Protests and Community Control

Governance and Virtue: The Case of Public Order Policing

Kevin Morrell • Stephen Brammer

Received: 1 February 2014 / Accepted: 16 December 2014 / Published online: 28 December 2014

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract For Aristotle, virtues are neither transcendent

nor universal, but socially interdependent; they need to be

understood chronologically and with respect to character

and context. This paper uses an Aristotelian lens to analyse

an especially interesting context in which to study virtue—

the state’s response when social order breaks down. During

such periods, questions relating to right action by citizens,

the state, and state agents are pronounced. To study this,

we analyse data from interviews, observation, and docu-

ments gathered during a 3-year study of riot policing in the

U.K. In doing so, we contribute by joining a number of

other conversations within JBE, suggesting detailed

empirical examination of this context is useful in opening

up considerations relevant to ‘virtue’ elsewhere. This

extreme context helps us raise interesting and empirically

informed questions that can encourage future theoretical

and empirical contributions to virtue in business ethics.

One such question is on the role of habituation in virtue,

which is not just the inculcation of a reflex or automaticity,

but can also refer to a trained and developed tendency to

behave in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right

time. Whilst we stop short of a simplistic alignment of

habituation and virtue, we show ways in which it can

inform understanding of both courage and phronēsis.

Keywords Aristotle � Governance � Habit � Police � Riot � Virtue

Introduction

In some ways remarkably simple, the central question in

virtue ethics is to ask how we can live a good life. In other

words, what does it mean as a citizen, a parent, a friend, or

simply a human being, to act in the right way, over time.

Virtue ethics is the oldest, most well-established approach

to questions of appropriate action that we have, yet it

remains of contemporary, indeed growing, interest within

business ethics (Alves and Moreira 2013; Beadle 2013a, b;

Fontrodona et al. 2013; Koehn 2013; Morrell 2012; Rob-

inson et al. 2013). Partly because there are many varieties

of virtue ethics (Slote 1997), it is of wider relevance than

other normative ethical systems in the sense it can be

considered as compatible with both deontological and

consequentialist approaches (Dierksmeier 2013; Morrell

2004), and an ethics of care (Slote 1997), in a way that is

unlike the basic tension between Utilitarianism and Kant

(Crisp and Slote 1997).

There are, nonetheless, a number of problems with

working with virtue. There is no transcendental appeal or

principle that virtue ethicists can invoke to evaluate

appropriate action in any given setting (MacIntyre 1984a,

b, MacIntyre 1988). This is in contrast to Kant’s categor-

ical imperative, Mill and Bentham’s recourse to a utility

principle, or more contemporary theorists’ appeal to ulti-

mate sanction in terms of privileging liberty (Nozick 1974),

or equity (Rawls 1971). Virtue ethicists face the problem

that no one virtue is super-ordinate, and nor is there a

possibility of ranking virtues, or rendering them com-

mensurate because in considering what constitutes virtuous

K. Morrell (&) Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry,

UK

e-mail: kevin.morrell@wbs.ac.uk

S. Brammer

Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham,

Birmingham, UK

e-mail: s.brammer@bham.ac.uk

123

J Bus Ethics (2016) 136:385–398

DOI 10.1007/s10551-014-2522-z

action, context, and the development of character (Solo-

mon 1992) are all important. Virtue ethics is focused, ‘not

so much on how to resolve problems as it is on how to live

one’s life’ (McCracken et al. 1998, p. 26), a central idea

being flourishing (Alves and Moreira 2013; Morrell 2012;

Sison and Fontrodona 2012). Even flourishing is context

sensitive though since it depends on a relation between the

citizen and the state: Spartans can flourish, as can Athe-

nians but they do it in different ways and in different

contexts. Translating this to a business context, one could

argue there can be personal flourishing within a corpora-

tion, but if we view the corporation as polity, then there

have to be interconnections between the individual and

collective (Solomon 1992, 2004), and similar contextual

relationships or dependencies, ‘demands of a civic repub-

lican or communitarian kind of citizenship on the stake-

holders of the corporate polity are altogether different’

(Sison and Fontrodona 2012, p. 617). Although some

(including Aristotle) have suggested there are at times

pivotal or crowning virtues (his example is usually trans-

lated as magnanimity), the meaning and expression of these

will vary over time and with respect to context.

While research on virtue ethics has brought increasing

sophistication in discussing the theoretical aspects of vir-

tue, it has been recognized that there is a need for more

empirical research in business ethics generally and virtue

ethics in particular (Wright and Goodstein 2007). Some

recent contributions have sought to contribute to under-

standing based on primary empirical research in virtue

ethics (Moore 2012; Payne et al. 2011). Notable among

these is Beadle’s recent (2013a) analysis (which we discuss

in more detail below) of how British and Irish circus

directors accounted for their working lives. This highlights

the role of the virtue of constancy in supporting a sense of

‘‘calling’’ among circus directors. Notwithstanding the

progress that has been made in recent years, there remains

scope to contribute through empirical work, especially

research using data suited to detailed analysis of micro-

practices within institutional settings, or drawing on lon-

gitudinal or historical data sources. This may prove illu-

minating because virtues are tied to contexts, and because

virtue theorists are partly interested in the development

over time, of character. Here, we suggest empirical

research can play a role in helping to understand important

features of a context and associated practices. In turn, this

can develop and strengthen the link between substantive

and important philosophical questions concerning virtue

and questions of a more applied nature.

Across different fields, theoretical development often

comes about through examination of empirical settings. To

contribute in this way here, we first outline our perspective

on virtue, based on Aristotle, and briefly review recent work

in the Journal of Business Ethics (JBE). This indicates there

is potential to contribute to an ongoing conversation within

the journal that has been predominantly (though not exclu-

sively) theoretical, with more empirically rooted analysis.

Next, we introduce the context for our study, which we

describe as an ‘outlier’ case: the governance and policing of

large-scale public disorder or rioting. We argue for the rel-

evance of this setting for consideration of virtue and discuss

multi-source, multi-method data collected over a 3-year

period of research studying riot police. 1

In presenting and

discussing preliminary findings from this project, we iden-

tify benefits to using data of the kind we collected and

analysed using different methods: narrative interviews,

observation, and documentary analysis.

