Entrepreneurship, police leadership, and the investigation of crime in changing times

Abstract

Entrepreneurship, or more importantly, entrepreneurial behaviour, is not a subject one normally associates with policing per se. By considering this slippery subject in relation to police leadership styles and how they influence the investigation of crime, this essay opens up considerations of organisational theory within the rubric of investigative psychology. The tying of the meaning of being an entrepreneur into the dominant narrative of police leadership opens up fruitful lines for empirical enquiry. This is achieved via an auto-ethnographic focus. This is important because such work is currently lacking in the fields of investigative psychology and offender profiling. At present, the prevailing organisational ethos in policing is that success is measured by promotion and the focus of attention of ambitious officers is upon being promoted. Thus, it is paradoxical that the dominant narrative of police leadership and, by extension, police culture can be articulated by the underlying (yet dominant) narrative that is entrepreneurship. As a consequence, investigative ability is no longer a key idiom in deciding the police leaders of the future. This has implications and consequences for recruitment and retention of its future pool of investigators because contemporary organisational practices may be counterproductive in that in seeking to produce its leaders, the organisation has lost sight of its core business, the investigation of crime. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.