HATHAZY, Paul C. Enchanting Bureaucracy. Symbolica Violence and the (Re)Production of Charismatic Authority in a Police Apparatus

7/26/2019 HATHAZY, Paul C. Enchanting Bureaucracy. Symbolica Violence and the (Re)Production of Charismatic Authority in …

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hathazy-paul-c-enchanting-bureaucracy-symbolica-violence-and-the-reproduction 1/23

International Sociology

27(6) 745 –767

© The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission: sagepub.

co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0268580912453728

iss.sagepub.com

Enchanting bureaucracy:Symbolic violence and the(re)production of charismaticauthority in a police apparatus

Paul C HathazyUniversity of California Berkeley, USA

AbstractThis article dissects the role of culture in securing authority relations within a militarized police

apparatus. Adding structure and power to the symbolic interactionist approach to organizational

culture and interests and positionality to the structural functionalist perspective on militarized

organizations, the author examines how, through the preservation and imposition of a sacralized

worldview and morality (symbolic violence), police officers – the commanding caste of a two-tiered type of police organization – manage to charismatically legitimate the internal distribution

of authority and its exercise in the relations between commanding officers and the non-

commissioned officers, turning sheer bureaucratic authority into charismatic power (symbolic

power). The author draws on ethnographic observations, interview data, and a structural-

semantic analysis to reconstruct the system of beliefs involved and to describe the practices

and mechanisms through which intra-bureaucratic domination is charismatically legitimated and

made effective. These processes are examined both in everyday relations of command and in the

extraordinary event of a police mutiny.

KeywordsLatin America, militarized police, organizations, power relations, symbolic violence

In the first lines of his memoirs – dedicated to ‘future generations of police officers’ –

retired Officer Jaime, of the Cordoba Province Police Department (Argentina), advises

those who will succeed him in the department’s commanding positions:

Besides acquiring adequate professional skills, every officer should work hard to learn and

know about the origins and history of the police department and about the sacrifices of the men

Corresponding author:

Paul C Hathazy, Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, University of California Berkeley, CA 94720-

1980, USA.

Email: [email protected]

ISS27610.1177/0268580912453728International SociologyHathazy

Article

at UNIV FEDERAL DO CEARA on June 16, 2016iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://iss.sagepub.com/






746 International Sociology 27(6)

who forged it. Most importantly, he must be convinced that the vocation he has chosen is a

sacred calling that goes beyond a mere ‘job’ or ‘public service.’ Moreover, he must remember

that his personality has been forged through constant sacrifice and austerity, always thinking

about his family, the martyrs who preceded him, and the glorious traditions of the organization

that took him into its womb. (Jaime, 2005: 2)

In what follows, I inquire why members of the officer corps1 invest time, energy, and

resources into preserving such traditions and memories. I venture that Officer Jaime’s

words are more than the ramblings of a nostalgic retiree and that, in fact, they reveal the

secret workings of power within this two-tiered militarized police apparatus. My analy-

sis will show that by preserving those traditions and engaging in ritual practices officers

manage to sustain and impose the belief in their moral charisma and to legitimate their

exercise of power vis-a-vis their subordinates within this police apparatus. In other

words, I propose to analyze its organizational culture as a central means of dominationwithin this militarized police force.

In doing so, I pursue both theoretical and analytical objectives. I apply Bourdieu’s

concepts of symbolic power and symbolic violence to explain domination within an

organization (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008) structured as an apparatus.2 Analyzing the

symbolic mediation of domination as an ongoing process achieved through the agency of

individuals with specific positions of power and interests within this apparatus, I over-

come certain problems I observe in symbolic interactionist analysis of organizational

culture and structural functionalist studies of domination within militarized and hierar-

chically divided bureaucracies.

By connecting organizational culture, rituals, and symbolically mediated interactions

with the specific power structure of the police apparatus, I can account for the practices

of distinction and domination within the organization in the forms of rites of passage, but

also of distance, and of community. Moreover, I argue that the objective relations of

power (1) propel agents to engage in the (re)production of the observed organizational

culture, (2) orient the situated efforts to symbolically (re)define domination, and (3)

ground their efficacy. In turn, by analyzing the habitus, interests, and strategies of appa-

ratchiks I explain the development, structure, deployment , and preservation of this

bureaucratic cultural tradition, with its virtues, figures, and rituals, all of which remain

unexplained within structural functionalist studies of militarized organizations.At the analytical level I show how bureaucratic symbolic power is generated, and

symbolic violence deployed securing and transforming domination within the appara-

tus.3 This process is made possible through subjective transformations, objective mecha-

nisms, and strategic position-takings, all through which the dominant group of officers

legitimate their formal positions and their exercise of command by reproducing a distinc-

tive moral charisma that they monopolize. The production of symbolic power involves

(1) the acquisition by officers during initial training of cultural capital necessary to jus-

tify their claims for special treatment as a bureaucratic status group that monopolizes a

distinctive moral charisma (Weber, 1978); and (2) the imposition of the categories of perception (symbolic violence) – via the systems of police schools and in everyday ritu-

alized interactions – whereby obedience is transformed via its (mis)recognition as char-

ismatic leadership (symbolic power). Both officers and NCOs are involved in this







Hathazy 747

process. I also demonstrate the centrality of this ongoing cultivation of charisma analyz-

ing how its faulty deployment leads to a major mutiny.

Studying the reproduction of these cultural elements I also illuminate a dimension

neglected in studies of police change in post-authoritarian regimes, which focus on polit-

ical, societal, and formal institutional factors (Fruhling, 2009; Hinton, 2006; Uildrikset al., 2009; Ungar, 2002). I show that these elements are not mere cultural residues – ‘a

holdover from past years’ (Ungar, 2002: 82) – but also powerful and central means of

present-day domination within this militarized police bureaucracy. This culture mediates

the consolidation of new professional standards in training and of policing models

respectful of citizens’ rights, facilitating in turn the continuity of violence and abuses

over citizens (see Brinks, 2008).

Symbolic power in a militarized police apparatus: Fromorganizational culture to bureaucratic symbolic violence

Treating the rigid two-tiered police apparatus as a space with field-like properties sheds

light on the everyday dynamics of the apparatus, and provides a novel way to analyze

organizational culture and domination within it, enriching current approaches to culture

and power within bureaucratic apparatuses (e.g. Fine, 1984; Hallet, 2007; Hallet and

Ventresca, 2006; Merton, 1952 [1940]). It means conceiving the militarized police

organization as a semi-autonomous, bounded, and structured space of social investment

and strategic position-takings (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008), where agents rather than

struggling to transform this space, invest in its material and symbolic rewards derivedfrom preserving its structure and internal distances.

The structure of this space is determined by the distribution of formal authority and

‘in-house’ capitals, internally produced, acquired, and deployed, and deemed necessary

to occupy the posts in the hierarchy. The distribution of symbolic capitals structures the

relations in this space, duplicating the formal relations of authority. In this case, different

amounts of formal authority within the police organization, which define the command-

ing and subordinate positions, are doubled by a correlative distribution of in-house sym-

bolic capitals.

