Theoretical Context: Organisational Culture and Occupational Culture
Research about police culture has been driven and theoretically supported by studies of sociologists that aim to comprehend police behaviour through the lens of the organisational culture perspective (Cockcroft in Police culture: Themes and Concepts. Tayl
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Theoretical Context: Organisational Culture and Occupational Culture
Research about police culture has been driven and theoretically supported by studies of sociologists that aim to comprehend police behaviour through the lens of the organisational culture perspective (Cockcroft 2013). Under the organisational culture approach, the cultural factors that influence the way that people think and behave is investigated and interpreted so that the “hidden and complex aspects of life in groups, organisations, and occupations” can be better understood (Schein 2004, p. 9). Although researchers using an organisational culture approach tend to emphasise culture within the boundary of organisations or departments (Paoline 2001), cultural phenomena in occupations could also be explained by this approach. This is because both organisational and occupational cultures are formed on the basis of shared history of members as ways to cope with outside pressures (Paoline 2001; Schein 2004; Trice and Beyer 1993). In police cultural studies, the concepts of organisational culture and occupational culture have been interchangeably used by academics (Bacon 2014; Cockcroft 2013, p. 16; Paoline and Terrill 2014, p. 4). In the classic work Organizational Culture and Leadership by leading sociologist Edgar Schein, he explained cultural phenomena at the level of groups, organisations, and occupations through the theoretical framework of organisational culture (Schein 2004). In this study, I have made an empirical inquiry of police subculture in China through the theoretical context of organisational culture and occupational culture.
2.1 The Concept of Culture and Subculture The concept of culture was first developed by anthropologists toward the end of the 19th century (Haviland 1999). Tylor (1871) offered the first “clear and comprehensive” (Haviland 1999, p. 36) definition of culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (p. 1). Early anthropologists and sociologists have explained the concept of culture as a collection of learned aspects that may symbolise the realm of human beings (Jenks 2005, © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 Z. Chen, Measuring Police Subcultural Perceptions, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0096-6_2
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2 Theoretical Context: Organisational Culture and Occupational …
pp. 8–9). Cultural studies from the perspective of sociology and anthropology now consider culture as “the whole way of life of a people” (Jenks 2005, p. 12). For early anthropologists, culture was considered to be a specific construct embedded in human behaviour instead of that of other creatures (Jenks 2005, p. 9). Clifford Geertz (1973), a noted anthropologist, made a widely-cited description of the concept of culture: Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental scienc
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