constituting the virtuous police selves. These rites impact every aspect of the candidates’ lives: use of time, personal appearance, dress, eating and drinking habits, relations with family, friends and neighbors, and even reading material. The cadet must leave the profane world of hedonistic desires and learn the virtues of ‘self-restraint,’ ‘humility,’ ‘loyalty,’ all and everything summed up in the notion of ‘sacrifice.’

While the first year is dedicated to the inculcation of obedient dispositions, by the second year ‘it is expected that the cadets will have already developed their self-discipline’ (Instructor Marcio). Cadets learn to obey and have self-discipline through a totally filled, and strictly imposed, schedule that starts at 6.30 a.m., with ‘Physical Training,’ then ‘Academy’ (class) until noon – when they regroup for lunch. After lunch comes ‘[military] Instruction’ during the afternoon, practicing parades, movements, and drill, until dinnertime. Besides inculcating obedience, the whole system of regimented interactions and routines, teaches promptness in reacting to the wills of superiors and the progressive assimilation to collective rhythms and demands.

Learning discipline and obedience is not just learning to follow orders and comply with regulations. Obedience is discursively elaborated, rationalized, and qualified by the instructor-officers in specific ways. The first qualification is that obedience has different ‘degrees.’ The cadet must be able to obey under more or less humiliating, mortifying, demanding, or painful conditions. Instructors rationalize, and cadets assume, that the endurance of pain and suffering implied in obeying orders is a means to develop fortitude and self-control. Roughly translatable as temper, but in the metallurgic sense, this ‘tempering’ of the mind – achieved through effort and pain – is directly related to the control of emotions and reactions of the body, through the development of an internal strength and the presentation of it. ‘Temper’ transforms the total subordination to the orders, wishes, and arbitrariness of the training officers, into a virtue. Obedience is not just a subjection to orders, but a capacity to follow them, accompanied by pride and satisfaction for achieving the moral and physical fortitude required to do it under any circumstance.

Obedience and discipline, ‘temper,’ and ‘sacrifice’ are in turn the bases of other virtues. A cadet with discipline and temper is ‘able to face the worst situations and will maintain within his attitudes and abilities the following ethical and moral values’: ‘companionship, veracity, discretion, respect, collaboration, loyalty, esprit de corps, [and] initiative’ (Policía de Córdoba, General Personnel Directorate, 2002: 13–15).

This substantive rationalization of obedience to orders – the most basic behavior in a bureaucracy – according to moral virtues is the pivotal element over which the whole symbolic system and effects of distinction and legitimation rests. Through it formal hierarchical subordination is made to coexist with moral distinctions within the same bureaucratic pattern. This creates degrees of moral excellence in the performance of orders, allowing officers to judge the receiver of orders on such moral grounds. Moreover, by morally rationalizing obedience officers can discursively connect the exercise of authority (giving orders) and their obedience with other dimensions of the symbolic system, which are also morally imbued.

In this way, ordering and commanding is learned as a complex ritual that contains issuing a directive, a potential moral judgment, and a sense of moral guidance and example. This same sense of moral guide will then be deployed in relating with the lower caste of subordinates. But these rationalizations of obedience and command do not exist as an isolated cultural trait. They are part of a more complex and extended police social cosmology within which officers frame their claims of morally legitimate domination.

The police cosmology: A structured symbolic system

The system of beliefs within which cadets’ obedience and command is rationalized constitutes a somewhat coherent social cosmology. It includes not only the specific ethos described above, but a more general worldview with devotional figures that condense such ideas and ideals. This police cosmology does not exist, in real life, as a system of precisely defined concepts and clearly organized oppositions, but as a system of analogous oppositions reproduced in practice (including discursive and written practices) and for practice, with the officers’ structured system of dispositions (habitus) as its generative principle of coherence, preservation, and imposition.

