Converging Corporatization? Police Management, Police Unionism, and the Transfer of Business Principles

Abstract

There has been a convergence of private and public policing corporate sectors into a ‘police industry.’ In part, this process has involved the successful reshaping of public police management into a corporate executive, such that the private and public security sectors converge in various ways. Ironically the success of the transfer of business principles to the public police has revitalized police unions, giving rise to an assumption that in the face of their opposition, the transfer of business principles will stall and eventually fail. By contrast, we identify the existence of unionized and non‐unionized sectors of policing as a normal feature of modernist industry. By doing so, it appears that in the current environment of labour relations—ironically—this formation may itself contribute to a new wave of business‐oriented reforms affecting police associations themselves.