Enchanting Bureaucracy: Symbolic violence and the (re)production of charismatic authority in a police apparatus

HATHAZY, PAUL

INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGY

Sage

Año: 2012 vol. 27 p. 745 - 767

0268-5809

This 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.