Virtue in Business Ethics: An Aristotelian Account

and Focused Literature Review

For Aristotle, questions of virtue in any sphere of practice

are secondary to questions of what constitutes the good for

human beings (Aristotle 1094a7–8). Still, rather than have

recourse to some transcendent principle, questions relating

to virtue are always tied in some way to certain kinds of

contingencies. What virtue means depends partly on the

characteristics of a particular context and partly on how we

understand the developing moral character of the respon-

sible agent. From a virtue perspective, if we are to ask what

is the right thing to do in a given situation, we need to

account, somehow, for the contingencies of that particular

situation and the wider socio-historical conditions for

action in that setting, as well as consider the life course and

character of the agent taking that action. There are, more

succinctly, both social (Koehn 2013) and temporal com-

plexities (Beadle 2013a, b). In terms of social complexities,

we need to be sensitive to a place, institution(s), a set of

practices and traditions, and what we might refer to in

shorthand as ‘culture’. In terms of temporal complexities,

when we question whether someone did the right thing, we

need to consider not just the action, but the overall life

course of the agent (Drake and Schlachter 2008).

These complexities make it a challenge to speak sensi-

bly in the abstract of virtuous action, even though populist

writers do and even though we would not want to abandon

a commonsense understanding of what is virtuous (or

vicious). These characteristics of virtue ethics are well

1 We use ’riot police’ for concision and to aid accessibility, in fact

’public order police’ or, ’police carrying out a public order role’ could

be more accurate alternatives. Within the U.K. unlike in many

European countries, police are generalists and public order is the

responsibility of most officers who share a common base of training.

Public order itself is very varied and complex encompassing many

different kinds of individual and collective phenomena and riots are

comparatively rare.

386 K. Morrell, S. Brammer

123

understood, and the issue of context-specificity has been a

problem which scholars have engaged with for centuries:

the virtuous Spartan was different from the virtuous

Athenian. Though it may be unsatisfactory that we have no

transcendent principle or ultimate authority to resolve

questions in virtue ethics, and that we must always attend

to context, this problem is not fatal to any project to work

with virtue. This does not mean that context is the only

thing that determines or defines virtue because (as we note

above) Aristotle makes such questions secondary to con-

sideration of the good. Nor does it make attempts to work

out what virtue means in a given setting futile (Beadle

2013a, b), or mean we cannot seek for principles that work

alongside a virtue framework (Melé 2009).

Even so, it is worth considering that unless we somehow

link discussion of virtues to a context we have to discuss

them at a level of generalization and abstraction. In itself,

in any one paper, this can be worthwhile, for instance at a

meta-theoretical level (Arjoon 2000). However, if we

develop a tendency to talk about virtues (like integrity) as

though they are somehow free-standing—something an

individual ‘has’—or that make up a certain ‘kind’ of per-

son, or as if they are ‘traits’ (like introversion) this

becomes problematic, and is an error in logic. Virtues may

be part of what makes up character, and be embodied, but

they are not traits in the way we understand personality

traits to be. Personality traits, in terms of the dominant

contemporary models in work psychology, are understood

as component parts of personality, and as predictors of a

tendency to behave. They are also embodied. Although

there are commonalities, these things are all different from

virtues which are learned, that continue to be developed in

adulthood, and defined interdependently with reference to a

context and set of social norms. Virtues are also an

expression of will (Foot 1978) (traits such as openness and

neuroticism are not understood to be this). A virtue per-

spective, in terms of developing a basic contrast with traits,

is less focused on personality and more interested in rela-

tional identity.

Speaking of the kinds of virtues we may want people to

have in a given setting does have the merit of making

virtues more easily operationalizable and quantifiable, and

amenable to being measured and tested in the same way

traits (such as openness or neuroticism) and states (such as

organizational commitment or job satisfaction) are within

the tradition of applied psychology research (e.g. Chun

2005). Furthermore, it also can support the building of

abstract, generalizable models. However, there is a poten-

tial disconnect between how virtue is operationalized in

literature that advances models for testing that are highly

generalized and the more nuanced considerations as to the

theoretical underpinnings of virtue in Aristotle’s work

(Hartman 2011; Sison 2003). This is because, ultimately,

virtue theorists are interested in questions of character

(Sison 2008), and of the morality of agents in complex

social worlds, rather than discrete acts, ‘in focusing on

good and bad agents, virtue theorists… deemphasise dis- crete acts in favour of long-term, characteristic patterns of

behaviour’ (Louden 1997, p. 205).

In keeping with well-established traditions in moral phi-

losophy, a great many discussions of virtue in business

ethics are theoretical. 2

Theoretical development often comes

2 We examined the 30 most cited papers in the Journal of Business

Ethics (JBE), whose authors referred to ’virtue(s)’ in the title of their

paper; as well as similarly titled full papers (in print) in JBE in 2013.

Thirty were chosen as likely to yield a representatively large body of

work, and a size large enough to allow us to read each paper carefully

and independently, as well as to allow enough comparisons to test

significance of classification outcomes. We also included six 2013

papers separately, to try to account for the fact that recently published

papers will not have garnered citations yet, and because there was a

special issue in JBE in this time given over to the practice of virtue

(Fontrodona et al. 2013). Inter-rater reliability on coding for ’primary

data,’ ’secondary data,’ ’theoretical paper,’ ’cross-sectional,’ and

’longitudinal’ was all (p \ 0.001) using a binomial distribution. Of 36 highly cited papers on ’virtue’ in the Journal of Business Ethics, only

eight use primary empirical data (Batson et al. 2006; Beadle 2013a, b;

Chun 2005; Lau and Wong 2009; Murphy 1999; Robinson et al. 2013;

Shanahan and Hyman 2003). Most discussions of virtue are concep-

tual (Alves and Moreira 2013; Arjoon 2000; Chismar 2001;

