Public criminology,reflexivity and the enterprise university: Experiences of research,knowledge transfer work and co-option with police forces

Introduction

In this article we contribute to discussions of ‘public criminology’ (Loader and Sparks, 2010a) by reflecting on our experiences of conducting research and knowledge transfer work with police forces in England within the context of the ‘enterprise university’ and evidence-based policing. The police have a long history of being secretive and resistant to outsider interference, but in recent years many have exhibited greater willingness to form partnerships with academics (Fleming, 2012; Fyfe and Wilson, 2012; Goode and Lumsden, 2016). We consider our activities to be a form of ‘public criminology’ which was contracted insofar as it was a funded project involving direct engagement and collaboration with external stakeholders including the police. Burawoy (2005: 11) notes that ‘public sociology’ and ‘policy sociology’ can often blur. In this case, we found ourselves operating on the shifting ground between two groups of clients (university and police) while attempting to engage in ‘public criminology’.

We focus on attempts to co-opt ‘public criminology’ into serving two broad agendas—that of universities’ commitments to ‘enterprise’ and the financial, political and professional constraints to which external users of research are increasingly subject. Two levels of co-option experienced during the project are reflected upon herein. First, we discuss the internal university pressures and dilemmas which had to be negotiated. These included: definitions of ‘research’ and ‘enterprise’ and issues around funding and contracting of the project. Second, we reflect on the external pressures encountered in interactions with police partners. These included the influence of new public management principles and ‘fast academia’. In attempting to do ‘public criminology’ we were confronted with challenges in our interactions with stakeholders, including the power dynamics which must be negotiated in relation to internal and external organizational, public management and ‘audit cultures’ (Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000).

There is a need to value the ‘public aspects’ of ‘criminological labour’ and to develop greater understanding of those aspects which further or impede our efforts to have ‘practical effects’ (Chancer and McLaughlin, 2007: 168). We highlight how the practice of ‘public criminology’ can entail occasions in which the criminologist may feel they are treading a thin line between critical engagement and academic freedom; and becoming, in relation to one of the pathologies of ‘policy sociology’, a ‘servant of power […] sacrificing scientific integrity in the process’ (Burawoy, 2004: 1611). We are concerned with a tension between the self-identity of criminologists within the bounds of public engagement (i.e. in a normative sense the role of criminology in engaging with the social world), and the institutional context in which this takes place, which consists of a pervasive ‘audit culture’ and the rise of the ‘enterprise’ or ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Taylor, 2014).

In the past few decades the traditional liberal and Enlightenment idea of the university as a place of higher learning has been replaced with the modern idea of the university as corporate enterprise. The enterprise university is primarily concerned with maximising profit, return and investment, gaining competitive advantage, and servicing the needs of commerce and industry (Shore, 2008). Although this research is UK centric, it is important to acknowledge that these developments are occurring across Anglophone jurisdictions. We highlight the ways in which ‘public criminology’ risks becoming institutionalized and managerialized, set within a context of ‘fast academia’—behind which is a business model consisting of high student fees, private providers and new public management principles (O’Neill, 2014). We show how this ‘business model’ can define the kind of contract which sets the parameters of the research and/or enterprise relationship between universities and external stakeholders.

Public criminology and the neoliberal university

The problems faced by criminologists in their role as public intellectuals are part of a continuing series of dilemmas for social scientists (Gattone, 2006), reflected in Burawoy’s (2004, 2005) call for ‘public sociology’ and related pleas for ‘public criminology’ (Loader and Sparks, 2010a; Uggen and Inderbitzin, 2010). Burawoy (2005: 11) distinguishes between four types of sociology: ‘policy sociology’, ‘professional sociology’, ‘critical sociology’ and ‘public sociology’, which together form a division of sociological labour. ‘Professional’ and ‘policy sociology’ involve instrumental knowledge, while ‘critical’ and ‘public sociology’ involve reflexive knowledge.

In his 2009 presidential address to the American Society of Criminology Todd Clear argues for criminology to develop a public research agenda which will influence policy-making (Rock, 2014). Criminology can be distinguished as a form of public scholarship because it is interdisciplinary, includes a subject matter which can incite moral panics, and has a practitioner base engaged in knowledge production (Uggen and Inderbitzen, 2010). The service roles of academic life are also part of ‘public criminology’ and include developing and nurturing students’ passion for social justice (Uggen and Inderbitzin, 2010: 728).

