ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to, through an in-depth study of police newcomers’ identity work during socialization, investigates how reification and recognition interplay through organizational processes and within individuals’ inner sensemaking, and draws implications for promoting recognition and care in organizations. It discusses police culture and socialization. Police have been historically stereotyped as crime-fighters and associated with physical robustness, aggression, audacity, coercion and violence. In addition, among the external recruits were a few fresh graduates, who were especially preoccupied with acceptance and approval by the police community. Overall, during socialization period police recruits were dominated by organization’s processes of reification, which regulated them with police identities that were formally stipulated or culturally approved. The idealized police identity advocated in the training enshrines police organizations’ emphasis on their accountability to the society, and the society’s demands on the performance and transparency of police.