Dierksmeier 2013; Gowri 2007; Hartman 2011; McAdams and

Koppensteiner 1992; Melé 2009; Nicholls 2010; Parkan 2008; Sethi

1994; Whetstone 2001). Two papers analyse secondary data using

recognizedly systematic methods: econometrics (Cai et al. 2011) and

content analysis (Chun 2005), most either review secondary data or

use it more illustratively (Crossan et al. 2013; Hadreas 2002; Jennings

1991; Koehn 2013; Limbs and Fort 2000; McCracken et al. 1998;

Marchese et al. 2002; Parkan 2008). Several papers focus on kinds of

case (e.g. Bertland 2009; Cavanagh and Bandsuch 2002; Crockett

2005; Hartman and Beck-Dudley 1999; Romar 2002), at times these

are quite detailed and context-specific (Drake and Schlachter 2008),

but cases are also often explicitly introduced as anecdotal, ’let’s

consider a true story’ (Crockett 2005, p. 199), ’look at what happened

to a friend of mine’ (Kurzynski 1998, p. 76), or for teaching purposes

(Mintz 1996). When data are collected, it is cross section (Batson

et al. 2006; Beadle 2013a, b; Chun 2005; Lau and Wong 2009;

Murphy 1999; Robinson et al. 2013; Shanahan and Hyman 2003); an

exception—with secondary data—being Cai et al. (2011). At the same

time, virtue scholars are likely to agree that to apply a virtue lens to a

specific setting requires an account of context, tradition, history, and

social forces. It is more than a determination of what is appropriate

action, or the solution to a quandary (McCracken et al. 1998), it

requires attention to particular complexities that influence our

considerations of whether something is likely to enhance the

development of virtuous character. These elements—attention to

history, tradition, situated complexity, and development of charac-

ter—are necessary to arrive at a contextualized analysis. The brief

review above focuses on JBE. This can be justified in the sense JBE

publishes more work on virtue than any other business journal, and

more empirical papers in business ethics, so such an analysis is more

likely to reflect the practices of a sizable community of researchers.

Still, it does not take account of discussions (including empirical

work) on virtue in cognate journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly

(Beadle and Knight 2012), Public Administration (Morrell and

Harrington-Buhay 2012), and Organisation Studies (Nielsen 2006).

Governance and Virtue 387

123

about through examination of empirical settings though. To

contribute in this way here, we introduce the context for our

study, an ‘outlier’ case: the policing of large-scale public

disorder or rioting; and the training of police officers. We

argue for the relevance of this setting for consideration of

virtue and discuss multi-source, multi-method data collected

over a 3-year period of research. In presenting and dis-

cussing preliminary findings, we identify benefits to using

data of the kind we collected and analysed using different

methods: narrative interviews and documentary analysis,

and observation of training. We do not claim a definitive

account of virtue in this setting but believe that police

training and some institutionalized practices can raise

interesting and empirically informed questions. These can

encourage future theoretical and empirical contributions to

understand virtue in business ethics.

Context and Method

In contributing to theory development, sometimes atypical

contexts are helpful because they throw fundamental

questions into relief. Though the bulk of writing in our field

concerns private corporations, ‘outliers’ can help us see

elements that are common to, but less pronounced in, other

settings. Particularly in case study research, the outlier is

sometimes helpful, even exaggeratedly so, because it can

offer more information about a theoretical point of interest

(Thomas 2011). This is analogous to how some experi-

ments can be designed to isolate variables of particular

interest. We draw on such an ‘outlier’ case, policing, and

more particularly the policing of large-scale public disor-

der. The policing of ‘public order’ in the U.K. (our context)

is a very broad category that includes policing of individ-

uals, but (the focus here) it is more typically associated

with large-scale events such as demonstrations, protests,

industrial action, and riots.

Partly because they have unique powers among public

servants, the police are an interesting occupational group to

study from the standpoint of business ethics. The Journal

of Business Ethics itself has always employed a generous

use of ‘business’ to encompass not just for-profit corpora-

tions, but public sector organizations, and also other kinds

of coordinated activity and institutions (Michalos 1982). In

terms of specific areas of activity that are central to the

journal’s interests, the role of the police in governance is

key when we consider the societal effects of ‘systems of

production, consumption [and] labor relations’ (JBE aims

and scope). More generally, JBE has been from its inception

concerned with attempts ‘to improve the human condition.’

Analysing the way policing is conducted with reference to

the administration of the state is also important in this regard.

Though they can be compared to other public servants,

across most developing and developed societies, the prin-

cipal thing separating the police from other occupational

groups is their entitlement to use force against the citizenry

(Dick 2005). These and related aspects, such as the need

for the police to uphold civic liberties, the legal context for

police work, the need for officers to be individually

accountable, and the need for discretion and situated

judgement, make it an informative setting in which to

consider questions relating to virtue. O’Kelly and Dubnick

(2006, p. 402), in writing about North American policing,

identify it as a paradigm case where there is an ongoing

conflict between competing obligations that cannot be

satisfied:

the moral obligation to do no harm to other individ-

uals comes into direct conflict with the obligation to

carry out one’s duty to protect the community—an

obligation that may require the use of injurious force

against another… to carry out one moral obligation, a law enforcement official may have to violate the

other.

More specifically, the actions of officers during public

disorder are particularly informative because it is in such

situations that relations between the citizen and the state

can be dramatically altered. During such periods of crisis,

there can be pivotal changes in the narrative of the

development of the state, or a political administration, and

also in the development of individual people’s life stories.