This police cosmology is structured around a basic opposition between the ‘Ideal’ and the ‘Material.’ These dimensions appear in constant tension in the different realms of reality: the world, the social world, the police bureaucracy, personality, or the human body. In this worldview the material aspects of reality (‘society,’ the ‘mass’ of subordinates, the ‘hedonistic’ impulses of the body) continuously threaten the actualization of the ideal dimensions (‘the police,’ the officer’s commands, altruism) (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Contents (horizontal) and symbolic functions (vertical) of the police cosmology.

Thus, in the dimension of the individual, the ideal person is one that can control his hedonistic impulses, with a deep sense of altruism and veracity. These ideal dispositions are threatened by the vicious material impulses of sensualism and egoism. The same tension exists in the realm of ‘institutions,’ where the police department, the realm of legal and ideal order and of the fulfillment of altruistic public services, is opposed to society, the reign of private interests and disorder, prompted by egoism, materialism, and utilitarian calculations. Within this system everything that takes place in society can be explained by reference to the corrupting forces of materialist egoism and hedonism. A criminal is someone who lacks the adequate values and is led by hedonist impulses he or she cannot control. Institutions are criticized for not performing their assigned functions. The family is conceived as the ‘moral cell’ of society, a locus of cultivation of morally correct citizens. Analogous principles explain drug consumption or political demonstrations.

In this worldview policemen appear as moral champions (spirit) in relation to a civil society they construct as morally deficient (material). In a social word suffused with moral decay, the duty of officers is to preserve and practice abnegation and self-sacrifice. Such moral obedience becomes the only way to preserve the police institution, and through it, the social and moral order. Finally, and decisively, within this perspective the commanding officers, as opposed to the subordinates, appear as the most complete embodiment of those values and dispositions of disinterest. They, and only they, have developed the strength of will that enable them to face their duties with an adequate moral attitude. In opposition to them, one finds the subordinates, who may develop the correct dispositions to some degree, but never with a similar level of commitment, intensity, clarity, and conviction.

This cosmology has as its pagan deity, a secular hero and moral paragon venerated by officers and respected by the whole police community, the War of Independence hero ‘Jose de San Martin,’ ¹¹ who is in turn protector and first martyr of the Motherland – represented by the Flag. From San Martin, as the father of the Motherland, officers derive the most legitimating ideas (the savior, the glory, the example, disinterest), but also the purest excuses to demand subordination (sacrifice, exact and prompt fulfillment of orders, submission, and even to die if necessary). Becoming an officer is reconverted as a progressive identification with the idol. Moreover, the two years of training is purposefully made to coincide with patriotic celebrations, with a final commencement ceremony where they receive a replica of San Martin’s saber. ¹²

It is through this symbolic system and categories that relations of domination are secured. But how? I argue that such effects are achieved by the symbolic transformation of relations of domination, both by converting bureaucratic hierarchical relations into relations between morally qualified agents, and by creating a morally defined community that encompasses officers and subordinates.

Legitimating domination within the organization: Naturalizing hierarchies and constructing the collective

The moral edification of police commanding officers not only produces transformed bodies that ‘become signifiers that cadets [and later on, the officers] use to draw moral boundaries’ (Lande, 2005: 4). Such system of moral differences, and the worldview within which it is integrated, as already advanced, naturalizes the officer’s domination within the organization and sustains the relations of authority by creating a sense of community and moral solidarity among the ranks. These are two analytically separate effects produced by the preservation of the specific police culture. I first address the naturalization of the police castes (officers and subordinates) and then I examine the ways in which officers, through the deployment of this ideology, create a sense of community among the hierarchies.

The subordinate’s place and use of the police cosmology

The symbolic mediation of bureaucratic domination is possible because the dominated within the police system, the subordinates, also believe in such values, virtues, and worldview. Subordinates themselves use this worldview to judge their peers and others and to organize their view of the social world and their feelings toward it. This legitimation of internal domination within the corporation is possible both because these values are conceived of as the values of the whole police community (as opposed to the civilian world), and because the bureaucratic ideology produces a number of services to the most dominated and humble members of the police department.

