An Inside Job

DOI10.1177/000486589402700211
Date01 September 1994
Published date01 September 1994
An I
nside
Job
Malcolm
Yeung'
Social research conducted within police institutions is almost invariably
flawed by researchers' innocence of the ethos in which they are
temporarily immersed. This criticism is particularly evident when the
subject of research is police employees.
One solution is to have suitably qualified police officers to conduct
such research. All too often that approach is flawed because officers are
so influenced by their environment that they cannot think beyond it. An
Inside Job is, however, a happy example of long term anthropological
study conducted within police institutions by a serving policeman.
Malcolm Young, the author, was a career police officer in England,
retiring in 1991 with the rank of superintendent. Halfway through his
30-yearcareerhe started studying social anthropology, eventually gaining
a doctorate. His chosen field of study was, understandably, police
employees intheir workplaces.In the books's
five
chapters, Young looks
at himself and his colleagues in the course of everyday police business,
the social characteristics of management and the exercise of power in
police organisations, the structured marginality of policewomen, and
perceptions of offending behaviour and offenders.
Through it all, Young maintains a nice balance between his two
persona, that of police employee and that of social anthropologist.
Tension created by that ambivalence is insightfully discussed at length
and should be of extreme interest to all police employees possessing
professional qualifications in other disciplines. In Youngs's hands,
insider-biographical analysis and related methods are artfully employed
with a clear understanding of their pitfalls, such as the effect of later
memory on earlier experiences. The author generally avoids the use of
jargon, although terms such a 'homology' and 'ritual metaphors of
negations' caused me to pause briefly.
Young is particularly acute in his analysis of field police employees'
attitudes, their lack of compassion for the unfortunate, management
limitations, and canteen culture, although he is less sound in my view
when he ventures into broader issues such as the police function in
society, and social control. He is, nevertheless, quite correct in
identifying the base factor as power.
This is an excellent, well-balanced account of the social realities of
police bureaucracies and police-client interfaces. All thoughtful police
officers will benefit from reading this book, for it places under the
spotlight many of the issues police officers prefer to leave at the
peripheries of their consciousness rather than risk the dissonance their
Clarendon Press (1991), 424 pp, $49.95.
208

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