Most basically, the breakdown of order in society pre-

sents individuals from the police force and the citizenry

with an array of threats, dilemmas, and possibilities for

action that are not present in their everyday life. These are

extreme circumstances, sometimes pivotal for societies or

political administrations and also for individuals involved

or affected. As such, they are often important in the indi-

vidual narrative of someone’s life, as well as part of a

broader narrative of social history or the legacy of an

administration. During mass disorder, sections of the citi-

zenry break deliberately with the rule of law. Sometimes,

even though these are breaches of the law, mass uprisings

Footnote 2 continued

Also, we do not claim to have comprehensively evaluated uses of

virtue ethics in JBE since virtue scholars do not necessarily incor-

porate virtue in the title (e.g. Koehn 1998; Morrell and Clark 2010;

Sison and Fontrodona 2013). Even so, this step is enough to sub-

stantiate a general point that in talking about ’virtue’; at the level of

our discipline, there may be more scope for theoretical development

based on detailed empirical analysis of what virtue means in a par-

ticular setting. Our analysis suggests only 8 of these 36 papers use

primary data, only 2 analyse secondary data using recognizedly sys-

tematic methods. Only one has a longitudinal design, and this is at a

very high level of abstraction. It seems that the methods and data we

use are not very often socially and temporally complex in the way

virtues are.

388 K. Morrell, S. Brammer

123

are judged to be virtuous: for instance in railing against an

oppressive tyranny, or resisting inequity, or bringing about

the fall of an unjust government. Citizens may then be

confronted with the dilemma of whether to participate in

disorder or to continue to behave lawfully. Mass public

disorder also prompts stark dilemmas for individual police

officers who, as well as preserving order and public safety,

should also protect civil liberties such as the right to pro-

test. They may be immediately confronted with the con-

sequences of their role in perpetuating the actions of the

state, perhaps being well paid while policing an impover-

ished or disenfranchised constituency. They may have to

make split-second decisions that have dramatic conse-

quences for others as they result in arrest or the use of

force. They may exercise courage, or they may succumb to

the corrupting influence of being comparatively powerful.

These dilemmas extend from officers at the front line, all

the way up the command chain (Morrell and Currie, in

press).

The discussion and analysis below draws on data as part of

a longitudinal project looking at public order policing in the

UK. From July 2010 to September 2013, research combined

interviews with police officers and retired officers and

observation of public order training. We recognize the lim-

itations of not interviewing other stakeholders such as

members of the public, community leaders and so on.

However, we make reference to some secondary data on the

UK Autumn 2011 riots (transcripts of debate in parliament,

written and oral evidence to a parliamentary Select Com-

mittee and reports in Britain 2012a, b, c; The Guardian 2012;

Lewis et al. 2013; Metropolitan Police Service 2012; Min-

istry of Justice 2011). Principal data sources are shown in

Table 1 (below for reviewer’s convenience).

We began in June 2010 interviewing several long-serving

or retired officers with extensive experience of public order

[primary research was carried out by Kevin, for parsimony

the paper uses ‘we’ or ‘us’]. Access to other interviewees and

observation of training was negotiated through referral or

‘snowball’ sampling, appropriate where populations are hard

to reach (Atkinson and Flint 2001), and deemed the most

suitable method as public order is a sensitive topic. Not all

interviews were taped, but the combined length of those that

were was c70,000 words. Standard ethical considerations

(relating to anonymity, confidentiality, right to withdraw at

any stage, right to retract, speak off record, and so on) were

made explicit and observed.

The approach to interviewing was narratological, a way

of understanding the world through stories and story-telling

(narrativization), drawing on different methods for ana-

lysing stories, and informed by literary analysis (Bal 1985;

Czarniawska 2010). 3

Essentially, we collected stories

relating to large-scale public disorder over the course of

interviewees’ careers, probing in relation to critical inci-

dents (Chell 2004): a common anchoring question in

interviews was ‘what was your most memorable public

order incident?’ We took a broadly realist stance in ana-

lysing stories, compatible with an Aristotelian perspective,

and that more sensibly supported triangulation with

observation and secondary data. The value of a narrato-

logical approach is that even with cross-sectional research,

such as a one-off interview, it allows insight into elements

of chronology, sequence, and learning. For instance, Bea-

dle’s (2013a) interview method was cross-sectional, but

allowed insight into the passage of time, used (as here) to

give insight into explicitly temporal aspects to personal

narratives (learning and memories of pivotal incidents).

During 2011, the context of the empirical research

unexpectedly changed as, in August, the UK experienced

Table 1 Overview of data sources

Data sources Type of

data

Data sources Analytical approach Main role in analysis

Interviews, taped Primary Transcripts Realist narrative/

biographical analysis

Raw data eliciting stories

Interviews, un-taped Primary Notes (during or shortly after)

Phone calls, Skype calls, emails Primary Notes (during) Content analysis Sense-checking (jargon,

procedures, legislation)

Observation: Training Scenarios Primary Substantive field notes First person, realist

ethnography

Raw data critical incident

Observation: Training Videos Secondary Video footage, authorized

YouTube clips

Realist video ethnography Triangulation with primary

observation

Observational Data: (Strikes and

Riots)

Secondary Media and other Footage Realist video ethnography Triangulation with primary

observation

Documents: Select Committee

Evidence, Reports

Secondary Transcripts, avail. on http://

www.parliament.org.uk

Realist narrative/content

analysis

Analyse accounts of other

stakeholders

3 Here we use ’story’ and ’narrative’ interchangeably, which is not to

deny that it can be helpful to differentiate between the two (see

Gabriel and Griffiths 2004).

Governance and Virtue 389

123

four days of mass disorder on an unprecedented scale (over

the next year more than 3,000 people were taken to court

for offences relating to the disorder; Ministry of Justice

2012). This, and related data sources, became the empirical

focus for primary research, although in the immediate

aftermath of the riots we prioritised analysing contempo-

raneous secondary data. This was because such data were

detailed and plentiful but also because we found it difficult

to gain access to officers at a time that was politically

sensitive. Later, through 2012 and 2013 additional inter-

views were carried out with a wider group of officers.

Here we introduce preliminary findings—concentrating

on interviews with officers who had a particular specialism

in public order and who all had a minimum of 10-year

service—with one exception as described below.

To provide analytical focus, in discussing findings, we

concentrate on ethical problems (described above), which

come about because mass disorder is an extreme situation,

presenting the citizenry and the police with an atypical

state of affairs, and one that can be pivotal for societies

and the individuals involved. In doing so, we consider

virtue in relation to the actions of police during public

disorder. A number of provisos should be made explicit

prior to introducing and discussing our findings.

