In the dynamic environment of the 21st century, organizational learning is essential for a successful police work. To keep up with environmental and social changes, learning has to be implemented deep into the organizational culture. Organizations that prioritize and cultivate learning are classified as learning organizations. Although a lot of empirical studies deal with this topic, the focus is on private companies. Quantitative research regarding organizational learning in public administrations in general and the police in particular. This is surprising, since police forces are ideally suited to represent learning organizations, considering that officers of the police are in constant exchange with the environment and facing permanent changes. Therefore, there is a need to close this gap and to gain more insights into the learning culture of the modern police. Also, there should be a better understanding of how internal factors, inherent in every member of the police, influence learning organizations. Against this background there is a strong need to bring together conceptual insights, and empirical data to better understand learning organizations in a public sector and police context.

In our quantitative empirical study, we investigate whether the German police represents a learning organization according to the model of Watkins and Marsick (1993). In this model, the learning culture is presented in seven dimensions, each of which describes an important part of learning and its conditions within an organization. Additionally, the dimensions can be regrouped, to describe the individual, team, and organizational level of learning in the organization.

In addition, we examine the impact of three internal factors (organizational commitment, organizational support, and communication quality) on the different dimensions of the learning organization. To measure these constructs, we use the dimensions of learning organization questionnaire by Watkins and Marsick (2003), the organizational commitment questionnaire by Porter and Smith (1970), the organizational support questionnaire by Eisenberger et al. (1986), and the vertical communication quality, perceived by the employee, questionnaire by Mohr et al. (2004). Our data was gained from 111 police officers selected to fill leadership positions in the German police forces. We investigated how the internal factors impact the learning organization using regression analyses.

Our preliminary findings suggest that the German police can be characterized as a learning organization. Furthermore, we find positive relationships between the measured internal factors and most dimensions of the learning organization. The internal factors have a positive impact on the learning organization, each in different ways and on different levels. While perceived organizational support has an important influence on the personal and team level of the learning organization, organizational commitment influences the aspects where the police connect with its environment. Leadership communication is important regarding distribution of resources towards learning. Our results offer valuable insights into the learning culture within the police as one of the largest public organizations and indicate approaches to improve it.

The police organisation is a collective system and a human community pursuing shared goals inside and outside an organisation. In this paper, a cultural change in police organisations is studied through organisational culture, structural change and organisational behaviour.

As an example of cultural change, the Finnish police organisation is studied by applying the autoethnographic research method. Integrating ethnography and autobiography, the autoethnography research method is reflexive and deploys the researcher within the study, and the researcher and participant are one and the same person. Findings of this study emphasise the importance of cognitive redefinition, learning a new point of view in the organisational culture.

The Finnish police organisation is considered a professional and human-centred institution possessing a very strong loyalty to society as a whole. However, the importance of collective organisational memory as an essential resource has not been fully recognized in the recent restructuring of the Finnish police organisation.

In Finland, like in many other countries, the increasingly abstract character of the police can be realized as the unintended and far-reaching consequences of the organisational and cultural changes. In the context of police reforms, it has been noticed that the police have become more at distance, more impersonal and formal, less direct, and more decontextualized, governed by ‘systems’. Therefore, the need to enhance a culture of the collective engagement and redefine a performance culture is a critical question in police organisations.

The collective spirit and a culture of engagement lay a sustainable foundation for organisational culture in the police. The importance of culture is to understand how organisations function.

Public sector training and education are recurrent issues in the public administration literature. More recently, this observation holds particularly true for (higher echelons of) the police. While some protagonists maintain that expertise in policing rests primarily on tacit knowledge, on-the-job training at street-level and vocational qualifications, there is also increasing recognition of the merit of more abstract intellectual education, which often comes in the guise of formal academic degree courses. Against this background, the proposed paper focuses on career paths, programs and institutions that prepare staff members for senior management positions in police authorities and seeks to analyze different meanings and consequences of a trend towards ‘academization’ in police training and education.

In doing so, the paper, first, develops a conceptual background for the analysis of police training regulations, programs, and institutions that are meant as stepping stones for future senior police officers. In a nutshell, the conceptual tools differentiate between the institutional status of training organizations (such as police academies, professional schools or universities), the content of relevant curricula (balance of academic disciplines, vocational vs. academic training) and the predominant teaching philosophies (student-centered learning vs. formal-passive instruction, on- vs. off-the-job training).

Against this background, we exemplify the analytical distinctions of training programs and institutions with reference to emerging patterns of senior police management qualifications in the case of Germany while making comparisons to other established European traditions of public sector and, in particular, police training and education.