Vol. 13 No. 8 (August
2003)
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE
IN AMERICAN POLICE AGENCIES: CONTEXT, COMPLEXITY, AND CONTROL by Edward R.
Maguire. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. 287 pp. Cloth $75.50. ISBN: 0‑7914‑5511‑4.
Paper $29.95. ISBN: 0‑7914‑5512‑2.
Reviewed by Thomas Shevory,
Department of Politics, Ithaca College. Email: shevory@ithaca.edu .
Edward R. Maguire’s
task in ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE IN AMERICAN POLICY AGENCIES is a daunting
one. His goal is not only to
place the study of police agencies within the parameters of organizational
theory, but also to examine the behavioral aspects of American police agencies,
insofar as they are affected by various internal and external phenomena. The task is daunting because of the huge
variety of organizational structures that mark the hundreds of police agencies
in the U.S. Agencies are the
product of local histories and contingencies. They have evolved as a hodgepodge of organizational forms.
As Maguire notes, “The result of the fragmented and localized
evolution of American policing is that: (1) there is a huge number of police
agencies, and (2) these agencies exhibit tremendous variety in organizational
form” (p.3). For someone studying the factors that help to determine
the organizational structure of these agencies, this presents both a danger
and an opportunity. The danger
is that a researcher might become overwhelmed by the sheer multiplicity of
forms, which present an immediate appearance of being the product of chaotic
happenstance. On the other hand,
the variation that exists between agencies opens the possibilities for statistical
analysis, because such variation provides the basis for comparison along many
axes of difference.
The study is an important
one, because, as Maguire notes, while countless studies and personal accounts
exist, describing and evaluating multiple aspects of police organizations—corruption,
violence, leadership, community relations, racism, reform—very little
scholarly work has been done to place police organizations within the field
of public administration. How police organizations function
in relation to the social networks that help to define them is important to
know for its own sake, and it is also useful knowledge for those interested
in reform efforts of various kinds.
Reform may be limited by multiple external and internal constraints;
thus “police administrators may not be entirely free to design their
organization as they see fit” (p.5). As a result, in Maguire’s
words, “[a]lthough the primary goal of this study is to develop and
test a theoretical model of formal structure in police organizations, the
results of this exercise will have implications for policy, reform, and practice
in policing ” (p.5).
The two aspects of police
organization that Maguire is primarily concerned with are “complexity”
and “control.” Structural complexity is “the extent to which an organization
is differentiated vertically, functionally, and spatially” (p.70).
Structural complexity involves, for example, the number of levels of
an organization, the division of labor within an organization, and the degree
of specialization within it. Structural control includes administrative
control structures, the degree to which rules and policies are formalized,
and centralization—i.e., “the degree to which the decision-making
capacity within an organization is concentrated in a single individual or
small select group” (p.17). The two major features of organizations can be clustered in
a variety of ways in specific cases.
For instance, organizations can have high levels of vertical differentiation
and low levels of functional differentiation. They can be very centralized but have
few formal rules.
There is, as Maguire notes,
an extensive literature in the field of public administration that attempts
to explain variations in the structure of organizations. Drawing upon this, Maguire posits that three main factors will
have some influence on police agency organizational structure. Size is a primary factor to be considered,
since there is considerable evidence that size does influence organizational
structure, and it makes sense intuitively that larger organizations will be
more complex and more centralized than smaller ones. “Technology,”
which he defines broadly to mean “the work performed by an organization,”
can also influence structure, but determining how this occurs can be difficult
to assess for organizations that have considerable contact with diverse publics. As Maguire notes, “Public service organizations like
the police, who conduct the majority of their work in the public eye, may
be far less able to develop structures that are consonant with their core
technology” (p.25). This
is evident for police agencies, where the “technical core” of
police work (controlling crime) may be difficult if not impossible to disassociate
from various external factors that influence it. It is a challenge, in other words, to distinguish between the
“inside” and “outside” of police agencies. Yet, to understand police agency behavior,
it is essential to attempt to do so. Maguire also posits the importance of
“environmental” influences on police agency behavior as well.
This can include everything from funding sources, clients, and unions
to media, and even “rumors” (p.26).
While there is a vast academic
literature on organizational structure and behavior, there are only a small
number of such studies of police organizations (only ten according to Maguire).
The centerpiece of the book, then, is to develop and test a “primitive
theory” of police organizational structure.