First, we are not equating appropriate action with lawful

action. Though there is overlap—at times we believe ille-

gal action can be virtuous, and at times to behave lawfully

may not be virtuous—this is the dilemma at the heart of

Sophocles’ play Antigone, itself instruction in virtue

(Nussbaum 2001). Social progress is often marked by

protests and demonstrations that are unlawful, but which

lead to changed legislation. This is particularly worth

emphasizing perhaps since Aristotle was conservative with

regard to the institutions of the state. The importance of

freedom and equality for individual citizens is either

underplayed or even absent in Aristotle’s vision of the

polis—governed by a minority, male elite with, ‘a single

moral perspective and… enough wealth to live at leisure and hold political office without pay’ (Kraut 2002, p. vii).

A virtue of the polis for Aristotle, perhaps unsurprisingly

so given the ravages of war in ancient Greece, is it provides

stability. Consequently, in terms of the relationship

between the state and its citizenry, Aristotle seems to have

regarded a weak or vicious government as preferable to no

government at all and is more sensibly understood as a

traditionalist than as someone who will support mass dis-

order (although see Goldstein 2001).

Second, we are not suggesting the police always act

virtuously during disorder, whether they act lawfully or

not. Nor are we suggesting that the police we interviewed

always acted virtuously or are exceptionally virtuous either

as police officers or citizens. Neither are we suggesting the

police are a virtuous force within society, or that the

appropriate default position in considering mass disorder is

to see those attempting to restore order as on the side of the

good. Instead, we propose this as an interesting context in

which to examine virtue because actions during such

events illustrate the importance of attention to contextual

contingencies and also highlight the development of char-

acter over time. Below, in data from our interviews (sup-

plemented with additional data sources), we present our

findings whilst discussing four such features of this setting

which we that think illustrate the potential value of an

empirical approach in informing theoretical considerations

relevant to ‘virtue.’

Discussion

Giving an Account of Actions

As the extracts below show, accounts of actions by officers

are rehearsed, documented, indexical, and institutionalized.

The reason this is significant in the context of virtue is it

illustrates the two aspects of contingency and development

of character.

…you think it through in your own mind… you think it through as you write in your pocketbook or a

statement, ‘I did that because I was thinking that’… and all the time you justify, ‘I did that because of

that.’ And there are [pause] I’ve stood in the witness

box, I’ve stood in front of the gaffer and said, ‘I did

this because of this, this and this.’ And you can feel

under pressure thinking at times. ‘Did I make the

right decision or didn’t I?’ Keith, Retired Officer,

Public Order Specialist.

…the more you write down about your thinking as well the better. I mean we constantly face, you know,

legal challenge whether it’s through judicial reviews

or other direct litigation, you know, through… civil courts… And we try and write, start writing as much down as possible… what am I thinking about? What am I concerned about… that can really help you afterwards… helping understand the things that were going through your mind at the time ‘Ant’, Public

Order Commander.

Keith is discussing the way he would be called to account

for use of force in situations such as mass disorder (the

broader context for this interview was a protracted, at times

very violent, industrial dispute). ‘Ant’ was describing

dilemmatic choices in policing disorderly crowds, where

some people are caught up in disorder.

In both settings there is a need for action to be described

in great detail because of the potential seriousness of the

consequences of using force, or curtailing liberties. Whether

390 K. Morrell, S. Brammer

123

activity is deemed lawful, necessary and appropriate

depends not just on legislation but on an assessment of the

contingencies of each situation. Keith’s personal—what

could be called ‘storying’ (Sims 2003) of events: ‘you think

it through,’ ‘I was thinking,’ and ‘you write in your pock-

etbook’—is a form of rehearsal for a public story that is

instantiated and made concrete through particular actions,

and kinds of professional being, ‘I’ve stood in the witness

box, I’ve stood in front of the gaffer and said’ (‘gaffer’ is

slang for a superior officer). The influence rehearsal of this

kind that has on the development of character is suggested in

the above extract with Keith’s emphasis on personal iden-

tity, ‘you can feel under pressure thinking at times. ‘Did I

make the right decision or didn’t I.’’ Similarly, Ant’s

learned habit of documenting is not just for external scrutiny

but helps aid recall of decisions in complex environments.

Police officers are also often called on to speak whilst being

recorded, for instance when interviewing suspects.

These extracts show how accounts of work, actions, and

identity are bound together with consideration of the con-

text. We are not saying being called to account automati-

cally results in the cultivation of virtue, but it may be we

can link to the ancient (Socratic) idea that ethical behaviour

involves being able to give an account of one’s actions.

Presumably, we want those who are entitled to exercise

force to be able to account for why they have done so after

the event. Also, we presumably want them to think about

whether they would be able to justify the use of force

before the event. Storying, or repeatedly giving an account,

and a set of institutional practices supporting this may be

the only way to cultivate this skill. Alternatively, it could

be an institutionalized vice if people became practised at

getting their ‘story straight’ rather than recording what

happened truthfully. In an individual, it might accelerate

development of a vicious character.

It is difficult to generalize, partly because we have

chosen an extreme case, but even so, giving an account is

clearly a notable aspect of work in this setting and worth

considering as to whether this could have implications in

other settings. Police officers have to record critical deci-

sions contemporaneously or very shortly afterwards. These

records are specific and indexical in different ways (with

reference to time, place, other parties, and their actions).

The records are handed over shortly after the event, they

belong to the institution not the individual, and they are

potentially scrutinized in an open court. All of these would

contrast with what we might expect to know about a con-

sequential political or business decision, for instance to

introduce a tax, or to close a factory. Often these decisions

would be made by an individual but attributed to a col-

lective (the Cabinet, or a Board), there would be no pub-

licly available minutes of the relevant meeting, and a

rationale (if given) would be prepared by others than those

who took the decision (such as ‘spin doctors’ or a public

relations department).

