‘Corporate Police Stories’

A Research Note on the Impact and the Capabilities of Police History on Policing, Police Training and Communication

Abstract

Over the last few years, scientific works and discourses about organisational uses of history have increased. Most of them refer to private sector organisations and their benefits from using their past. Making use of an organisation’s history has already been widely acknowledged as an important means for a company’s identity formation and its image. Regarding the company’s internal relations, an organisational identity based on this form of history management holds potential for recognition, the implementation of values and the strengthened loyalty of employees. Concerning external relations, the properly structured management of history can result in recognisable and distinguishable image formation, leading to advantages in the competition for resources with other companies and in defining the work area. For the stakeholders, it provides a stable point of orientation among the enormous number of apparently identical organisations. In contrast to this, governmental organisations — especially those dealing with security tasks — do not seem to be in need of such measures due to their stable institutional background. However, there are still some approaches engaging in processing the organisational past of police organisations. Primarily based on empirical material from Germany (e.g. documents, websites, artefacts), this article presents first findings and assumptions on why this is being done and what outcomes the uses of the past provide for the external and internal communication processes of police organisations.