Thus, the (re)production of charismatically legitimate domination within the policeapparatus involves studying (1) the acquisition of the in-house moral and symbolic capi-

tal and (2) the work of legitimation of domination within the space through symbolic

violence. The production of bureaucratic symbolic power (the capital of prestige derived

from possession of other capitals) through symbolic violence (the imposition of princi-

ples of appreciation of capitals and of categories of perception) includes the passage

through ‘voluntary total institutions’ (Goffman, 1961): the officers’ and NCOs’ acade-

mies and the reproduction of a ‘negotiated order’ (Fine, 1984; Hallet, 2003, 2007).

However, from the field-theory perspective, those schools are more than sites for the

transformation of the self, and the negotiated order involves more than just interactions.First, these schools are sites of entrance to the field and mechanisms of legitimation

of the bureaucratic structure. Here agents acquire the cultural capital, credentials, and

dispositions required to occupy different positions and engage with the bureaucratic

space. Second, interactions within those locales and between any member of the









Hathazy 749

something that much needed comparative studies of police culture will have to confirm,

discard, or qualify. 5

The following reconstruction of the local police space, habitus, and cosmology is

based on interviews, observations, and documentary data produced during my fieldwork

at the Cordoba Province Police Department, in Argentina. This a major police force in ahighly urban and industrialized province, with a long tradition of professionalism

(Barreneche, 2009). After being under military control in the 1960s and 1970s and

deployed to fight political dissidents, in the first years of democracy the government

reoriented training toward greater respect of citizens’ rights, improved forensic investi-

gation capacities, and introduced modern pedagogic techniques for in-class instruction

(Policía de Córdoba, 1989). All this makes it an excellent case to show the resilience of

this informal culture in the face of reform efforts, the centrality of police culture to legiti-

mate bureaucratic domination, as well as the subtlety of the mechanisms that reproduce

it and secure its effects.With a ‘relational approach to ethnography’ (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008: 34) I

made observations in the officers’ school and in the riot control unit over a 10-month

period in 2003 and 2004 and in the summer of 2005. The police academy that trains

only those who will become officers is where future officers’ ethos and worldview are

made more explicit.6 There I could observe how officers acquire the police capital on

which their bureaucratic symbolic power will be based. By observing other parts of the

police department, especially the riot police unit, I then traced how the cultural disposi-

tions acquired in the officers’ school are diffused throughout the department and trans-

mitted to subordinates through ritualized interactions. In addition to my observationsand interviews, I performed a semiotic structural analysis of documents written by

police officers through which I reconstructed the content and structure of the organiza-

tional culture.7

Officers school: Initiatory discipline as moral cultivation

In a world of predominantly specialized training, only the juvenile phenomena of the barrack

and student life remain as residues of the ancient ascetic means for awakening and testing

charismatic capacities. (Weber, 1992: 1143)

The officers’ school is the nodal point where the legitimating culture is perpetuated. This

is the point of entrance for those who will occupy the higher echelons of this police appa-

ratus that monopolizes the exercise of state policing prerogatives within the province.8

Here the cadets invest time, energy, and effort to acquire the dispositions and cultural

tool kit (Swidler, 1986) that will justify their membership in the commanding caste and

morally legitimate their authority. Such dispositions and justifications are not technical

qualifications,9 but distinctive moral, embodied capacities, virtues. In the police acad-

emy cadets will acquire such ‘virtues’ – embodied cultural capital – and learn the moral

vocabulary in accordance to which the officer himself will transform the exercise of

authority over subordinates into an enterprise of constant moral education.

To become part of the Officer Corps, cadets engage in two years of training in this

total but voluntary institution (Goffman, 1961: 118),10 where they are subjected, but also








subject themselves, to negative rites oriented toward constituting the virtuous police

selves. These rites impact every aspect of the candidates’ lives: use of time, personal

appearance, dress, eating and drinking habits, relations with family, friends and neigh-

bors, and even reading material. The cadet must leave the profane world of hedonistic

desires and learn the virtues of ‘self-restraint,’ ‘humility,’ ‘loyalty,’ all and everythingsummed up in the notion of ‘sacrifice.’

While the first year is dedicated to the inculcation of obedient dispositions, by the

second year ‘it is expected that the cadets will have already developed their self-discipline’

(Instructor Marcio). Cadets learn to obey and have self-discipline through a totally filled,

and strictly imposed, schedule that starts at 6.30 a.m., with ‘ Physical Training ,’ then

‘Academy’ (class) until noon – when they regroup for lunch. After lunch comes ‘[mili-

tary] Instruction’ during the afternoon, practicing parades, movements, and drill, until

dinnertime. Besides inculcating obedience, the whole system of regimented interactions

and routines, teaches promptness in reacting to the wills of superiors and the progressiveassimilation to collective rhythms and demands.

Learning discipline and obedience is not just learning to follow orders and comply

with regulations. Obedience is discursively elaborated, rationalized, and qualified by the

instructor-officers in specific ways. The first qualification is that obedience has different

‘degrees.’ The cadet must be able to obey under more or less humiliating, mortifying,

demanding, or painful conditions. Instructors rationalize, and cadets assume, that the

endurance of pain and suffering implied in obeying orders is a means to develop fortitude

and self-control . Roughly translatable as temper, but in the metallurgic sense, this ‘tem-

pering ’ of the mind – achieved through effort and pain – is directly related to the controlof emotions and reactions of the body, through the development of an internal strength

and the presentation of it. ‘Temper’ transforms the total subordination to the orders,

wishes, and arbitrariness of the training officers, into a virtue. Obedience is not just a

subjection to orders, but a capacity to follow them, accompanied by pride and satisfaction

for achieving the moral and physical fortitude required to do it under any circumstance.

Obedience and discipline, ‘temper,’ and ‘sacrifice’ are in turn the bases of other vir-

tues. A cadet with discipline and temper is ‘able to face the worst situations and will

maintain within his attitudes and abilities the following ethical and moral values’: ‘com-

panionship, veracity, discretion, respect, collaboration, loyalty, esprit de corps, [and] ini-tiative’ (Policía de Córdoba, General Personnel Directorate, 2002: 13–15).

This substantive rationalization of obedience to orders – the most basic behavior in a

bureaucracy – according to moral virtues is the pivotal element over which the whole

symbolic system and effects of distinction and legitimation rests. Through it formal hier-

archical subordination is made to coexist with moral distinctions within the same bureau-

cratic pattern. This creates degrees of moral excellence in the performance of orders,

allowing officers to judge the receiver of orders on such moral grounds. Moreover, by

morally rationalizing obedience officers can discursively connect the exercise of author-

ity (giving orders) and their obedience with other dimensions of the symbolic system,

which are also morally imbued.

In this way, ordering and commanding is learned as a complex ritual that contains

issuing a directive, a potential moral judgment, and a sense of moral guidance and exam-

ple. This same sense of moral guide will then be deployed in relating with the lower caste







Hathazy 751

of subordinates. But these rationalizations of obedience and command do not exist as an

isolated cultural trait. They are part of a more complex and extended police social cos-

mology within which officers frame their claims of morally legitimate domination.