Remaining Individually Responsible

One assumption we had before interviewing and observing

officers was that, during riot situations, officers would have

little discretion over how to act. A well-known characteristic

of police work is that it is dilemmatic (Brown 1988), but

emergency service organizations are also sometimes

described as having two modes of operation: an operational

or routine mode, and a crisis mode. We anticipated that

during crisis mode there would be much more of a command

and control structure, with front line officers being given

orders to carry out. In interviews, and also observation of riot

training and footage of riots, it was noticeable that individual

officers continued to experience this dilemmatic aspect to

policing. They still had decisions to make, even when con-

fronted with apparently simple and monolithic phenomena

such as a rioting crowd. Consequently, those at the front line

remain individually responsible even in situations where,

from a distance, police presence and response could seem

homogenous and militaristic. This came through in two

explanations for use of force:

the officer has to have in their own mind that honest

held belief that that’s going to be a lawful use of

power, just as much as an officer in line with all his

colleagues with a baton [pause] every baton strike

you do isn’t under some kind of general order, ‘hit

them’, it’s ‘I’m making up my own mind that it is

proportionate and necessary to hit this particular

demonstrator because of the threat they pose’ Arthur,

Public Order Commander

you can be told what to do and where to go, you can

be told to draw your baton and use force but to

actually make the decision to get hands-on with

someone and to strike them is your responsibility and

you are held solely accountable for that and each

strike is in itself a separate use of force Andrew,

Front-line Specialist in Public Order with 2 years

experience as a PC.

Again, in both cases, each officer emphasizes the impor-

tance of being able to account for their decision, for which

they are individually responsible.

It is interesting to consider responsibility in relation to

the citizenry participating in large-scale disorder in

Autumn 2011. Rather than in some way excuse people for

being swept up by a phenomenon, the UK courts took a

harsh approach to sentencing rioters, to provide a deterrent

effect. This mood was reflected in comments by the Prime

Minister and Members of Parliament in a day the UK

House of Commons was recalled to debate the riots:

Governance and Virtue 391

123

the Sentencing Council says that those people found

guilty of violence on our streets should expect to have

a custodial sentence David Cameron, Prime Minister.

Can he [Prime Minister Cameron] assure my con-

stituents that those who are found guilty of being

caught up in this mayhem will feel the full force of

the law, including prison sentences? Angie Bray, MP

for Ealing and Central Acton

These extracts show that not only were individual rioters

held responsible, irrespective of others’ actions: they were

actually punished more severely for choosing to take part

and joining in with the actions of rioters. This aspect of

remaining individually responsible seemed important to us,

since often attributions of vicious conduct in management,

in terms of corporate scandals, or large-scale failure are

explained in rather vague terms, with reference to diffuse

phenomena. For instance, Treasury Secretary Geithner’s

testimony before the congressional oversight panel

explained the Global Financial Crisis in terms of ‘risk

appetite,’ ‘systemic risk,’ ‘distress in money markets,’

‘financial stress,’ and ‘deep-seated problems’ (U.S. Trea-

sury 2009); there is almost a routine reference to ‘culture’

in discussions of Enron, Worldcom et al. But in riots,

notwithstanding the extreme and atypical climate for

action, the speed with which situations unfold, and

crowd-level phenomena, there is an obvious need for

people on all sides to remain responsible as individuals.

Habituation and Judgement

We think that training in scenarios, and experience in the

field, could be understood in terms of either of two senses

that the term habituation has taken on in translations of

Aristotle’s account of virtue (Ryle 1945; Sorabji 1973).

Habituation could be a more subtle kind of habit devel-

opment—if we think about it in terms of the development

of judgement. Alternatively, habituation could be a kind of

drilling that makes someone accustomed to and inured to,

or numb to some of the effects of danger and risk. We

deliberately stop short of making any simple or straight-

forward claim that the following examples show how

habituation can lead directly to particular moral virtues

such as courage, or intellectual virtues such as phronēsis

(Shotter and Tsoukas 2014; Tsoukas and Shotter 2014). At

the same time, we did find evidence that we thought sug-

gested habituation could be relevant to the development of

character in this context, more particularly in relation to the

role of emotion in decision making.

Part of what appeals to us about Aristotle’s account of

virtue is that emotion is not seen as a distraction or as in

some way compromising decision making but as in some

way usefully informing and shaping decisions. Emotions

can also be trained. 4

For instance, Aristotle says that being

angry in and of itself is not problematic provided one is

angry at the right things, with the right people, for the right

length of time (Aristotle 1125b32–3). Keith contrasted the

circumstances under which decisions are made from the

conditions under which the same decisions are evaluated:

I’ve had that thought go through my mind, thinking,

‘he wants to kill me,’ thinking about it, that in itself

gets adrenalin going but you still want me to make

the same calm, rational decision as if we’re sat here

talking about it now… one of the most difficult things about being a police officer [is] remaining calm and

making that rational decision that people will still see

as the right decision at ten o’clock the next morning

or 6 months later when you’re stood in the witness

box

Although Keith describes the need to take ‘that rational’

decision, from an Aristotelian perspective there is not the

separation between emotion and reason this implies.

Clearly this kind of decision process is not one occurring

in the absence of emotion. It is taking place while Keith is

thinking, ‘he wants to kill me,’ but it is where emotions

have been trained. One could not really recreate such a

scenario in training but Dan, a very experienced public

order commander, referred interestingly to a reliance on

training, hoping the effects of it would ‘kick in’ when

describing having to clear a 300 metre street of hostile

crowd:

it was a very, very tense situation and my heart was

certainly racing and my blood was racing… I was very conscious of losing my colleagues either side

[the risk of] being dragged into the crowd was very,

very high. So that kind of awareness, when you’re,

the adrenaline is pumping your vision becomes very

much restricted—tunnel vision… hopefully in that situation your training kicks in because your ability to

make decisions is considerably restricted.