In Public Criminology? Loader and Sparks (2010b) propose a series of ideal types of academic engagement, of which they favour the ‘democratic under-labouring’. This approach to criminology seeks to contribute ‘to a better politics of crime and its regulation’ (Loader and Sparks, 2010b: 117). It is committed to the generation of knowledge across three distinct moments: ‘the moment of discovery’, the ‘institutional-critical moment’ and the ‘normative moment’ (Loader and Sparks, 2010b: 125). They also warn against forcing authors into various categories, or arguing that ‘public crimiology’ is a particular position which criminologists may or may not choose to adopt.

Wacquant (2011: 439) argues that Loader and Sparks help to support calls for reflexivity, as they ask us to consider criminology’s relationship to policy and politics. Nonetheless, he highlights three weakness in their thesis including: a focus on the US ‘public sociology’ controversy; the adoption of a textualist brand of reflexivity which ignores institutional aspects; and the utilization of a descriptive typology (Wacquant, 2011: 439). There are a number of more general critiques of ‘public criminology’. Tittle (2004) for example, draws attention to the moral dilemmas faced by criminologists, the ‘shaky’ ground on which criminological knowledge is based, and threats to the legitimacy of sociological knowledge. He cautions that most of the time we do not know as much as we pretend to and practitioners rarely trust sociological knowledge (Tittle, 2004; see also Stanko, 2008). It is also worth noting that in general the debate thus far concerning ‘public criminology’ has been macho and of a relatively non-applied nature.

In this article we are concerned with the role of ‘public criminology’ in the neoliberal university. We are reflecting on our experiences of doing enterprise as defined and promoted within a particular university in the English higher education system, and recognize that our experiences may not be shared. However, we believe they reflect the growing trend in British higher education and in neoliberal universities in other Anglophone jurisdictions towards managerialism, ‘audit culture(s)’ (Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000; Shore, 2008), and a focus on public engagement outside of the academy. In this sense, ‘public criminology’ also risks becoming managerialized in the context of research impact (Loader and Sparks, 2010a). The institutionalization and self-discipline of individuals subjected to managerialized ‘audit culture(s)’ in the neoliberal university can create space for the potential co-option of ‘public criminology’ into university/political agendas. It is also worth noting that the type of collaboration we describe in this article has been touched upon previously in literature on police–academic partnerships in other Anglophone contexts, including Bradley and Nixon’s (2009) acknowledgement of intimate partnerships between police and universities in Australia, and police and university relationships in the USA (Engel and Whalen, 2010), Scotland (Fyfe and Wilson, 2012) and in Europe. ¹

Reflexivity in criminology

We adopt a reflexive approach in order to shed light on the interpersonal, organizational, and political influences and tensions encountered when doing ‘public criminology’ with police in the context of the neoliberal university. Recent publications such as Lumsden and Winter’s (2014) Reflexivity in Criminological Research, and the writings of others such as Jewkes (2012) and Liebling (1999), demonstrate the growing recognition among criminologists of the value of reflexivity. In this, they build on earlier feminist critiques. Gelsthorpe and Morris (1990: 88), for example, point out that the feminist principle involves ‘viewing one’s involvement as both problematic and valid and of recording the subjective experiences of doing research, for these experiences underpin the creation of knowledge’. Theoretical developments in feminist criminology have permeated mainstream criminology, and the benefits of research methodologies favoured by feminist criminologists are recognized by other streams of criminology (Mason and Stubbs, 2010). In drawing on feminist principles, reflexivity challenges the myth of ‘hygienic research’ (Oakley, 1981) and reminds us that the researched are subjects, not objects (Jupp, 1989). It permeates each part of the research process including the selection of the research topic, the search for funding, relationships with participants, data collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination (Lumsden and Winter, 2014).

It is also important that we examine the proliferation of contracted research. There is a risk that the acceleration of this form of academic labour will ‘spell the end of critical—reflexive—criminology’ (Chan, 2000: 131–132). It can be difficult to reflect in studies such as ours where the researcher is in an underprivileged position in relation to key gatekeepers. It raises questions as to how researchers can avoid becoming ‘servants of power’ in doing “‘policy sociology’ (Lumsden, 2016). Despite the difficulties presented to us in contracted research, we demonstrate that it is still possible to be reflexive. In light of all of these observations, before we reflect upon our experiences of doing ‘public criminology’ with the police, we briefly surface issues of power and status within different models of partnerships, by outlining the history of policing research.