The police cosmology: A structured symbolic system

The system of beliefs within which cadets’ obedience and command is rationalized con-

stitutes a somewhat coherent social cosmology. It includes not only the specific ethos

described above, but a more general worldview with devotional figures that condense

such ideas and ideals. This police cosmology does not exist, in real life, as a system of

precisely defined concepts and clearly organized oppositions, but as a system of analo-

gous oppositions reproduced in practice (including discursive and written practices) and

for practice, with the officers’ structured system of dispositions (habitus) as its genera-

tive principle of coherence, preservation, and imposition.This police cosmology is structured around a basic opposition between the ‘Ideal’ and

the ‘Material.’ These dimensions appear in constant tension in the different realms of real-

ity: the world, the social world, the police bureaucracy, personality, or the human body. In

this worldview the material aspects of reality (‘society,’ the ‘mass’ of subordinates, the

‘hedonistic’ impulses of the body) continuously threaten the actualization of the ideal

dimensions (‘the police,’ the officer’s commands, altruism) (see Figure 1).

Thus, in the dimension of the individual, the ideal person is one that can control his

hedonistic impulses, with a deep sense of altruism and veracity. These ideal dispositions

are threatened by the vicious material impulses of sensualism and egoism. The same ten-sion exists in the realm of ‘institutions,’ where the police department, the realm of legal

and ideal order and of the fulfillment of altruistic public services, is opposed to society,

the reign of private interests and disorder, prompted by egoism, materialism, and utilitar-

ian calculations. Within this system everything that takes place in society can be explained

by reference to the corrupting forces of materialist egoism and hedonism. A criminal is

someone who lacks the adequate values and is led by hedonist impulses he or she cannot

control. Institutions are criticized for not performing their assigned functions. The family

is conceived as the ‘moral cell’ of society, a locus of cultivation of morally correct citi-

zens. Analogous principles explain drug consumption or political demonstrations.In this worldview policemen appear as moral champions (spirit) in relation to a civil

society they construct as morally deficient (material). In a social word suffused with

moral decay, the duty of officers is to preserve and practice abnegation and self-sacrifice.

Such moral obedience becomes the only way to preserve the police institution, and

through it, the social and moral order. Finally, and decisively, within this perspective the

commanding officers, as opposed to the subordinates, appear as the most com-

plete embodiment of those values and dispositions of disinterest. They, and only they,

have developed the strength of will that enable them to face their duties with an adequate

moral attitude. In opposition to them, one finds the subordinates, who may develop the

correct dispositions to some degree, but never with a similar level of commitment, inten-

sity, clarity, and conviction.

This cosmology has as its pagan deity, a secular hero and moral paragon venerated by

officers and respected by the whole police community, the War of Independence hero








‘Jose de San Martin,’11 who is in turn protector and first martyr of the Motherland –

represented by the Flag. From San Martin, as the father of the Motherland, officers derivethe most legitimating ideas (the savior, the glory, the example, disinterest), but also the

purest excuses to demand subordination (sacrifice, exact and prompt fulfillment of

orders, submission, and even to die if necessary). Becoming an officer is reconverted as

a progressive identification with the idol. Moreover, the two years of training is

Figure 1. Contents (horizontal) and symbolic functions (vertical) of the police cosmology.











school. The training period in the subordinates’ school lasts from four to six months, and

is essentially destined to produce obedient subordinates.15 The effectiveness of the offic-

ers’ ‘claim to social esteem’ (Weber, 1992: 218) is ultimately based on the resulting dif-

ferences between the products of the pedagogic regimes of the system of educational

police institutions.The recognition of a moral superiority and social dignity of officers by subordinates

is made possible through a transformation of the different pedagogic experiences into

differences in nature between the officers and subordinates. The tradition of the depart-

ment captures such differences in the folk theory of different types of discipline, that of

the officers and that of subordinates. In the preface to the ‘Notes on Discipline’ (Policía

de Córdoba, General Personnel Directorate, 2002) the different types of discipline are

presented. In the subordinate’s case:

We have that [discipline] which makes man an automaton; that which governs him strictlythrough regulations, that dictates his conduct down to the most minute detail . . . the one that is

accepted and voluntarily desired by the subordinate. We understand too well that the abundance

of laws and regulations and dispositions obscure the notions of what is good and what is bad,

and the only thing that is important to them is to escape punishment. (Policía de Córdoba,

General Personnel Directorate, 2002: 5)

That is the discipline of those destined to obey, the impure, the mediocre, the mass, the

subordinates. In opposition to such general disposition one finds the officer’s true

discipline:

. . . discipline based on dignity and conscience. . . . Integrity of behavior, veracity, rectitude,

character, sense of duty and Sacrifice. . . . [It is one] of authority, initiative and example, based

on the confidence that the officer inspires thanks to his education, civility, passion for service,

subordination, energy and zeal. (Policía de Córdoba, General Personnel Directorate, 2002: 7)

This naturalization of dispositional differences rests, in turn, in the typical social trajec-

tories of the members of each bureaucratic group. Put very generally, officers come

mainly from police and military families and from petty-bourgeois groups. By contrast,

subordinates tend to come from peasant groups and the working classes.16

The officers’school selects and values two main types of capitals: social capital and ‘disciplined’ body

dispositions. Social capital comes mainly from the capital of relations that relatives of

police agents can mobilize in order to be admitted to the officers’ school. As the school

director, somewhat lightly, puts it: ‘80 percent are sons of police agents.’ The bureaucratic

caste receives newcomers that posses dispositions to obedience and the capacity and inter-

est in engaging in highly disciplined relations acquired from military and religious schools

and, secondarily, by coming from police or military families.17 The officers’ school recog-

nizes and consecrates the interest in self-discipline and moralized obedience of future

officers, while the NCOs’ school recognizes docility, conservatism, and the bodily culture

of the peasant and working classes. The police culture produces a misrecognition of both

different social and educational trajectories, and reconverts them in types of policemen.

But this police culture not only legitimates the existence of two impassable bureau-

cratic castes. It also operates in the everyday relations of domination, transforming







Hathazy 755

authority and obedience and the services provided by officers and subordinates. But, for

such transformation to occur it is necessary that both officers and subordinates experi-

ence authority through the same categories of perception. That is, it requires the imposi-

tion of categories of perception through which bureaucratic power is converted into

symbolic power.

