Policewomen’s perceptions of occupational culture in the changing policing environment of England and Wales: A study in liminality
| Author | Jenny Fleming,Marisa Silvestri,Jennifer Brown |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X20914337 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2021, Vol. 94(3) 259 –281
Article
Policewomen’s perceptions
of occupational culture
in the changing policing
environment of England and
Wales: A study in liminality
Jennifer Brown
Department of Social Policy, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London
School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Jenny Fleming
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Marisa Silvestri
School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent,
Canterbury, UK
Abstract
Liminality is the transitional phase of a rite of passage when individuals no longer hold to
their traditions but have yet to transition to a new status. Utilising cultural character-
isations reported by a sample of policewomen (N¼127) from England and Wales, a
hierarchical cluster analysis revealed empirical demonstration of a traditional preliminal
condition, a transforming postliminal state and a liminal betwixt and between period,
which are associated with different discriminatory experiences and policing styles.
Women as potential liminal workers may offer a way to nudge movement towards the
postliminal incorporation of a more academically oriented professional police culture.
Keywords
Policewomen, police cultures, policing mission, police professionalism, liminality, policing
in England and Wales
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Brown, Department of Social Policy, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics
and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: j.brown5@lse.ac.uk
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032258X20914337
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260 The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles 94(3)
Introduction
This article examines policewomen’s experiences in the current changing climate occur-
ring within policing in England and Wales. The authors employ the concept of liminality
as an explanatory device to give a more nuanced reading of the discernible shifts in not
only the policing mission to address 21st-century problems (Brown and Silvestri, 2019)
but also from training to the formal education of officers (Rogers and Gravelle, 2019).
Liminal environments are those which are changing from one which is often a traditional
condition (X) to another, usually reformed condition (Y) (Bamber et al., 2017). The in-
between liminal position can be fraught with anxiety or pessimism about what is per-
ceived to be lost or, alternatively, engendered with optimism, excitement and enthusiasm
about embracing the new. We have previously characterised policing in England and
Wales as being in a state of flux as it seeks to accommodate the challenges of multi-
culturalism, novel types of crime and respond to newly introduced graduate entry
requirements (Brown et al., 2019). In the earlier article, policewomen reported charac-
terisation of their cultural working environment as being relatively unreformed (or what
the authors are now calling a preliminal traditional condition), in a transitional (liminal)
position and those that are in a more progressive (postliminal) state of change. The
current article further develops the analysis to flesh out this state of flux. Hierarchical
cluster analysis (HCA) is adopted here to bring together the police officer respondents
into groupings that approximate to these three conditions and chart their experiences
within each. In advance of this, the following section considers briefly the changing
environment within which this analysis takes place.
The changing environment
Constructed in Victorian times, Sir Robert Peel’s ‘princip les’ became central to the
model of Anglo-American policing. The principles were seminal to guiding the training
of officers and imbuing the police mission to preserve order, protect property, prevent
and detect crime (Loader, 2016). Recourse to the Peelian principles are quintessential to
rank-and-file officers’ sense of their individual professionalism (Lumsden, 2017), which
preserves both the internal solidarity and the external policing mandate (Manning, 1977).
Traditional aims were to be achieved by a disciplined, uniformed corps of men, trained
largely by learning under the supervision of a tutor constable and organised by a hier-
archical leadership system of command and control. The norms of full-time employ-
ment, lifelong engagement, linear progression, exacerbated by long hours and shift
working, were such that organisationally, police work mapped onto a version of assertive
masculinity (Langan et al., 2019). This model persevered throughout the 19th and into
the 20th centuries.
Loader (2016) argues that assumptions about policing’s efficiency and effectiveness
began to crumble in the 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, in parallel with other UK
public-sector organisations, the police service was subjected to wide-ranging changes in
structures and management processes, as part of New Public Management regimes
(Savage, 2007). In 1992, Sir Patrick Sheehy (1993) was commissioned to undertake a
review of police roles and responsibilities and its publication resulted in a restatement of
2The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles XX(X)
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