Policing research and police–academic partnerships

Police studies is a diverse, and frequently disputatious field and has typically involved a distinction between ‘sociology of’ and ‘sociology for’ the police (Manning, 2005). It can act as a ‘mirror’ or a ‘motor’: either reflecting the ‘complex realities of policing in a globalizing world’ or working as an ‘“engine” for change and improvement’ (Innes, 2010: 128).

Many of the field police studies took an ethnographic approach (Cain, 1979; Holdaway, 1983; Punch, 1985). These studies focused on how deviance is produced by the police and shifted attention from the deviant to the agencies of social control (McLaughlin, 2007). Later work, much of which took a Marxist perspective, was concerned with the injustices of police relationships with the state and class (McLaughlin, 2007).

Applied research perspectives developed alongside the ethnographic and Marxist studies, examining policing facts like whether increasing the number of patrol officers in certain areas would reduce crime (McLaughlin, 2007: 67–68). Cain (1993) proposed that the most recent sub-discipline of police studies has (as a result of funding decisions) focused on ‘policy-oriented methodologies’ which have been used to ‘colonize the soul of police studies’ (McLaughlin, 2007: 85) and focus on development of a ‘what works’ paradigm. The consequences of this include a lack of ethnographic studies of policing, and an absence of Marxist scholars from the field (McLaughlin, 2007; see also Manning, 2005).

These days, police studies have largely shifted from conducting research ‘on’ police, to conducting research ‘with’ them (Goode and Lumsden, 2016) and academics and police-practitioners have openly reflected on the benefits of working together (Fleming, 2012; Fyfe and Wilson, 2012; Stanko, 2008). The rhetoric has frequently been challenged by the realities, however, with the traditional relationship between police and academics being conceptualized as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’, which can be understood as a ‘mutual misunderstanding that negatively impacts on the police–academic relationship’ (Bradley and Nixon, 2009: 423). Academics have been criticized for failing to engage with the complex demands of policing resulting in mistrust between police and academia (Wilkinson, 2010).

Stanko (2007) highlights four reasons for the difficulties ‘outsiders’ encounter when trying to translate research into evidence in the realm of policing. First, they are often unaware of the best means to target their audience. Second, they might be an expert in one area of academia, but in policing they are required to demonstrate expertise in multiple areas. Third, there is a need for patience. Finally, there is a need to recognize the organizational context and power dynamics at play within it. Police organizations are ‘breathing decision-making entit[ies] […] [with] […] “snakes and ladders” of change. To move forward, you need continuity, high organizational management support and a constitution of steel’ (Stanko, 2007: 215). Thus, police and researchers have drawn attention to the benefits of co-produced research and participatory action research for shaping successful police–academic collaborations and research agendas (Foster and Bailey, 2010), but also offer some caveats.

Partnerships in the context of police–academic relations are focused on breaking down the two worlds of policing and academia, to cultivate mutual understanding and develop close relationships in which researcher/s and practitioner/s work closely together to design, develop, conduct and disseminate research into the policing context. They can be top–down strategically developed partnerships, instigated and promoted at the organizational level, or bottom–up organically developing partnership relationships between key individuals from both sides. Our experience here is of the latter form of partnership, which was then co-opted into strategically aligned organizational priorities for forces and universities. We show how in practice academics may find themselves situated between the police organization and the university organization, having to respond to pressures in practice with regard to the definition, shaping and application of research.

An enterprise project: Strategic partnership development with police forces

This article is based on our experiences during a one-year funded enterprise project from 2014–2015 that focused on developing partnerships and conducting knowledge transfer with police forces in England. As Foster and Bailey (2010) note, many partnerships of this type are forged by ‘happenstance’, and this was the case. Early collaborative work and the development of this strategic project, originated from an informal meeting between the Principal Investigator (PI) and a Superintendent responsible for developing partnerships with regional universities. The project involved the appointment of a full-time Senior Research Associate (SRA), in a role similar to a Knowledge Transfer Manager, who spent seven months seconded to one police force, while also liaising with officers from four other regional forces, the College of Policing and other stakeholders and practitioners (such as victim support agencies). The police forces were open and receptive to dialogue and building partnerships.