Moralizing command and cultivating the collective

If the symbolic system is to produce the legitimation of officers it is because practices

and structures of domination are deciphered in accordance with a system of categories

imposed by those who dominate the institution. A similar thesis can be found in Goffman’s

depictions of the micro-dynamics of power within total institutions. According to

Goffman, the staff that directs total institutions cultivates – as part of their efforts to con-

trol inmates – a ‘doctrine, with its own inquisitors and its own martyrs.’ This ‘institu-tional doctrine’ involves ‘the translation of inmate behavior into moralistic terms usually

based on a theory of human nature [which] rationalizes activity, provides subtle means

of maintaining social distance, a stereotyped view of them, . . . and [justifies] the essen-

tial difference between staff and inmates’ (Goffman, 1961: 87). According to Goffman

the ‘cultivation of legitimacy’ includes the preservation of an ‘institutional doctrine,’ and

institutional ceremonies that ‘express unity, solidarity, and joint commitment to the insti-

tution, rather than differences between the two levels’ (1961: 94). The next step then is

to analyze the system of practices and rituals through which the ‘institutional doctrine’ is

diffused and deployed.Such dissemination takes place first and foremost in the initial training of subordi-

nates in the NCOs’ school. There officers inculcate not that sense of discipline as respon-

sibility –reserved for officers – but the rudiments of the general mission and the common

set of values to which every true policemen should strive. The instructors ‘try to instill,

to transmit as much as they can the idea of nation, the feeling that you are serving the

fatherland’ (Instructor Daniel). This, according to the Leadership Manual is done through

various means, including serving as an example but most importantly, through constant

‘education’ of subordinates. In this perspective:

Each unit and each police station is the real school. In it the Officer has all the means available

to achieve such education. The means available to the Officer are many: Patriotism, Discipline,

Sacrifice, Honesty, Pride and Braveness. All of them are the result of a constant and progressive

work, and achieving such qualities and virtues is possible only through convincing the

subordinates through example, observation and orientation, but never through harsh punishments.

(Officer’s Leadership Manual, p. 14)

This symbolic violence has its concrete pedagogic techniques, described with surprising

meticulousness:

The preservation of the police esprit de corps must be done through short conferences. These

conferences should take the form of a conversation or a simple narration of the operations

performed by the members of each Unit, or from other sections. One should always refer to, and

focus on, the action performed, the spirit of sacrifice and the boldness demonstrated by the








personnel. It is wise to carefully choose the words used. The episodes, the events, the anecdotes,

etc., all have to be simple and clear, but also impressive, using an energetic tone of voice, vivid

and passionate. Words, on the other hand, have more or less effectiveness according to the

occasion in which they are used, being most of the time able to convince the audience only if

the story and the words appear as deeply felt by the narrator himself. Finally, one must nevermiss the opportunity to awaken and develop in the subordinates the deepest love of the

fatherland, reminding them of the glories of those who have preceded us in each Unit and in the

Police Department in general, of our venerable past and the greatness of our enterprise and

mission. (Principles of Police Command, pp. 49, 51)

By diffusing their worldview, officers preserve the principles that make them rec-

ognizable as the charismatic leaders, and convert the exercise of authority into a rela-

tion of moral guidance, transforming obedience and service of subordinates into

participation within a collective enterprise guided by those models of moral excel-

lence, the officers guiding the deficient subordinates. This role of commander-as-moral-educator is instilled in the officers’ school and sustained all through their

careers:

It is not enough to limit oneself to self-preparation and being technically capable as a policeman.

This is a professional obligation. What matters most, is that the commanding officer must be a

guide and educator of his men. (Gonzalez Figoli, 1998: 15)18

The complementary side of transforming command into moral guidance is to pro-

duce a moral community, of a hierarchically ordered but unified collective that encompasses officers and subordinates, guided by its charismatic officers. For this, officers

make the veneration of the bureaucratic hero and the fatherland, public and collective

events. This includes the daily ceremony of saluting the flag, where the national flag is

raised in the morning and brought in at dusk by an honor guard formed of one officer

and one subordinate. The collective hero, San Martin, is also invoked with his portrait

hanging in the entrance of all police stations, and its emblem, the San Martinian Sun,

appears in both the badge on the officer’s uniform and in the coat of arms of the institu-

tion. In addition to such daily reminders, all the units celebrate San Martin Day com-

memorating the day of his death. While on the day of his birth, each unit and the policedepartment itself receive a ritual collective identity, celebrating the day and month

when each was created. This ritual designation blurs the daily separation between the

bureaucratic castes and momentarily unifies officers and subordinates. The creation of

community involves also the collective sacrificial devotion through the homage of

those who fell in the line of duty, ‘institutional martyrs,’ remembered through a monu-

ment in the central patio of the police headquarters, the symbolic core of the

institution.

Up until now I have mainly talked about officers and the system of beliefs and

rites. I referred to the officers’ virtues acquired in the school and the cosmology that

feeds their vocabulary of command, and how they disseminate these to the lower

ranks, converting themselves into moral champions of a moral community. There is

a piece still missing, the participation of subordinates in the collective symbolic

treasure.








Hathazy 757

The subordinate’s place and use of the police cosmology

The symbolic mediation of bureaucratic domination is possible because the dominated

within the police system, the subordinates, also believe in such values, virtues, and

worldview. Subordinates themselves use this worldview to judge their peers and othersand to organize their view of the social world and their feelings toward it. This legitima-

tion of internal domination within the corporation is possible both because these values

are conceived of as the values of the whole police community (as opposed to the civilian

world), and because the bureaucratic ideology produces a number of services to the most

dominated and humble members of the police department.

The symbolic system provides benefits of social and self-esteem to subordinates.

According to Bourdieu, labor has a ‘twofold truth,’ never being just exploitation. It also

has, in the eyes of those who perform it, other ‘intrinsic profits . . . symbolic profits asso-

ciated with the name of the occupation or the occupational status’ (2000: 202). In this police apparatus the organizational culture institutes a twofold truth to obedience and

membership to the force, creating inherent gratifications at both the individual and rela-

tional levels.19

At an individual level subordinates feel praised for their physical effort and endur-

ance. These values celebrate their working-class habits, and indeed the peasant past of

most first-generation police agents. The ideology also gives coherence to the subordi-

nates’ typical social trajectory of a history of relative scarcity of material means com-

bined with constant renunciations of immediate satisfactions aimed at preserving or

advancing their social positions.

The police ideology also allows subordinates decisive benefits of social distinction.

It permits them to position themselves, at least in the symbolic realm, in a higher posi-

tion vis-a-vis civilians, and especially vis-a-vis those civilians of social sectors that are

just below the ones from which the police themselves arose. Subordinates participate

in this bureaucratic cosmos assimilating their occupational service to altruism, disin-

terest, and an idealistic way of life. Police from the lower echelons draw moral bound-

aries (Lamont, 2000) against all classes of civilians but especially against the urban

poor and the working classes. Quite revealingly, when I asked a ‘Johnny’ (the generic

nickname for subordinates) about the people that live in the slums he answered, ‘What

do poor people know about sacrifice? They know nothing’ (Policeman Juan). The‘self-sacrificing’ habitus can exclude almost anyone, even hard workers, who are

respected as long as ‘they do not ask for wage increases, what else do they want? They

work only eight hours a day, they have vacations; they can see their families every

night’ (Subordinate Rodrigo). Moreover, they explain crime and the existence of crimi-

nals – their archenemies – by referring to the criminals’ lack of values and capacities

to control their material appetites. This leads to a bureaucratically based racism, with

the subordinates and officers defining civilians as essentially defective. As a quite irate

Sergeant Hector explains:

Those in the slums . . . they are a bunch of degenerates, they bring it in their blood, they are like

that . . . people who do not work, who do nothing, they are all day without doing anything; the

demonstrators . . . you give them a house, that they could have it for fifty pesos a month, no. .

