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.