The aim of the project was to develop a university partnership with regional police forces, that would showcase research in the social sciences (and cognate disciplines), and develop further collaborations and opportunities. Funding was secured (via the university’s Enterprise Project Grant) from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF). This knowledge transfer funding provided by the Higher Education Council for England (HEFCE) aims to ‘support and develop a broad range of knowledge-based interactions between universities and colleges and the wider world, which result in economic and social benefit to the UK’ (HEFCE, 2016). ²

From the outset of the project, it was made clear to us that police were no longer able to accommodate the kind of informal, one-to-one relationships that have traditionally been created between lone academics and individual officers to undertake research of limited interest and questionable applicability. Rather, they sought collaborative ventures which clearly mapped onto their own strategic priorities. In order to identify areas of common ground and interest (while still holding open the possibility of identifying potential questions which might not currently appear on their agenda), a scoping exercise was undertaken to identify policing-related research being conducted across the university. Once the secondment was underway, a similar exercise was undertaken within the police force to determine areas where the police research needs and the university’s areas of expertise might match up. This included identifying completed university projects which had potential application to policing. We also researched the police forces’ research needs and priorities, and how these could be addressed collaboratively.

Given that our model of knowledge transfer was conceptualized as a collaborative process through which partners engage in the co-production of knowledge (including the joint identification of appropriate research questions), we felt it important to gain some insight into police understandings of what constitutes research. Consequently, we conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews with police staff and officers who had key roles in relation to the utilization of research evidence or had experience of undertaking research themselves and/or collaborating professionally with academics. The interviews were all recorded and fully transcribed.

These were supplemented with observations and notes taken during our attendance at relevant meetings and at research fairs; and informal conversations with a variety of police personnel including representatives from probationary Constable level to Assistant Chief Constable level. Officers were also observed and shadowed on response shifts, in a custody suite and in a control room. Hence, the above constitutes a ‘purposive’ rather than a ‘representative’ sample. For ethical reasons the identities of the police forces, officers and staff in question have been fully anonymized. When drawing on our observations and field notes we utilize pseudonyms to disguise the identities of individuals.

Reflections on doing enterprise work with (or for) universities and police forces

Discussion and conclusions

This article reflected on knowledge transfer or enterprise work with police forces in England in the context of the neoliberal enterprise university. We focused on two levels of co-option: internal university pressures and external pressures from police partners. While ‘public criminology’ is undoubtedly a vital part of the academic division of labour, greater reflection is needed regarding the practice, politics, and ethics of this work (Chancer and McLaughlin, 2007). Caution is required regarding the ways in which a ‘public criminology’ can be co-opted into the call for impactful and user-focused research in the context of the enterprise university. We need to be mindful of instances where ‘public criminology’ might in fact not be called for, and equally, of how we can retain a critical ‘criminological imagination’ (Young, 2011) while doing ‘public criminology’.

The challenges faced in trying to retain our critical insight, while engaging with police, highlights wider pressures criminologists face. The distinction between public and policy criminology/sociology can often blur, with criminology simultaneously serving a client and generating public debate (Burawoy, 2005). This is reflected in an emphasis on research needs as defined by the user. Manning (2005) highlights a tension in police studies between the call for short-term funded research, and longer-term theoretically grounded scholarship. He warns against an increasing focus on ‘mirror work’ reflecting the interests of the government of the day (Manning, 2005: 39). Post-1992 academia increasingly rewards intellectual conformity (Smith, 2010). This conformity was exacerbated by the rise of the evidence-based movement in policing. Police partners expected that our access to them would result in direct delivery of ‘useful’ (read: ‘cost-saving’) knowledge and practical (read: ‘aligned with their organizational targets’) recommendations.

We found that there was a lack of clarity about the meanings of ‘enterprise’, ‘engagement’ and ‘impact’ in the sense that these are not well-articulated or differentiated in practice by universities themselves. Individuals tended to use the terms ‘enterprise’ and ‘impact’ interchangeably. For us, ‘enterprise’ has been experienced and understood as a means of generating ‘impact’ from research (and for universities with income generation as the goal). So ‘enterprise’ becomes a process of ‘impact’ generation. The lack of articulation and clarity on the part of universities means that ‘enterprise’, ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘research’ occupy semantically and discursively shifting ground—which may enhance their power to operate as a disciplinary mechanism (Foucault, 1975), as academics struggle to understand and meet their requirements.

