Alistair Henry

Brokering communities of practice: a model of knowledge exchange and academic-practitioner collaboration developed in the context of community policing

Knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange have recently become commonly used terms in the social sciences. They imply a number of different relationships between researchers and practitioners, and between research and practice, although these have often remained implicit or underdeveloped. Drawing from the experience of designing, delivering and refining a three-year knowledge transfer fellowship on community policing, this article aims to critically appraise these concepts and the assumptions about ‘knowledge’ and academic-practitioner roles and relationships that underpin them. It examines the role of research in knowledge transfer and exchange collaborations and the importance of personal relationships and organisational structures in shaping and sustaining them. In so doing, we contend that the nature and scope of academic-practitioner collaborations (and the potential benefits and pitfalls inherent within them), is more meaningfully captured by a model that is introduced and sketched out in this article: ‘brokering communities of practice’.

Situating community safety: Emergent professional identities in communities of practice

Community safety has often been studied from an institutional perspective as an important adaptation to late modernity, or from a practice perspective as a set of professional activities that are of especial interest because they are developed across institutional boundaries, through partnerships. This article will introduce Wenger’s communities of practice perspective in order to demonstrate how both of these strands of research need to be understood together. Drawing upon an empirical study of the development and working of community safety partnerships in Scotland it will explore the ways in which professional identities and practices around the concept of community safety have been negotiated through practitioners’ participation in emergent communities of practice that need to be understood within the particular institutional, social and political contexts that frame them. It will be argued that to understand practice as ‘situated’ in Wenger’s terms is to acknowledge the dynamic and mutually constitutive relations that connect institutions and lived experience. Such an analysis suggests that there is much transformative potential in partnerships, and that theorizing on broad national and international trajectories of transformation needs to be tested through the study of locally negotiated practice.

Community policing and reassurance: Three studies, one narrative

Drawing on data from three separate studies of community policing (CP) in Scotland this article identifies common themes in the practice of contemporary CP. First, following in the wake of the global financial crisis, we have an austerity drive with cuts to policing budgets setting the context in which CP practice is now negotiated. Second all three studies evidence an increasingly entrenched performance management framework for policing which exerts pressures on beat officers to depart from established, valued and often ‘unmeasurable’ activities within CP practice. Third, we see the depletion of the traditional ‘tools of the trade’ of CP as new recruits, lacking the skills of the traditional beat officer, are assigned CP functions, while mentoring opportunities for supporting their professional development become increasingly inadequate. Finally, the idea of reassurance as a core policing goal has informed the re-organization of Scotland’s main police forces towards models which purport to increase CP numbers, visibility and public engagement. In the context of the preceding three themes however, these re-inventions of CP have been problematic in various ways: conflicted, superficial and unconnected to developments in policing and procedural justice theory around legitimacy and public confidence. Indeed, we will argue that given the formal increase in public-facing CP numbers across the sites examined here, the procedural justice perspective, with its focus on the quality of police–public encounters, has real potential to enhance the efficacy of CP in Scotland.

Powers, liabilities and expertise in community safety: Comparative lessons for ‘urban security’ from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

This paper begins by outlining and critiquing what we term the dominant anglophone model of neo-liberal community safety and crime prevention. As an alternative to this influential but flawed model, a comparative analysis is provided of the different constitutional-legal settlements in each of the five jurisdictions across the UK and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and their uneven institutionalization of community safety. In the light of this it is argued that the nature of the anglophone community safety enterprise is actually subject to significant variation. Summarizing the contours of this variation facilitates our articulation of some core dimensions of community safety. Then, making use of Colebatch’s (2002) deconstruction of policy activity into categories of authority and expertise, and Brunsson’s (2002) distinction between policy talk, decisions and action, we put forward a way of understanding policy activity that avoids the twin dangers of ‘false particularism’ and ‘false universalism’ (Edwards and Hughes, 2005); that indicates a path for further empirical enquiry to assess the ‘reality’ of policy convergence; and that enables the engagement of researchers with normative questions about where community safety should be heading.

Impact and the Reflexive Imperative in Criminal Justice Policy, Practice and Research

This volume grows out of two parallel but distinct developments in social science research that affect the way researchers study and seek to have an impact in the areas of crime and criminal justice. These are the increasing acceptance and practice of (some form of) reflexivity in social science research, on the one hand, and, on the other, the changing context of research itself. On the latter point, we note that criminologists working across different jurisdictions are experiencing heightened pressures to render their research relevant and appealing to external audiences. These pressures are linked in part with the fact that governments in Australia, the UK and the USA (along with other countries) are increasingly keen to ensure that their investment in the higher education sector is delivering ‘value for money’. This implies that research and teaching activities that are government-funded must increasingly align with, or at least demonstrate alignment with, what these governments define as the public interest. In Australia, for example, the Australian Research Council, which is responsible for administering public research funding, has identified a list of nine strategic ‘Science and Research Priorities’ to organise funding of ‘support for science and research on the most important challenges facing Australia’ (developed partly from a 2014 white paper ‘Boosting the commercial returns of research’; see ARC 2016). With the possible exception of ‘cybersecurity’, none of these strategic priorities appear to be directly relevant to criminology or indeed, the social sciences. The specified research priorities relate primarily to what are known as ‘STEM’ subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine), thereby prioritising an increasingly narrow set of subjects and research methodologies that reflect a pragmatic and in our view myopic governmental understanding of what constitutes societal value.

Reflexivity and Criminal Justice: Intersections of Policy, Practice and Research

This collection presents a diverse set of case studies and theoretical reflections on how criminologists engage with practitioners and policy makers while undertaking research. The contributions to this volume highlight both the challenges and opportunities associated with doing criminological research in a reflexive and collaborative manner. They further examine the ethical and practical implications of the ‘impact’ agenda in the higher education sector with respect to the production and the dissemination of criminological knowledge. Developed to serve as an internationally accessible reference volume for scholars, practitioners and postgraduate criminology students, this book responds to the awareness that criminology as a discipline increasingly encompasses not only the study of crime, but also the agencies, process and structures that regulate it. Key questions include: How can criminal justice policy be studied as part of the field of criminology? How do we account for our own roles as researchers who are a part of the policy process? What factors and dynamics influence, hinder and facilitate ‘good policy’?

Reflexive Academic–Practitioner Collaboration with the Police

Reflexivity in the understanding and practice of research is not just something to be cultivated amongst researchers. Particularly as models of collaborative research develop—models which tend to already work with a reflexive understanding of research—there is a growing need to think about the reflexivity of the researched. This chapter characterises research as ultimately being about learning across the (recognised) boundaries of social worlds (the academy or, in this case, the police being distinctive social worlds). It will argue that reflexive practice on the part of social researchers, in that it challenges some of the myths about scientific social research, might itself play an important role in encouraging reflexivity on the part of practitioners (or ‘the researched’), and that reflexivity on the part of practitioners will encourage challenge of some of the myths about their practice, fostering a more realistic understanding and ownership of research that sees it not in narrow instrumental, credibility-enhancing terms, but as something relevant and to be learned from, even where—perhaps especially where—it is critical of extant practice. However, local demands of practice, external politics, and interests in maintaining public relations also make reflexive engagement with research a challenge.