The symbolic system provides benefits of social and self-esteem to subordinates. According to Bourdieu, labor has a ‘twofold truth,’ never being just exploitation. It also has, in the eyes of those who perform it, other ‘intrinsic profits . . . symbolic profits associated with the name of the occupation or the occupational status’ (2000: 202). In this police apparatus the organizational culture institutes a twofold truth to obedience and membership to the force, creating inherent gratifications at both the individual and relational levels. ¹⁹

At an individual level subordinates feel praised for their physical effort and endurance. These values celebrate their working-class habits, and indeed the peasant past of most first-generation police agents. The ideology also gives coherence to the subordinates’ typical social trajectory of a history of relative scarcity of material means combined with constant renunciations of immediate satisfactions aimed at preserving or advancing their social positions.

The police ideology also allows subordinates decisive benefits of social distinction. It permits them to position themselves, at least in the symbolic realm, in a higher position vis-a-vis civilians, and especially vis-a-vis those civilians of social sectors that are just below the ones from which the police themselves arose. Subordinates participate in this bureaucratic cosmos assimilating their occupational service to altruism, disinterest, and an idealistic way of life. Police from the lower echelons draw moral boundaries (Lamont, 2000) against all classes of civilians but especially against the urban poor and the working classes. Quite revealingly, when I asked a ‘Johnny’ (the generic nickname for subordinates) about the people that live in the slums he answered, ‘What do poor people know about sacrifice? They know nothing’ (Policeman Juan). The ‘self-sacrificing’ habitus can exclude almost anyone, even hard workers, who are respected as long as ‘they do not ask for wage increases, what else do they want? They work only eight hours a day, they have vacations; they can see their families every night’ (Subordinate Rodrigo). Moreover, they explain crime and the existence of criminals – their archenemies – by referring to the criminals’ lack of values and capacities to control their material appetites. This leads to a bureaucratically based racism, with the subordinates and officers defining civilians as essentially defective. As a quite irate Sergeant Hector explains:

Those in the slums . . . they are a bunch of degenerates, they bring it in their blood, they are like that . . . people who do not work, who do nothing, they are all day without doing anything; the demonstrators . . . you give them a house, that they could have it for fifty pesos a month, no. . . . Instead of paying it, they want it for free and they do not want to work. Or if you give them a social security benefit, they do not want to work, they want everything to be given to them, everything, and it is like that.

These practical social philosophers construct the social word as a hierarchy of morally qualified individuals, with the police bureaucracy as the implicit social and moral model. This results in an extreme social conservatism in which everybody should accept his position and condition, just as the officers and subordinates do every day. ²⁰ These moral elements, as other studies show (Garriga Zucal, 2010; Hathazy, 2006), frame the exercise of legal violence against common criminals and demonstrators and morally justify illegal coercion and abuses – even in this force, with relatively low levels of violence compared to other forces in Argentina and Brazil (Brinks, 2008).

The subordinate’s sense of superiority vis-a-vis civilians has a price. Subordinates feel justified and proud of their superior condition when comparing themselves to civilians by drawing on a moral system of which they themselves are the less perfect realization compared to the officers. In this manner, the subordinates preserve the moral legitimation of their superiors by using standards that locate them in an inferior position within the bureaucratic cosmology. And through their use of such standards they close the magic circle of bureaucratic enchantment.

However, the cultivation of legitimacy does not always yield the expected products. This is not a fault-proof process that almost automatically secures the relations of domination. Events of massive disobedience, mutinies, show that such work of charismatic legitimation is a delicate mechanism that can be threatened when the socialization within this culture is weak, or when the shared mores are transgressed by the charismatic leaders. In the next section I dissect an event of mutiny that reveals the centrality of symbolic violence and legitimacy in everyday bureaucratic domination.

