UC Santa Barbara

Organizations must continually work toward positioning themselves to develop a favorable identity with various audiences. Many organizations operate in complex environments with two or more potentially opposing logics—orientations that guide their mission, activities and relationships (Wallace, 1990). As organizations communicate and enact their logics, representations that appeal to some can be less favorably perceived by others. Police departments currently operate in such an environment causing them to manage these tensions in their communication for recruitment. This dissertation includes two phases to examine the depiction of opposing institutional logics in police department (PD) recruitment videos. These studies explored the nature and relationship of the community-oriented policing (COP) and traditional enforcement (TE) logics, integrating an institutional logics perspective (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999) with a tensional approach (Putnam et al., 2016). The purpose of Phase I was to determine whether police recruitment videos could be categorized into either TE, COP, both or neither. Do videos representing police logics demonstrate identifiable patterns? In Phase I, a codebook was developed incorporating audio, visual, thematic, and narrative elements. 312 PD recruitment videos were coded and analyzed. The analysis confirmed that the videos predominately demonstrated either the COP logic, the TE logic, or both. This last group demonstrated institutional complexity by attempting to present their department with more than one logic. My analysis yielded six primary themes for the COP logic (personalized engagement, self-differentiation from field, demonstrations of community-centric policies, internalization of COP as a process, and diversity as strength) and four primary themes for the TE logic (exciting storytelling, officer heroics, incomplete COP, and hierarchical orientation). In Phase II, I sampled three videos from each of the COP and TE categories, and two videos from the mixed –-to investigate how the logics that often are in opposition to each other appear to interact when depicted in the same video representing the attitudes and behaviors of a PD. I found that, at times, videos presented a dualistic approach by grouping activities/units that pertained to one or the other logic and then presenting them before moving on the activities/units that represented the other logic in the department. This acknowledges that both logics exist but treats them as dualistic—present but separate. Other departments were noted to treat the logics as dialectics, by simultaneously presenting both logics—not as oppositional—but as choices that officers were expected to make, which were not necessarily mutually exclusive. I found several strategies for how videos demonstrate the interplay of the logics, illustrating the importance of scene sequencing for narratives, humor for presenting counternarratives, and department orientation for conceptualizing the relationship between the logics. I identified three ways to represent multiple logics: 1) vacillation which draw in turn from either logic, 2) chunks which split and lump the logics into separate sections, and 3) attention-getters which present a drastically different introduction than the rest of the video. These results demonstrate that departments strategically use humor, cinematography, music, sequencing, as well as carefully selecting the actors to represent their department in various ways to attract the attention of potential recruits. The implications for theory and practice are discussed, before I turn to a review of the limitations and future directions for research in police recruitment and work.