. . Instead of paying it, they want it for free and they do not want to work. Or if you give them








a social security benefit, they do not want to work, they want everything to be given to them,

everything, and it is like that.

These practical social philosophers construct the social word as a hierarchy of morally

qualified individuals, with the police bureaucracy as the implicit social and moral model.This results in an extreme social conservatism in which everybody should accept his

position and condition, just as the officers and subordinates do every day.20 These moral

elements, as other studies show (Garriga Zucal, 2010; Hathazy, 2006), frame the exercise

of legal violence against common criminals and demonstrators and morally justify illegal

coercion and abuses – even in this force, with relatively low levels of violence compared

to other forces in Argentina and Brazil (Brinks, 2008).

The subordinate’s sense of superiority vis-a-vis civilians has a price. Subordinates

feel justified and proud of their superior condition when comparing themselves to civil-

ians by drawing on a moral system of which they themselves are the less perfect realiza-tion compared to the officers. In this manner, the subordinates preserve the moral

legitimation of their superiors by using standards that locate them in an inferior position

within the bureaucratic cosmology. And through their use of such standards they close

the magic circle of bureaucratic enchantment.

However, the cultivation of legitimacy does not always yield the expected products.

This is not a fault-proof process that almost automatically secures the relations of domi-

nation. Events of massive disobedience, mutinies, show that such work of charismatic

legitimation is a delicate mechanism that can be threatened when the socialization within

this culture is weak, or when the shared mores are transgressed by the charismatic lead-ers. In the next section I dissect an event of mutiny that reveals the centrality of symbolic

violence and legitimacy in everyday bureaucratic domination.

Understanding a mutiny: Breaking and restoring the

bureaucratic ideology

What causes a mutiny in a militarized police force? I would argue that they are caused in

part by a break in the routine recognition of charisma by subordinates. This can occur in

one of two cases: (1) when subordinates are inadequately socialized, or (2) when officersviolate core tenets of the ideology. To probe the connection between legitimation deficits

and mutinies, I focus on the period before, during, and after a May 2002 episode of col-

lective insubordination in the Cordoba Police Department’s riot control unit, the most

disciplined and obedient section of the police force, and where one would least expect a

mutiny.

In December 2001, Argentina experienced various massive popular revolts, promoted

by the opposition, that led to the fall of President Fernando De la Rua (see Auyero,

2007). In the capital city of Cordoba province, the riot control unit was on duty for five

days in a row, from 19th to 24th December. The protests were finally controlled, the riotssubsided. In the riot control unit, however, things changed. In the six months following

the protest, the chief commander of the unit intensified overtime requirements, ordering

subordinates to work an extra eight hours, or even 16, in addition to the 24 hours they

were contractually obligated to in each shift. With time, the threat of further rioting







Hathazy 759

subsided, but the workload for the riot unit did not. After four months of continuous

demands for overtime, a feeling of uneasiness started to develop in the ranks. I argue that

this uneasiness stemmed from a lack of adequate socialization: members of the riot con-

trol unit could not fall back on an ideological buffer strong enough to support the increas-

ing demands on them.At that point in time, newcomers made up a large proportion of the riot control unit’s

rank and file. Predicting social upheaval, the police department recruited in late 2001

three cohorts of about 100 new NCOs who went through a very brief training of only 60

days, instead of the usual six months, and many of them were assigned to the riot control

unit. In turn, given the urgency to fill the positions, the traditional riot control training of

15 days was shortened to three days. Lacking sufficient socialization in the logic of suf-

fering and discipline, the riot unit training seemed absurd and abusive to the new recruits.

Subordinate Carlos recalls the training as:

. . . mainly drilling, which for us was strange . . . and a lot, a lot of closed-order formations:

salutes, marching, and calisthenics, and of course the unit’s movements, you know, the

formations. However, in my view it was badly planned: they clearly committed a mistake with

the methods, which was basically punishment, almost torture, too harsh, too rough. They said

that [such treatment] was a way of really knowing if you should be a member of the unit. But

really, in my view [it was] useless suffering.

This feeling of being abused and subjected to useless suffering only worsened when,

in May 2002, commanding officers of the riot police were implicated in a corruption

case, accused of charging surveillance services they never actually provided. The news

led to a sudden loss of face by the officers in the eyes of the subordinates. Two weeks

later the rank and file of the riot control unit’s First Company – which included both

many under-socialized newcomers and many old-timers who felt betrayed – decided to

report sick, even if they remained in the barracks. The Second and Third Companies,

urgently called to replace them, instead joined the mutineers. The mutineers took over

the riot police headquarters and resolved not to leave the premises until the chief of the

riot control unit was removed. Rumors circulated that the chief was ‘squeezing’ his sub-

ordinates in order to impress his superiors and gain a promotion. Instead of promoting

him, the headquarters responded to the subordinates’ petition by removing him and put-ting in place another officer, who knew the old times, as he had been part of the unit a

decade earlier.

Instead of purging the unit of the leaders of the mutiny, Officer Ortega engaged in an

intense bout of ideological inculcation over the new subordinates instituting an

‘Extraordinary Instruction period’ for the unit where every member of the unit, old and

new, would acquire or refresh his skills – and, most importantly, his values – in order to

cement his solidarity with the unit. All members received training in a farm about 100

miles from the city, in the middle of the Cordoba hills, where they had to set up bivouacs

and hunt or fish for their own food. Each day they visited ‘Cross Mount,’ a hill with threecrosses on top, ascended at night before going to sleep, and returned there in the early

morning, ascending and descending in a silent pilgrimage. At the top of the hill they

‘meditated,’ guided by an officer to ‘find their values.’ After 12 days in the camp, they








were given an official welcome by the chief of the unit, who administered them a new

oath of allegiance to the unit. In the following months, the new chief continued to demand

overtime from the subordinates, but since he had restored a sense of collective enterprise,

the subordinates did not object to it now.

As this episode shows, the production of symbolic power within the riot control unitrequired the exercise of symbolic violence. The unit’s leadership had to impose princi-

ples that portrayed officers, their command, and their (excessive) demands as not just as

bureaucratically legitimate, but also charismatically legitimate. On the basis of such

principles of classification, the subordinates granted the new leading officer recognition

and charismatic legitimacy. For this to happen, subordinates had to be steeped in institu-

tional doctrine and conditioned to recognize the exercise of formal bureaucratic authority

as charismatic command.

Conclusion and implications

In this article, I have analyzed the operation of symbolic violence in a militarized police

apparatus, showing how bureaucratic authority is converted into bureaucratic symbolic

power through the exercise of symbolic violence. This two-tiered structure is natural-

ized: hierarchical obedience is transformed into a moral relation, while membership in

the bureaucracy is converted into participation in a hierarchical community of the cho-

sen, different from, and superior to, the civilian world.