Dan went on to give a very rich account of the relationship

between training and the reality, when it came to the

experience of being personally attacked:

training tries to prepare you for the unknown so when

you meet a similar situation you instinctively know

what to do and I’ve been overwhelmingly impressed

by how that has worked for me in policing, for

example when I am being attacked as a PC out on the

street, or a Sergeant, it’s amazing how you do step

into your self-defence mode, issue the instructions

4 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer on this point.

392 K. Morrell, S. Brammer

123

and before you know it you say, ‘oh my god, I’m

dealing with this situation without even thinking

because my training has taught me to do that’.

Across Keith and Dan’s cases we think there is an

argument to be made for seeing this as the development

of kinds of habit and then in turn as supporting decision

making or judgement consistent with the development of

character. We are not, to emphasize, drawing such a simple

equivalence as: training leads to habit leads to virtue. Even

if we traced the life course of an officer before joining the

force, through training and up to and including witnessing a

specific incident, it would be difficult to draw these kinds

of equivalence. Nonetheless, in a civilized society, one

would want a police officer who was being attacked (with

their powers and equipment, and likely superior fighting

skills), to behave in such a way that the safety of their

assailant was preserved—as long as and only if they could

preserve their own safety. The kinds of response we would

want officers to exhibit would be very difficult to

accomplish without training that made some elements of

this second nature, given the rush of fear and adrenalin, and

also at times excitement.

Interestingly, the second extract from Dan describes

automaticity ‘‘before you know it you say, ‘oh my god, I’m

dealing with this’’’ but he distinguishes two forms of auto-

matic action. This automaticity applies both to preserving

his personal safety, ‘‘step into your self-defence mode’’ and

to following arrest procedure ‘‘issue the instructions’’—a

more formal and explicit decision process he would be

accountable for. Whether it is correct to describe this in

terms of virtues such as bravery and practical wisdom, or as

‘‘merely’’ owing to training, or as some combination, is very

difficult, but Rorty’s (1970) account of first- and second-

order habits may be useful here. Training may instil some

primal, first-order habits to do with physical protection, with

these being purely a matter of instinct. But the presence of

these first-order instincts may mean that there is a scaf-

folding or platform that can support carrying out other kinds

of actions, such as second-order habits that are more to do

with higher-level decision making.

There are also points of resonance here with Aristotle’s

account (1116b4–1117b27) of five kinds of courage, which

makes reference to specific contexts in which courage may

be displayed (politics, war) or certain embodied charac-

teristics that influence whether someone can appropriately

be called courageous (emotion, sanguinity, ignorance). 5

The second of the five kinds is courage as ‘experience with

regard to particular facts,’ and in this, Aristotle suggests

that some things which seem to be courage are not really

courage. Experienced soldiers fight with confidence

because they are like armed men fighting against unarmed

men and they are not as phased by false alarms. They may

also flee while civilians in the same situation might stay

since they have got more of a fear of disgrace. Our analysis

suggests that it is helpful in some ways to think of this not

in terms of a specific virtue (courage) but to consider

instead the role of institutionalized routines and practices

and how these might relate to virtue.

Policing during such crisis situations offers an example

where, normatively at least, there is an underpinning gov-

ernance framework, in terms of the law, and a set of

institutional practices that try to document the way in

which a particular event in its complexity is mapped onto a

general infrastructure. Yet officers remain aware of the role

emotion plays in informing, or potentially compromising,

effective decisions.

Habituation as Drilling

Unlike Kantian and Utilitarian systems, which rely on the

application of a universal principle, and are thus in a sense

cross-sectional (though see Dierksmeier 2013), virtue ethics

emphasizes not only learned and embodied but also social

qualities. There is a paradox at the heart of training for mass

disorder though. Large bureaucracies such as the police are

tasked with preparing for and routinizing the unpredictable.

There is a need for common procedures to ensure stan-

dardization, for health and safety reasons, to minimize

exposures and also to deliver training within a certain bud-

get. At the same time, however, a recurring theme in

interviews was that public order incidents are unique in

some way. Mass public disorder and events, such as riots,

are extremely rare, nonetheless the police have to prepare

for them. Richard, a Public Order Commander described this

in terms of what would typically happen with the most

specialist units who are often held back in reserve:

if they’ve had 100 deployments… to actually get out of the van, to actually use a word of command that

you’ve used in training… is one out of a 100, one out of more than 100 because generally speaking you’re

there, you’re doing crowd control so you’re just locked

in a cordon, you’re not going to run in line and form a

wedge and you know, show of strength and all of the

tactics, you’re just you know, in real life it’s restrained

to sitting in a van, standing and looking at people.

In attempts to reproduce fidelity in training scenarios, we

found certain elements of public order training were more

pronounced and potentially more violent or physically

hazardous than the typical experience of actual public order

scenarios. Richard went on to describe his force’s approach

to training:

5 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer on drawing our attention

to this passage.

Governance and Virtue 393

123

[Force name withheld] has got a reputation within the

region of being very robust in its training. When we

do have the regional exercises, there’s always little

comments that we seem to be a bit more fierce or

violent in the exercises than the other forces… we train very, very hard and if I was to make an

instantaneous reflection… the reality is never any- where near as difficult and as taxing as the training.

Interestingly, and again in relation to emotion, we also

found evidence of the ‘drilled’ nature to habituation in one

officer, Alan’s account of his first riot:

I remember running towards the crowd, and the

crowd were throwing half house bricks, and I

remember seeing the half house bricks in the air. I

can remember them landing, and they appeared to

bounce, and it just amazed me, but the training was so

good that we’d had, I didn’t really feel any emotion. I

didn’t feel fear at all, and the thoughts that were

going through my head when I saw these bricks and

we were running forward with our shields, my

thoughts were, this is just like training.

At times we could see that drilling, albeit leading to

automatic behaviour might still improve commander’s

judgement, suggesting that the dichotomy between habit-

uation as drilling and as supporting wise judgement was

not so clear cut as is sometimes suggested (Ryle 1945).

One commander described a training exercise where he

continued talking on the radio calmly even though he was

in the midst of a barrage of bricks:

I can remember talking on the radio and I remember a

brick hitting me in the head as I’m talking on the

radio and it just felt a bit like the kind of Terminator

moment, you know, where the kind of head gets

knocked off sideways sort of thing and he comes back

up slowly, you know, and carried on talking.

