The New Public Management and Managerial Roles: the Case of the Police Sergeant
| Author | Jean Woodall,Christine Edwards,Reginald Butterfield |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2005.00466.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
The New Public Management and
Managerial Roles: the Case of the Police
Sergeant
Reginald Butterfield, Christine Edwards
*
and Jean Woodallw
Kingston Business School, Margaretenstr. 22/12A, A-1040 Vienna, Austria,
*
Kingston University Business
School, Kingston Hill, Kingston upon Thames, KT2 7LB, wOxford Brookes University,
Wheatley Campus, Wheatley, Oxford, OX33 1HX, UK
jwoodall@brookes.ac.uk
This paper explores the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) techniques
within the UK police service since the late 1990s, and in particular, the impact upon the
role of the first line manager: the police sergeant. It draws upon qualitative data
collected within ‘City Police Service’ by means of in-depth interviews with role sets of
police sergeants, constables, inspectors and members of the senior management team in
two police divisions. After evaluating a number of NPM precepts in the light of the
findings, the paper makes a number of conclusions relating to the role of police
sergeants. These echo the findings of other research on changes in managerial roles,
including a shift towards more strategic responsibilities, but with a significant
intensification of work, tighter control and scrutiny through organizational performance
management systems, and less daily contact with their police constables. As elsewhere
in the public sector, a shift towards becoming a ‘practitioner manager’ was apparent,
but with respect to police sergeants the effect was to limit their ability to provide
leadership and support for their constables, and to encourage a greater reliance upon
peer group networks and on the constables they supervised.
Introduction
There has been surprisingly little research into the
impact of the New Public Management (NPM)
initiatives upon how managers carry out their
roles, with most research focusing upon manage-
ment processes, and only occasionally on middle
and senior managers. The implications for line
managers, the key actors involved in delivering
the services the NPM is designed to improve, is
strangely neglected. This article attempts to
remedy this shortcoming by exploring the impact
of the introduction of the NPM into the police
service during the 1990s, by focusing specifically
upon the role of the police sergeant, the first line
manager with direct responsibility for managing
service delivery in one of the UK’s ‘essential’
public services. It is one of the first studies to
examine the impact of NPM at the operational
level within the Police Service (see also Davies
and Thomas, 2003; Metcalfe, 2004), and adopts
an innovative application of role set analysis to
evaluate the changes in the police sergeant’s role.
Before describing how NPM was introduced into
the Police Service, this article commences with a
discussion of the key features of NPM and its
reported impact across other parts of the public
sector. The discussion then moves on to a
consideration of the implication of the NPM
for managerial roles in a variety of public
services, before turning to the role of the police
sergeant. Data from a role set analysis in City
Police Service (a major urban police force in the
UK) are used to explore the impact of the NPM
British Journal of Management, Vol. 16, 329–341 (2005)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2005.00466.x
r2005 British Academy of Management
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