ABSTRACT
This chapter explores and argues for the use of a specific set of theoretical approaches combined with certain methodological tools for carrying out research into police officers’ subculture and the wider field of policing phenomena. The reciprocal relationship between theory and methodology is understood here as being fundamental to guaranteeing the validity, accuracy and effectiveness of researching issues surrounding policing - especially ethnographic fieldwork aiming to provide a sociological insight into the world police officers’ inhabit. Discussed are a number of thinkers’ understandings of human agency and social causality alongside how such processes as sensemaking play a defining role in the construction of police officers’ shared reality. This chapter should be of significant interest to police researchers who are keenly aware that understanding officers’ shared reality, and how this reflects and impacts on everyone’s shared reality, yields rich data which provides original contributions to the wider and inter-disciplinary knowledge base on policing. The chapter draws on relevant examples of police researchers’ contributions to the area that have grown out of, and are rooted in, the wider endeavour of trying to better understand the relationship between police officers’ use of language, knowledge, practices and power relations within the late-modern nation-state. This chapter ultimately outlines how the combination of these approaches and tools can perhaps provide the most fruitful and fit-for-purpose paradigm for researching any and all social phenomena surrounding policing.