I have also examined the experiences and perspectives of the subordinate members of

this bureaucratic apparatus, the mass of policemen and policewomen who are trapped in amoral economy that simultaneously saves them from the banality of being mere civilians

but condemns them to acquiesce to their own subordination. Finally, I analyzed a mutiny

– an instance where ideological work was interrupted and subordinates failed to grant the

recognition their officers demanded – and its aftermath, where officers engaged in an inten-

sified process of charisma building, socializing the under-socialized newcomers to the riot

police and reinstating bureaucratic order through reinforcing the symbolic one.

In closing I want to briefly mention the main theory and policy implications of this

study. First, domination within this apparatus is neither the mechanical effect of a

Foucauldian disciplinary technology that perpetuates itself, nor its culture a manifesta-tion of a self-replicating authoritarian political rationality (e.g. Sozzo, 2005). This police

apparatus is a space of social investment, where agents manage to reconvert the most

basic bureaucratic pattern of obeying orders into a morally qualified behavior, to trans-

form membership in this rigid bureaucracy into a distinctive mark of status and distinc-

tion relative to internal groups or society, and convert subordination and exploitation into

a sacred mission.

Second, the field theory approach also complements the symbolic interactionist per-

spective on bureaucratic culture. Agency is still operating in this highly regulated and

disciplined organizational space, not in ‘negotiations of the negotiated order’ (Fine,

1984), but in the active engagement with, and strategies of distinction within, a bureau-

cracy that remains structurally and symbolically constant. I also showed the necessity of

analyzing symbolic power (Hallet, 2003) together with symbolic violence, and of







Hathazy 761

attending to organizationally specific symbolic interests to start understanding the inter-

action between ‘local and extra-local meanings’ (Hallet and Ventrestca, 2006).

Finally, this work serves to understand how police culture conditions post-authoritar-

ian reforms in contemporary Latin America – a dimension usually overlooked (Fruhling,

2009; Hinton, 2006; but see also Candina, 2005). While in Argentina a volatile, corrupt,and protective political system and a weak judiciary make reform difficult (Eaton, 2008;

Hinton, 2006; Ungar, 2009), even when such factors are overcome, the informal authori-

tarian culture contributes per se to the failure of educational innovations and the deploy-

ment of community policing models.

The work of cultivation of charisma described explains the resilience of elements

derived from the conservative regimes of the 1940s and the military regimes of the 1960s

and 1970s. With it we can explain why a decade after ‘civil and human rights’ were intro-

duced in the Federal Police of Argentina curriculum, these are still ‘just covered ritually,

without conviction, to show to society’ (Ungar, 2002: 82), and why officers resist sofiercely changes in their alma mater (Jaime, 2002) or the closing of their academies (Sa,

2011). These cultural frames also appear to be operating in the reproduction of authori-

tarian and hierarchical relations within community policing programs and forums, as

Eilbaum (2004) so vividly shows for the Argentina Federal Police. As these cases attest,

reform projects should offer new elements for building a new sense of police honor, one

compatible with a respectful, egalitarian treatment of citizens, while seriously taking into

account the prestige interests of the incumbent police elite and subordinates who exploit

every day the material but also the symbolic profits derived from inhabiting the enchanted

police apparatus.

Funding

This work was supported by the Tinker Foundation, the A Mellon Foundation, and the Agencia

Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas (Argentina).

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Marion Fourcade, Ann Swidler, Laura Mangels, and Ryan Calder for their always

encouraging readings and suggestions.

Notes

1. Within the Police Department of the Province of Cordoba, Argentina, the site of this study,

functionaries are divided into two hierarchically subordinated and impassable bureaucratic

castes. On the one hand, there is the group of ‘Officers’ (‘Oficiales’) who command, and on

the other, the Non-Commissioned Officers and Troop, called ‘Subordinates’ (‘Suboficiales’).

In this article I call the members of those groups ‘Officers’ and ‘Subordinates,’ respectively.

This division of the hierarchy into two impassable groups is the case in all police and military

forces in Argentina, and in most of Latin America. Also, the few masculine pronouns I use

reflect that 95% of officers and 90% of subordinates are men, and that I interviewed only

men. In turn, the masculine references of documents and interview excerpts reflect the mas-

culine domination within this culture and space.

2. According to Bourdieu, fields – relatively autonomous and stable structured spaces of posi-

tions and struggles where specific capitals are efficient – operate as an apparatus when








struggles are reduced to a minimum, ‘the dominant manage to crush and annul resistance

and the reactions of the dominated, [and] all movements go exclusively from the top down’

(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 102). This highly regulated, militarized, and two-tiered

police organization fits this conceptual type.

3. By symbolic power I understand, following Bourdieu, ‘that invisible power [based on themediation of certain symbolic instruments] which can be exercised only with the complic-

ity of those who . . . are subject to it’ (1991 [1973]: 163), being always ‘a transfigured and

legitimated form of the other forms of power’ [in this case, bureaucratic authority] but ‘recog-

nized, that is misrecognized as arbitrary’ and, finally, ‘defined in and through a given relation

between those who exercise power and those who submit to it, i.e. in the very structure of the

field [or bureaucratic structure] in which belief is produced and reproduced’ (1991 [1973]:

163, 170).

4. According to Merton these sentiments arise and become a value in themselves through a pro-

cess of displacement of means (discipline) to ends (values) in themselves which is ultimately

caused by ‘these sentiments [being] more intense than what is technically necessary’ to ensurediscipline (1952 [1940]: 365).

5. Most countries in South America have two-tiered systems that separate officers from subor-

dinate officers, as do some in Europe, among others, the French Gendarmerie, the Spanish

Guardia Civil, and the Italian Carabinieri. I briefly refer to other Latin American police forces

– with homologous structures and analogous symbolic elements – in the course the text as the

analytic and conceptual is privileged over the comparative.

6. The morphology of the organization, respective of these two groups, is roughly, a proportion

of officers of 22% and subordinates and troops, 78%, with 31% being non-commissioned

officers and 47% troops (Semiraz, 1999). So projecting those percentages to 2005, when the

department had a population of about 15,000, would mean there were approximately 3000officers and 12,000 subordinates.

7. Superficial semantic analysis, as proposed by Robin (1973), is based on the assumption that

the terms used within a community acquire specific meanings determined by the structure

of the ‘semantic field,’ which is structured by recurrent relations of association, equivalence

and opposition between the terms, as well as through the specification of agency and support

between the objects designated. The analysis aims at discovering these reiterated modalities of

association, equivalence, and opposition between different notions. The analysis stops not when

new meanings of words stop appearing but when new principles of association and opposition

stop arising . Once I reconstructed the police community ‘dictionary’ I organized the observed

system of semantic associations into a system of homological oppositions (see Figure 1). 8. In the Federal Argentine system, each of the 22 provinces has just one police organization.

This means an actual monopoly of this organization over policing powers. It also means

a monopolized market for the cultural (bodily) capital and credentials that are granted by

the officers’ and subordinates’ schools, which are not transferable to other police organiza-

tions, provincial or federal. The morphology of this organizational field is very different from

the atomized structure of the US or UK police organizational fields. This centralized nature

increases the power of those who control the organization to impose entrance rights and

demands to those who enter.