Understanding a mutiny: Breaking and restoring the bureaucratic ideology

What causes a mutiny in a militarized police force? I would argue that they are caused in part by a break in the routine recognition of charisma by subordinates. This can occur in one of two cases: (1) when subordinates are inadequately socialized, or (2) when officers violate core tenets of the ideology. To probe the connection between legitimation deficits and mutinies, I focus on the period before, during, and after a May 2002 episode of collective insubordination in the Cordoba Police Department’s riot control unit, the most disciplined and obedient section of the police force, and where one would least expect a mutiny.

In December 2001, Argentina experienced various massive popular revolts, promoted by the opposition, that led to the fall of President Fernando De la Rua (see Auyero, 2007). In the capital city of Cordoba province, the riot control unit was on duty for five days in a row, from 19th to 24th December. The protests were finally controlled, the riots subsided. In the riot control unit, however, things changed. In the six months following the protest, the chief commander of the unit intensified overtime requirements, ordering subordinates to work an extra eight hours, or even 16, in addition to the 24 hours they were contractually obligated to in each shift. With time, the threat of further rioting subsided, but the workload for the riot unit did not. After four months of continuous demands for overtime, a feeling of uneasiness started to develop in the ranks. I argue that this uneasiness stemmed from a lack of adequate socialization: members of the riot control unit could not fall back on an ideological buffer strong enough to support the increasing demands on them.

At that point in time, newcomers made up a large proportion of the riot control unit’s rank and file. Predicting social upheaval, the police department recruited in late 2001 three cohorts of about 100 new NCOs who went through a very brief training of only 60 days, instead of the usual six months, and many of them were assigned to the riot control unit. In turn, given the urgency to fill the positions, the traditional riot control training of 15 days was shortened to three days. Lacking sufficient socialization in the logic of suffering and discipline, the riot unit training seemed absurd and abusive to the new recruits. Subordinate Carlos recalls the training as:

. . . mainly drilling, which for us was strange . . . and a lot, a lot of closed-order formations: salutes, marching, and calisthenics, and of course the unit’s movements, you know, the formations. However, in my view it was badly planned: they clearly committed a mistake with the methods, which was basically punishment, almost torture, too harsh, too rough. They said that [such treatment] was a way of really knowing if you should be a member of the unit. But really, in my view [it was] useless suffering.

This feeling of being abused and subjected to useless suffering only worsened when, in May 2002, commanding officers of the riot police were implicated in a corruption case, accused of charging surveillance services they never actually provided. The news led to a sudden loss of face by the officers in the eyes of the subordinates. Two weeks later the rank and file of the riot control unit’s First Company – which included both many under-socialized newcomers and many old-timers who felt betrayed – decided to report sick, even if they remained in the barracks. The Second and Third Companies, urgently called to replace them, instead joined the mutineers. The mutineers took over the riot police headquarters and resolved not to leave the premises until the chief of the riot control unit was removed. Rumors circulated that the chief was ‘squeezing’ his subordinates in order to impress his superiors and gain a promotion. Instead of promoting him, the headquarters responded to the subordinates’ petition by removing him and putting in place another officer, who knew the old times, as he had been part of the unit a decade earlier.

Instead of purging the unit of the leaders of the mutiny, Officer Ortega engaged in an intense bout of ideological inculcation over the new subordinates instituting an ‘Extraordinary Instruction period’ for the unit where every member of the unit, old and new, would acquire or refresh his skills – and, most importantly, his values – in order to cement his solidarity with the unit. All members received training in a farm about 100 miles from the city, in the middle of the Cordoba hills, where they had to set up bivouacs and hunt or fish for their own food. Each day they visited ‘Cross Mount,’ a hill with three crosses on top, ascended at night before going to sleep, and returned there in the early morning, ascending and descending in a silent pilgrimage. At the top of the hill they ‘meditated,’ guided by an officer to ‘find their values.’ After 12 days in the camp, they were given an official welcome by the chief of the unit, who administered them a new oath of allegiance to the unit. In the following months, the new chief continued to demand overtime from the subordinates, but since he had restored a sense of collective enterprise, the subordinates did not object to it now.

