Norman Conti

Social context, spatial structure and social network structure

a b s t r a c t Frequently, social networks are studied in their own right with analyses devoid of contextual details. Yet contextual features - both social and spatial - can have impacts on the networks formed within them. This idea is explored with five empirical networks representing different contexts and the use of distinct modeling strategies. These strategies include network visualizations, QAP regression, exponen- tial random graph models, blockmodeling and a combination of blockmodels with exponential random graph models within a single framework. We start with two empirical examples of networks inside orga- nizations. The familiar Bank Wiring Room data show that the social organization (social context) and spatial arrangement of the room help account for the social relations formed there. The second example comes from a police academy where two designed arrangements, one social and one spatial, powerfully determine the relational social structures formed by recruits. The next example is an inter-organizational network that emerged as part of a response to a natural disaster where features of the improvised con- text helped account for the relations that formed between organizations participating in the search and rescue mission. We then consider an anthropological example of signed relations among sub-tribes in the New Guinea highlands where the physical geography is fixed. This is followed by a trading network off the Dalmatian coast where geography and physical conditions matter. Through these examples, we show that context matters by shaping the structure of networks that form and that a variety of network analytic tools can be mobilized to reveal how networks are shaped, in part, by social and spatial contexts. Implications for studying social networks are suggested.

Policing the Platonic Cave: Ethics and Efficacy in Police Training

This article seeks to understand the form, content and broader implications of police academy ethics training. We begin by detailing the mechanisms borrowed from (near) total/greedy institutions that are key elements in the academy training structure. These are noted in an ethnographic account that points out the importance of obedience to authority, and the resultant shame and honour, which function as the core of police socialization. We conclude by explicating the theoretical foundation of the police function and then move on to question how ethics training supports, or resists, this structure. Findings suggest that, even at its best, ethics training is likely to serve in restraining the professional vision of incoming police officers. Despite what can only be assumed to be the best of intentions, a traditional model of police as law enforcers is (re)generated within a recruit cohort while more progressive notions of the police role (i.e., working toward neighbourhood efficacy) are ignored. With this, truly ethical behaviour is structurally inhibited by theatrical efforts at maintaining the collective fiction of the police mandate.

Situational policing: neighbourhood development and crime control

Over the past two decades, the Broken Windows version of social disorganization theory has had a significant impact on law enforcement practices in the United States. Contemporary sociologists, however, have demonstrated that neighbourhood‐level collective efficacy (or a lack thereof) is a more significant predictor of violent crime than are physical and social disorder (i.e., broken windows). Collective efficacy is viewed as an evolving neighbourhood‐level property. We posit that neighbourhoods pass through, regress to, or get stuck in identifiable stages of development as they move toward (or away from) higher levels of collective efficacy. Giving consideration to both stage of neighbourhood development and level of neighbourhood crime and disorder, we construct four neighbourhood types: Strong, Vulnerable, Anomic and Responsive. The concept of “situational policing”, then, is introduced as a way to address effectively both the development of collective efficacy, and the occurrence of crime and disorder in each neighbourhood type.

Role Call: Preprofessional Socialization into Police Culture

This article examines the process by which individuals actively seek status elevation through selection into police academy training. In pursuit of departmental authorization, aspirant police recruits navigate through three stages of self: civilian, contestant and anticipatory recruit. That evolution, where civilians negotiate admission into the police academy, is the focus of analysis in this project. Data were collected through full participant observation within the recruit selection process in a large American city. This selection process maintains some structural similarities to Goffmans prepatient stage of the mental patients moral career; his model of the betrayal funnel is retooled into a framework more appropriate for preprofessional socialization. Additionally, examples are presented that demonstrate how race functions in mitigating this process for minority recruit candidates.