9. This is a type of occupation in which the real know-how demanded to perform adequately

on a daily basis is learnt after their passage through the school. Moreover, such ‘technicalknowledge’ is almost the same for officers and subordinates. See note 14.

10. Voluntary total institutions have the peculiarity that ‘mere compliance with work rulings

would not seem to be enough, and where inmates’ incorporation of staff standards is an active

aim as well as an incidental consequence’ (Goffman, 1961: 118).








Hathazy 763

11. Jose de San Martin (1778–1850) was the General Commander of the national army during

the War of Independence. Similar mythological use of an independence hero as a charismatic

model for police officers in Latin America are: San Martin for most Argentine police forces,

including the Federal Police Force; Simon Bolivar, for the Policia Metropolitana of Caracas

and most Venezuelan police forces; General Artigas, in the Uruguayan National Police; DrFrancia in Paraguay; Sucre in the National Bolivian Police. In some cases, the hero is a mem-

ber of the officers corps, such as the ‘Institutional Martyr and National Hero Captain Alipio

Ponce’ in the National Police of Peru, and Lieutenant Merino in the Chilean Carabineros.

12. This devotion and semi-sanctification of San Martin was not invented by the local police

officers, who today present it as a tradition. It was developed by the Argentine military since

the 1930s (Zanatta, 1996), where it performs an analogous function. This worldview was

brought to the Cordoba police by the military men who occupied the head of the police

department in 1952 (Jaime, 2002: 8), during the democratic regime of Peron, through the

successive military occupations, through military chaplains and ordinary priests who had

assisted the police officers, and is reinforced by the education that cadets receive in Catholicand/or military high schools.

13. For a complete analysis of the differential and differentiating effects produced by the work-

ings of the system of educative institutions and its contribution to the production of a nobility,

see Bourdieu (1996), especially, part II ‘The Ordination.’

14. The curriculum in the officers’ school is organized into three areas, professional-technical,

sociocultural, and police ethics and skills. Technical includes: penal law, procedural law,

administrative law, constitutional law, and the new area of security; sociocultural formation

encompasses psycho-sociology and history of the institution. Police skills entail physical edu-

cation, self-defense, emergency aids, and use of weapons. Within the school for subordinate

officers and policemen, the areas are roughly the same but the time of study is shorter. In the professional area, legal information and introduction to security are covered. The sociocul-

tural element comprises introduction to psychology, introduction to sociology, history of the

institution, and introduction to police ethics. Finally, regarding skills, this area comprises

physical training, self-defense, and use of weapons. The main difference is that in the officers’

school the courses are longer, and they also have training in leadership.

15. For a detailed and extremely rich ethnographic description of the training of NCOs in an

Argentinean police academy see Sirimarco (2009), where she describes how the instruction

of the lower echelons is focused on learning obedience through being exposed to continuous

punishment.

16. From the 22 officers interviewed 11 are sons of police personnel (four of officers and seven ofsubordinates), three are offspring of army NCOs, and the remaining eight are as follows: two

were the sons of small land owners, two of farm worker overseers, two were sons of civilian

employees of the army, one the son of an independent truck driver, and one the son of a small

merchant. Among the subordinates interviewed their fathers’ backgrounds are as follows: six

are from families of industrial workers, six from diverse occupational manual occupations

(masons, plumbers, etc.), and nine were farmhands.

17. Regarding the capital of bodily dispositions possessed by the 22 officers, 12 came from a

highly disciplined milieu (five had been in the army and left the service for family, health,

or economic reasons, two had attended military academies, one came from a theological

seminary, four were interns in religious schools), while those who attended schools with lessdiscipline had relatives in the police force.

18. One should not understand that the imposition of an officer’s view is the result of a clear-cut

decision of a rational actor that deploys this ideology with the clear aim of dominating his

subordinates. This is more of an almost automatic generalization of the officers’ relation to the








institution; a quite sincere will and even passion to completely invest and give all they have,

including their lives, to the institution, since it is from the institution that they extract their

power, resources, and prestige, their social being. Moreover, one can argue that such enchant-

ment with the institution derives from the artificially produced ‘match’ between acquired

dispositions and objective regulations.19. Here I focus on the gratifications enjoyed by subordinates by participating in the symbolic

universe. The ‘inherent gratifications’ of police work go beyond the symbolic rewards I

describe. They also include pragmatic ones, related to the pride in a job well done, the distinc-

tion of being a specialist within the force, the joy of capturing criminals, the sensualities of

having physical supremacy in interactions, or embodying a legitimate masculinity. All these

dimensions cannot explain why subordinates do still feel superior to civilians on moral terms,

indeed on moral standards also espoused by the officers.

20. Here I should also say that I treated the members of each group, officers and subordinates, in

a general and common manner. The particular individuals of each group relate to the system

of beliefs presented in a variety of manners. The analysis of such variation, which shouldtake into account the various trajectories of the individuals involved, corresponds to another

study.

References

Abrahamson B (1972) Professional socialization: Theory, ethics, corporateness. Military

Professionalization and Political Power . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 54–64.

Auyero J (2007) La Zona Gris. Violencia colectiva y política partidaria en la Argentina contem-

poránea. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Barreneche O (2009) La reorganización de las policias en Buenos Aires y Córdoba. 1936–1940.

In: Moreyra B and Mayor S (eds) Pensar y construir los grupos sociales: Córdoba y Buenos

Aires, siglos XVI–XX . Córdoba: Centro Estudios Históricos.

Bordua D and Reiss A (1966) Command, control and charisma: Reflections on police bureaucracy.

American Journal of Sociology 72(1): 68–76.

Bourdieu P (1990) The Logic of Practice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu P (1991 [1973]) On symbolic power. Language and Symbolic Power . Cambridge, MA:

Polity Press, pp. 163–170.

Bourdieu P (1996) The State Nobility: Elites School in the Field of Power , trans. L. Clough

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu P (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu P (2005) The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge: Polity.Bourdieu P and Wacquant LJD (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: Chicago

University Press.

Brinks D (2008) The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America: Inequality and the

Rule of Law. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Candina A (2005) Carabineros de Chile: Una mirada histórica a la identidad institucional. In:

Bailey J and Dammert L (eds) Seguridad y reforma policial en las Américas. Experiencias y

desafíos. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Davis A (1948) Bureaucratic patterns in the Navy Officer’s Corp. Social Forces 27: 143–153.

Eaton K (2008) Paradoxes of police reform: Federalism, parties and civil society in Argentina’s

public security crisis. Latin American Research Review 43(3): 5–32.Eilbaum L (2004) La policía ‘al servicio de la comunidad’: Tradición policial y vientos de cambio.

In: Tiscornia S (ed.) Burocracias y violencia. Estudios de antropologia juridica. Buenos Aires:

Antropofagia.








Hathazy 765

Emirbayer M and Johnson V (2008) Bourdieu and organizational analysis. Theory and Society

37(1): 1–44.

Fine GA (1984) Negotiated orders and organizational cultures. American Review of Sociology 10:

239–262.

