The Anthology

The Anthology
92
1.7 Learning and special events
Prof. Bo Wennström, Uppsala University,
Departmen of Law, Sweden
Introduction
Special events can be anything from previously known
major events, e.g. high-risk football games or political
demonstrations, to unanticipated events, such as
terrorist attacks, serious crimes or major accidents.
Common to them all is that they break the everyday
patterns of policing and require other measures, not
least with regard to cooperation with actors other than
the police. In everyday policing, usually the police
response unit’s knowledge, equipment, and authority
are enough to solve most acute problems. One well
known fact is that the largest challenge with special
events for the actors involved is to go from everyday
trot to alert. In spite of this, we will in this article not
discuss the whole organizational context of special
events and all of the problems related to them. Instead,
we will concentrate on one aspect of the difficulties
with organization for special events, namely, learning.
After every special event the remark usually comes,
not at least from the media or from the political level,
that “we have to learn from this event for the future.”
Since the 1990’s, the concept ‘learning organizations’
has been popular to refer to when discussing
organizations and learning. 123 In this article, the
perspective will be different from that of organization
123 Senge is usually said to be the father of the concept of
“learning organization”; see P. Senge, The Fifth Discipline:
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
(New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1990). But the concept
of organizational learning also occurs in the debate; see,
for example, C. Argyris and D. Schön, Organizational
Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1978). One problem with the concept of
learning organizations, as many have pointed out, is that
organizations themselves do not learn it is people who
learn, and therefore the concept of organizational learning
is more accurate.
theory; the point of departure will be ‘institutional’
that is, based on institutional theory. An institution
is, in this sense, as North expresses the matter, “the
rules of the game of a society composed of the formal
rules (constitutions, statute and common law, regulations),
the informal constraints (norms, conventions,
and internally devised codes of conduct) and the
enforcement characteristics of each. Together they
define the way the game is played.” 124 The entities,
which are referred to as institutions, have the capacity
to do two things which are of special interest for
this paper: one, limit possible courses of action and
ways of acting; two, facilitate alternative actions
that would not be available without the existence of
a certain institution or several cooperating institutions.
Below, the difference between the police as
an organization and as an institution is discussed in
more detail. The focus of the discussion is the process
of institutionalizing and change.
Problem
The problem which will be addressed in this article is
“How can we learn from previous special events” and
“how can learning become an integral part of working
with special events.”
124 D. North, “The Process of Economic Change,” UNU/
WIDER Working Paper no. 128 (Helsinki: UNU/WIDER,
1997).. In police research has so far, institutional theory
been is equivalent to that which in the organizational
theory is namned as institutional theory, see e.g. J. P. Crank,
“Institutional Theory of Police: A Review of the State of
Art in Policing,” An International Journal of Police Strategies
& Management 26 (2003): 186–207. The main difference
in approach lies in how the concept of institutionalization
is interpreted, and in that no clear distinction is made
between organization and institution. For example, Meyer
and Rowan makes a difference between technical and institutional
organizations. For them, the institutional rules
are “myths.” J. W. Meyer and B. Rowan, “Institutionalized
Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,”
American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977): 340–363. See
also R. Granér, Patrullerande polisers yrkeskultur (Lund:
Socialhögskolan, Lunds universitet, 2004), 47–48.