As this episode shows, the production of symbolic power within the riot control unit required the exercise of symbolic violence. The unit’s leadership had to impose principles that portrayed officers, their command, and their (excessive) demands as not just as bureaucratically legitimate, but also charismatically legitimate. On the basis of such principles of classification, the subordinates granted the new leading officer recognition and charismatic legitimacy. For this to happen, subordinates had to be steeped in institutional doctrine and conditioned to recognize the exercise of formal bureaucratic authority as charismatic command.

Conclusion and implications

In this article, I have analyzed the operation of symbolic violence in a militarized police apparatus, showing how bureaucratic authority is converted into bureaucratic symbolic power through the exercise of symbolic violence. This two-tiered structure is naturalized: hierarchical obedience is transformed into a moral relation, while membership in the bureaucracy is converted into participation in a hierarchical community of the chosen, different from, and superior to, the civilian world.

I have also examined the experiences and perspectives of the subordinate members of this bureaucratic apparatus, the mass of policemen and policewomen who are trapped in a moral economy that simultaneously saves them from the banality of being mere civilians but condemns them to acquiesce to their own subordination. Finally, I analyzed a mutiny – an instance where ideological work was interrupted and subordinates failed to grant the recognition their officers demanded – and its aftermath, where officers engaged in an intensified process of charisma building, socializing the under-socialized newcomers to the riot police and reinstating bureaucratic order through reinforcing the symbolic one.

In closing I want to briefly mention the main theory and policy implications of this study. First, domination within this apparatus is neither the mechanical effect of a Foucauldian disciplinary technology that perpetuates itself, nor its culture a manifestation of a self-replicating authoritarian political rationality (e.g. Sozzo, 2005). This police apparatus is a space of social investment, where agents manage to reconvert the most basic bureaucratic pattern of obeying orders into a morally qualified behavior, to transform membership in this rigid bureaucracy into a distinctive mark of status and distinction relative to internal groups or society, and convert subordination and exploitation into a sacred mission.

Second, the field theory approach also complements the symbolic interactionist perspective on bureaucratic culture. Agency is still operating in this highly regulated and disciplined organizational space, not in ‘negotiations of the negotiated order’ (Fine, 1984), but in the active engagement with, and strategies of distinction within, a bureaucracy that remains structurally and symbolically constant. I also showed the necessity of analyzing symbolic power (Hallet, 2003) together with symbolic violence, and of attending to organizationally specific symbolic interests to start understanding the interaction between ‘local and extra-local meanings’ (Hallet and Ventrestca, 2006).

Finally, this work serves to understand how police culture conditions post-authoritarian reforms in contemporary Latin America – a dimension usually overlooked (Fruhling, 2009; Hinton, 2006; but see also Candina, 2005). While in Argentina a volatile, corrupt, and protective political system and a weak judiciary make reform difficult (Eaton, 2008; Hinton, 2006; Ungar, 2009), even when such factors are overcome, the informal authoritarian culture contributes per se to the failure of educational innovations and the deployment of community policing models.

The work of cultivation of charisma described explains the resilience of elements derived from the conservative regimes of the 1940s and the military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s. With it we can explain why a decade after ‘civil and human rights’ were introduced in the Federal Police of Argentina curriculum, these are still ‘just covered ritually, without conviction, to show to society’ (Ungar, 2002: 82), and why officers resist so fiercely changes in their alma mater (Jaime, 2002) or the closing of their academies (Sa, 2011). These cultural frames also appear to be operating in the reproduction of authoritarian and hierarchical relations within community policing programs and forums, as Eilbaum (2004) so vividly shows for the Argentina Federal Police. As these cases attest, reform projects should offer new elements for building a new sense of police honor, one compatible with a respectful, egalitarian treatment of citizens, while seriously taking into account the prestige interests of the incumbent police elite and subordinates who exploit every day the material but also the symbolic profits derived from inhabiting the enchanted police apparatus.