Freeman F (1948) The army as a social structure. Social Forces 28: 78–83.Fruhling H (2009) Dos décadas de reforma policial en América Latina: Factores que inciden en su

éxito o fracaso. Violencia y policía en América Latina. Quito: FLACSO.

Garriga Zucal J (2010) Se lo merecen: Definiciones morales del uso de la fuerza entre los

miembros de la policía bonaerense. Cuadernos de Antropología Social 32: 75–94.

Goffman E (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates.

New York: Anchor Books.

Gonzalez Figoli H (1998) Principios de mando policial . Córdoba: Policía de la Provincia de

Córdoba.

Hallet T (2003) Symbolic power and organizational culture. Sociological Theory 21: 128–149.

Hallet T (2007) Between deference and distinction: Interaction ritual through symbolic power inan educational institution. Social Psychology Quarterly 70: 148–171.

Hallet T and Ventresca M (2006) Inhabited institutions: Social interactions and organizational

forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society 35: 213–236.

Hathazy P (2006) Los cuerpos del orden: Técnicas corporales y trabajo policial antidisturbios. In:

Papalini V (ed.) Cuerpo y comunicación. Al Margen: La Plata.

Hinton MS (2006) The State on the Streets: Police and Politics in Argentina and Brazil . Boulder,

CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Jaime R (2002) Padre Nuestro que estabas en el Bronce. Córdoba: AR&A, Inc.

Jaime R (2005) 432 Aniversario de la Policia de Cordoba. 1573–2005. Córdoba: Alfa.

Lamont M (2000) The Dignity of Working Men. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Lande BJ (2005) Drive on: How soldiers embody ethical dispositions. MA Thesis, Department of

Sociology, University of California Berkeley.

Merton RK (1952 [1940]) Bureaucratic structure and personality. In: Merton R, Gray A, Hockey

B and Selvin H (eds) Reader in Bureaucracy. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Policía de Córdoba (1989) Memoria anual . Córdoba: Policía de la Provincia de Córdoba.

Policía de Córdoba, General Personnel Directorate (2002) Internal Disciplinary Regulations.

Córdoba: Policía de la Provincia de Córdoba.

Policía de Córdoba, Training Directorate (2005) La policia hoy. Córdoba: Policía de la Provincia

de Córdoba.

Reiner R (1991) Police culture. The Politics of the Police. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–106.

Robin R (1973) Approches des champs sémantiques: Les experiences du Centre de lexicologie

politique de Saint-Claude. Historie et Linguistique. Paris: Armand Colin, pp. 94–134.

Rose A (1946) The social structure of army. American Journal of Sociology 51: 361–364.

Sa L (2002) Os Filhos do estado: auto-imagen e disciplina na formação dos oficiais da Polícia

Militar de Ceará. Rio de Janeiro: Relumé Dumará.

Sa L (2011) A desincorporação e a crise da crença do oficialato: ocaso da Academia de Polícia

Militar do Ceará. In: XXVIII Latin American Sociological Association Meeting , Recife, 6–11

August.

Semiraz D (1999) Reingenieria policial en Argentina. Córdoba: Eudecor.Sirimarco M (2009) De civil a policía. Una etnografía del proceso de incorporación a la institución

policial . Buenos Aires: Teseo.

Skolnick J (1966) Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society. New York: John

Wiley and Sons, Inc.









Sozzo M (2005) Policia, violencia y democracia. Santa Fe: Universidad Nacional del Litoral.

Swidler A (1986) Culture as symbols and culture in action. American Sociological Review 51(3):

273–286.

Uildriks N et al. (2009) Policing Insecurity: Police Reform, Security and Human Rights in Latin

America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Ungar M (2002) Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America. Boulder, CO:

Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Ungar M (2009) Police reform in Argentina: Public security versus human rights. In: Uildriks N

et al. Policing Insecurity: Police Reform, Security and Human Rights in Latin America.

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Weber M (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Weber M (1992) Economy and Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Zanatta L (1996) Del estado liberal a la nacion catolica. Iglesia y ejercito en los orígenes del

Peronismo. Quilmes, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.

Author biography

Paul C Hathazy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California

Berkeley. His main interests are penal bureaucracies, the state, law and experts, deploying qualita-

tive methods, and privileging historical comparative approaches.

Résumé

Cet article analyse le rôle de la culture pour garantir les relations d’autorité au sein d’un appareil

policier militarisé. En ajoutant la structure et le pouvoir à l’approche de l’interactionnisme sym-

bolique vis-à-vis de la culture et des intérêts organisationnels et le positionnement par rapport àla conception structuro-fonctionnaliste relative aux organisations militaires, l’auteur étudie com-

ment, à travers la préservation et l’imposition d’une conception du monde et d’une moralité

sacralisées (violence symbolique), les officiers de police – la caste dominante dans un système

d’organisation de la police à deux niveaux – parviennent à légitimer de manière charismatique la

distribution interne de l’autorité et son exercice dans les relations entre les officiers de police qui

sont aux commandes et leurs subordonnés, transformant une simple autorité de type bureaucra-

tique en un pouvoir charismatique (pouvoir symbolique). L’auteur s’appuie sur des observations

ethnographiques, des données tirées d’entretiens et une analyse structurelle et sémantique pour

reconstituer le système de croyances en jeu et montrer les pratiques et les mécanismes à travers

lesquels la domination intra-bureaucratique est légitimée de manière charismatique et est rendue performante. Ces processus sont examinés à la fois dans les relations quotidiennes de commande-

ment et dans les cas exceptionnels de mutinerie policière.

Mots-clés: Amérique latine, organisations, police militarisée, relations de pouvoir, violence

symbolique

Resumen

Este artículo analiza el papel de la cultura en el mantenimiento de relaciones de autoridad dentro

de un aparato policial militarizado. Añadiendo la estructura y el poder al enfoque del interaccio-nismo simbólico sobre la cultura y los intereses organizacionales y la posicionalidad a la perspectiva

estructural funcionalista sobre las organizaciones militares, el autor examina cómo los oficiales de

policía –la casta dominante de una organización policial de dos niveles consiguen legitimar

carismáticamente la distribución interna de la autoridad y su ejercicio en las relaciones entre los







Hathazy 767

oficiales al mando y los agentes, convirtiendo a una simple autoridad burocrática en poder

carismático (poder simbólico), a través del mantenimiento y la imposición de una visión del mundo

y moralidad sacralizadas (violencia simbólica). El autor se basa en observaciones etnográficas,

datos de entrevistas y un análisis semántico-estructural para reconstruir el sistema de creencias

en vigor y para describir las prácticas y mecanismos a través de los cuales la dominación intra- burocrática es legitimada carismáticamente y se hace efectiva. Estos procesos son examinados en

las relaciones diarias de mando y en la ocurrencia extraordinaria de un motín policial.

Palabras clave: América Latina, organizaciones, policía militarizada, relaciones de poder, violencia

simbólica

Documents

HATHAZY, Paul C. Enchanting Bureaucracy. Symbolica Violence and the (Re)Production of Charismatic Authority in a Police Apparatus