The project thus fills a significant gap in the literature of police
studies (which tends to focus mostly on the work of police officers) as well
as a gap in the literature on organizational behavior.
The basic model that Maguire proposes looks for the impact of contextual
factors on police organizational complexity and ultimately on the network
of controls that operate within the police agency. Contextual factors such as geographical location, age of the
organization and its environment, he posits, influence how complex the organization
is. Levels of complexity, in
turn, shape degrees of hierarchy, formalization of policies, and the structures
of administrative apparatus. To give a brief example (not taken from Maguire), a small town
police department, in a relatively crime free location, will, according to
his theory, be less complex and therefore have less formal hierarchy, less
formalization of procedures, and, in general, a less centralized control system than a larger agency in a
crime-prone jurisdiction. Of
course, all kinds of factors can intervene to disrupt such a simplified picture,
and Maguire’s project involves isolating particular variables to reveal
the interplay of these confounding influences.
Maguire carefully hypothesizes
how each of the contextual factors – age, technology, size, and environment
– might impact the complexity and in turn the exercise of intra-organizational
control. He outlines fifty-five separate hypotheses positing potential connections
between context, complexity, and control in law enforcement organizations.
One of the book’s most striking features is the meticulousness
with which Maguire moves from general to particular, from theoretical to empirical. One can learn a lot from this book about
organizations in general and police organizations in particular, in addition
to how to develop deliberate and accessible statistically grounded writing.
While Maguire puts his “primitive” theory forward as a
new one, he also places it within “structural contingency theory,”
as well as the more specialized scholarship that has followed from it.
Structural contingency theory, itself, is “a broad perspective
that viewed organizational structures as dynamic systems that adapt rationally
to a variety of contextual features (contingencies) in order to remain effective.”
In my own view, the breadth of Maguire’s approach is a strength,
indicating a kind of methodological pragmatism.
Law enforcement statistics
have improved markedly over the last decade or so, and Maguire has much to
draw upon to test his various hypotheses.
His data sets include LEMAS (Law Enforcement Management and Administrative
Statistics), the Police Foundation Community Policing Survey, Census Population
Data, and supplemental survey data that the author collected to fill in some
gaps. Merging of the data sets
increased the possibilities for analyzing variables, but necessarily required
the elimination of some agencies that had not responded to the surveys. As a result, depending on the model being
tested, the study retained 65% to 72% of the 432 eligible departments. While Maguire’s analysis of the
data is at times fairly technical, he is correct to assert that, with a close
reading of the section on theory-testing, “[e]ven readers with very
little knowledge of statistics will gain a new appreciation for the close
relationship between theory, data, and statistics ” (p.149). In other words, Maguire has something
of a knack for quantitative analysis into accessible language.
Ultimately, Maguire reaches
a variety of intriguing although perhaps not startling conclusions. He finds that variation in vertical differentiation
can mostly be explained by size, and to some extent by organizational age.
He finds that variations in spatial differentiation are also largely
the result of organization size, although environmental dispersion and instability
can also be factors (although he questions his measure for the latter). He had more difficulty explaining variation
in centralization of police departments, the degree of formalization, and
administrative intensity (pp.209-212). That organization size matters, is “the first finding
that emerges most strongly” (p.212), and somewhat unsurprisingly. He found, in fact, that internal features
of departments (size and spread) accounted for more variation than the size
and spread of the jurisdictions where they were placed.
In terms of policy, Maguire
suggests that some kinds of reforms may be much more difficult to achieve
than others. Changing vertical
and spatial differentiation may be especially problematic; while changes in
functional differentiation or administrative intensity may be more achievable. The findings do not necessarily bode well
for community policing advocates, because even though less functional differentiation
may be realizable, community policing reforms often result in greater differentiation
of functions. Still, the administrative ranks of policy agencies can probably
be thinned out in some cases, and deformalizing and decentralizing agencies
are probably attainable reforms under some circumstances as well (p.226).
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE IN
POLICE AGENCIES is a valuable contribution to the fields of public administration
and police studies, and it would be a useful text in upper level undergraduate
or graduate level courses involving either. Given the emphasis on hypothesis formation
and data analysis, it would be most useful to students who have reasonably
good statistical preparation, but others, less well-grounded, would also find
much of interest about organizational theory and police agency behavior.
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Copyright 2003 by the author, Thomas Shevory.