Social network engineering and race in a police academy: A longitudinal analysis

This research examined an attempt to facilitate racial integration by populating squads (i.e., workgroups) in a police academy with mixes of recruits that reflected the racial demographics of the larger cohort. This was part of the social infrastructure of the academy. Additionally, a fixed seating arrangement was considered as a second element of academy infrastructure capable of impacting racial integration. We examined the consequences of these academy components over time with regard to race by combining ethnographic accounts with social network data collected throughout the academy and using a variety of network analytic tools. These consequences with regard to race were examined as a part of social network evolution. The academys social arrangements did accelerate the creation of social knowledge of recruits about each other and the formation of friendship ties both within and between races. However, our results point to clear limitations to such infrastructural engineering and have implications for both recruitment to police academies and dealing with race. They shed light also on processes of homophily and group composition over time and have implications for studying social networks.

A Visigoth System Shame, Honor, and Police Socialization

This article documents the process by which a police academy staff generates an interaction order of obedience to authority during recruit training. Specifically, it examines the formal pattern of face-to-face interaction that recruits are expected to embrace before they can engage the larger occupational culture. The staff utilizes a dialectical method akin to Braithwaites model of reintegrative shaming in which recruits are simultaneously degraded for what are defined as highly stigmatic civilian characteristics and offered a status elevation for the excision of these problematic attributes. Subscription to or deviance from established rituals is taken as evidence of personal character and assists in driving recruits through a moral career, in which they can evolve to an idealized status of police officer.

Weak links and warrior hearts: a framework for judging self and others in police training

This paper examines professional socialization within a metropolitan police academy in the USA. Specifically, the research documents how the normative orders of the occupational culture come to function as a framework used to either stigmatize or idealize fellow recruits. A series of narratives regarding and reactions to particular events in the training serve as examples that detail the manner by which recruits internalize the occupational culture as they evolve through the training. The paper also discusses how recruits are eventually able to utilize their burgeoning understanding of normative orders to discredit police administrators and the training structure itself.

From Here On Out, We’re All Blue: Interaction Order, Social Infrastructure, and Race in Police Socialization

Motivated by the complicated history of race relations in policing, this article offers a social network analysis of the formation of relationships between recruits in a police academy. While the quantitative analysis is the core of this article, it is framed by an ethnographic description of how the interaction order within the academy functions as a mechanism for maintaining racism within police organizations. The academy’s social infrastructure was designed to generate encounters between recruits of various races. Recruits were divided into subgroups, which generally reflected the overall demographics of the cohort, so recruits of different races could get to know each other. While this academy had some success in forming ties between Black, Latino, and White recruits, it fell short of achieving the stated ideal of “we’re all blue.” Our results suggest that achieving this ideal lies in a distant future.

All the Wiser: Dialogic Space, Destigmatization, and Teacher-Activist Recruitment

This article examines instructor training for The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program®, an organization that brings “outside” college students into prison, joining incarcerated men and women who become “inside students” for an undergraduate course. Ethnographic data revealed a purposeful stigma reversal for a group of men serving life sentences and a concomitant shift in moral career for instructor trainees. Through structured encounters with these men, trainees come to see, speak, and behave in ways that subvert conventional understandings of the stigma imposed on those in prison. The alteration of self and perspective experienced during the training drives participants to incorporate this activist ethos into their own teaching.

Creating the thin blue line: Social network evolution within a police academy☆

Abstract Whenever major schisms between police and communities come to public attention, there are always passionate calls for an increased emphasis on - and improvement of - police training. This rhetoric is so common that police leaders joke that there is no societal problem so big that it can’t be fixed by better police training. Still, professional socialization in law enforcement remains an important topic with a great deal of resources being devoted to developing initiatives and augmenting existing curricula. This training comes in many forms including learning the nuts and bolts of many legal processes and acquiring the practical skills for law enforcement. However, beyond this, there is a socialization process with multiple facets including the development of solidarity and trust among a cohort of recruits. We attempt to understand the basic mechanisms of network creation in police academies as the foundation of the socialization processes within them. By focusing on these network mechanisms underlying the establishment of the ‘Thin Blue Line’, we offer an understanding of the underlying social processes foundational for the transmission of police culture. In short, we think the recruit network structure functions as a vehicle for cultural transmission within police academies.