We were operating in a specific institutional location/context where industry, engineering and business schools largely shaped the university agendas. This context created opportunities for us as social scientists to ‘do’ enterprise, but also expectations for outcomes incompatible with the nature of social science knowledge production and its transfer. Individuals subjected to ‘audit culture’ (Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000) can become institutionalized and engage in a form of self-discipline. As Shore (2008: 283) writes:

this is because of the insidious way it has of implicating all of us in its webs of power: whether it be in the form of annual performance reviews, research assessment exercises or the competitive ranking of our institutions […] we have all bought into the audit culture and allowed it to shape our thinking and our subjectivities.

This creates space for the potential co-option of ‘public criminology’ into university/political agendas.

This article also supports concerns that police studies’ empirical, theoretical and methodological agendas are now likely to be set by the organization being researched. Police studies risk acting merely as a ‘servant of power’ (Burawoy, 2004: 1611) and reaffirming government and state actions, rather than their research acting as a ‘motor’ for change (Innes, 2010). Moreover, a focus on ‘gold standard’ methodologies associated with the evidence-based policing movement in the UK (such as randomized control trials and systematic reviews), risks overshadowing or discounting a legacy of seminal criminological/sociological police studies (i.e. ethnographies of policing) (Lumsden and Goode, 2016).

Gaining access to the organizational culture(s) of the police gave us a glimpse into this world and how individuals within it understood and viewed research, academia and evidence-based policing. Viewing police as consisting of multiple cultures allows us to ‘convey the nuances and differences within and between different elements of the police organization and the people who work in it rather than presenting it as homogenous and one-dimensional’ (Foster, 2003: 196). We had insight into the internal workings of the culture and challenges faced in the wider social and political context, particularly vis-a-vis the impact of financial cuts to policing budgets. The monitoring of the SRA on secondment highlighted tensions in the internal culture between certain gatekeepers who were police officers, and others who were management staff. We were co-opted into internal conflicts and staff anxiety over their own organizational role(s), and the wider context of austerity which is reshaping police organizations and professional and management roles within them.

We were also confronted with contestations as to how stakeholders defined legitimate knowledge. Knowledge ‘must pass successfully through a series of filters if it is to influence policy’ (Tonry, 2010: 787) Windows of opportunity are thus crucial for determining the success of knowledge transfer. Policymakers are rarely open to rational advice while criminologists have failed to look into the black box of the political process (Rock, 2010). Instead, they ‘have become observers after the event when policies are neatly packaged, discursively tidied up, agreed and coherent, free of discontinuities, false starts, doubts, falterings, and lacunae’ (Rock, 2010: 758–759). It is here that Loader and Sparks’ (2010b: 119) notion of the criminologist as ‘democratic under-labourer’ illuminates the ways in which scholars could ‘cultivate greater humility in the face of democratic politics’. There is a need to investigate how criminological knowledge relates to and intersects with wider forces impacting on the definition of, and response to, crime problems (Loader and Sparks, 2010b). This includes how this knowledge is used in policy spheres and across political cultures (Loader and Sparks, 2010b). Police–academic partnerships offer opportunities for criminologists to better understand the ways in which knowledge is received, challenged, (de)legitimized and utilized.

Under the auspices of new managerialism and the extensive cuts to public spending experienced by the police and public sector post-2008 recession, an environment has been ushered in which creates a paradox in police and academic partnerships. Both police forces and academics are under pressure to engage with external partners at the same time that the evidence-base becomes part of new public management (Hammersley, 2013). Although there are undoubtedly benefits to be had, we would also counsel caution in a relationship where ‘public criminology’ risks being co-opted into serving the interests of users and as part of performance management. As enterprise work and public engagement with external stakeholders become the status-quo for social scientists, those who wish to conduct critical research and challenge the relations and structures of power may find it difficult to do so in practice.

In sum, we call for wider debate concerning the practice, politics and ethics of (public) engagement, and police–academic partnerships in an age of ‘enterprise’ and ‘public criminology’. Like research, public engagement and impact are ‘messy’, and we need to be mindful of how we can retain the critical sensibility so vital to criminology, while effectively engaging with publics. In tracing our enterprise work with police forces, we have made evident the tension between the need for criminologists to publicly engage in a normative sense, and the risks inherent in the current institutional culture, in which academics and organizational partners alike are subject to so many internal and external constraints, risking the co-opting of criminological research and ‘public criminology’ into agendas not of their choosing.