One can imagine that such training is effective in making

someone more hardened or as Aristotle says, ‘not as phased

by false alarms.’ In this example, the resistance or

imperviousness to a brick might not be courageous—if it

is unthinking—rather than the expression of will, but one

can imagine it could still support wiser judgement.

During observation of training, one interesting feature of

watching officers prepare for a regional training day was to

see how their day began with practising how to deal with

petrol bombs. Sometimes called Molotov cocktails, these

are large glass bottles filled with petrol where the petrol is

held in place by a piece of twisted cloth. The cloth soaked

in petrol also acts as a primitive fuse. Lighting the cloth,

then throwing the bottle results in a burst of flame when the

glass shatters and the petrol inside the bottle ignites and

spreads. As Kevin was being shown around the training

facility, he could see ranks of officers lining up in groups of

three, and in a very measured way (in protective clothing),

walking through the flames caused by a petrol bomb. Part

of the skill involved in doing this is doing it collectively

and in step with colleagues, so habituation is not just about

the individual but about the development of an institu-

tionalized and collective skill. One trainer was ushering the

officers through the flames, at times advising how to stamp

these out, another trainer was repeatedly picking up and

lighting petrol bombs before throwing them at the feet of

the next rank of officers. This seemed another instance of

officers being trained, not simply to use judgment and work

correctly together, but also trained in terms of their emo-

tions. Although this seemed closer to the sense of habitu-

ation as drilling, and without lionizing these officers, as an

outside observer, it was thought-provoking to see people

literally walking through fire to start their day’s work.

Conclusion

To be truly human for Aristotle requires the presence of the

state, this is why in the Politics (1253a19–30), he says the

state (the polis) is prior to the individual. For Aristotle, the

good citizen and the good state are defined relationally.

Here we have studied a third actor for whom there is no

direct equivalent in Aristotle’s work—the police, who

during riots can be seen either as representatives of the

state or as guardians of the public (or as guardians of

certain constituencies from among a fragmented public).

When confronted with a riot or mass disorder, the impli-

cation of this relational link between citizen and state is

that a society should question the degree to which it is

culpable for having created the conditions under which

rioting occurs (Morrell 2012). Riots are interesting phe-

nomena in various ways. As empirical settings, riots

present both police and other citizens with potentially life-

altering situations: ‘moments’ (Lefebvre 2002) where

unique possibilities for action present themselves because

everyday order is disrupted and social relations can be

inverted or dramatically shift. In analysing such moments,

here, the paper draws on Aristotle’s account of virtue to

consider aspects of police work during public disorder.

Aristotle’s framework is both pre-eminent and seminal, yet

as the introduction to the paper argues, it is not always

applied to consider empirical settings in depth. There is

potential incoherence here in that Aristotle was himself the

first great empiricist, and also our discipline of business

ethics is an applied one. This suggests there may be scope

to enhance our understanding of virtue since it is rare to see

an account of virtue developed with reference to data from

a specific context and a specific set of practices.

394 K. Morrell, S. Brammer

123

If we want to retain Aristotle’s account of virtue ethics,

and use this to inform our understanding of business, we

also need to acknowledge that there are a number of things

which are uncomfortable in terms of Aristotle’s account of

how the polis should be governed. He is sometimes—

mistakenly in our view—interpreted as believing that some

people are naturally slaves, with the attendant belief that

some are naturally masters. Aristotle is also often taken to

advocate the exclusion and subjugation of women, which

many say is too simplistic a reading (Dobbs 1996; Nichols

1992; Swanson 1992). Even so, he certainly can be

recruited in different ways: as a defender of the powerful,

the rich and of elites, and, although primarily used as an

ethicist, his political philosophy as a whole clearly comes

into tension with the contemporary Western intellectual

climate of liberalism. Nussbaum (2001, p. xx) describes his

‘first and most striking defect’ as being ‘the absence… of any sense of universal human dignity, a fortiori of the idea

that the worth and dignity of human beings is equal.’ It is

also perhaps understated, but Aristotle himself does not say

very much about ‘business ethics’ (in the sense of com-

mercial activity for profit) (Michalos 2008)—there is in

some ways a parallel concern with how MacIntyre’s work

on virtue has been (mis)appropriated (Beadle 2008).

Yet one thing that Aristotle does offer is the original and

in our view the most comprehensive, account of the aetiol-

ogy and nature of virtue, which extends to considerations of

ethics as well as politics, aesthetics, and rhetoric (Morrell

2012). He grounds this in an account of biology and, for all

the limitations with that ancient work, in doing so he is able

to talk coherently about temporal complexities such as the

role of habit as well as the influence of emotion. Another

key feature of Aristotle’s account of virtue is that the indi-

vidual and the group are related recursively. The good cit-

izen is possible because of the good polis and vice versa.

Social complexity extends not just to considering contin-

gencies and the particular circumstances of any one action,

but it also extends to considering relations between the

individual and their social group. The setting of large-scale

public disorder is a useful and illustrative one to consider the

different aspects of his account and the value of considering

virtue in light of political arrangements and habituation.

Virtues are learned over time and ‘tradition-constituted’

(Fives 2008, p. 169), in other words they only make sense

in terms of the context in which one develops character

(Arjoon 2000). Rather than being assigned to individuals at

any one moment in a cross-sectional way, or in some sense

carried by, or within individual agents (like traits are),

virtues are more complex. They need to be seen in light of

the development of someone’s character over their entire

life course or over the entire time that they inhabit a role.

The meaning of an action and its status in terms of virtue is

socially complex and also stretches in time—both

prospectively in terms of someone’s development and also

retrospectively in terms of its historical context. This lon-

gitudinal aspect is complicated because virtue is interde-

pendent: defined relationally with reference to other people

and groups, and also rooted in the values, and mores of a

society or collective. Bright et al.’s recent review (2014,

p. 452) observes ‘[w]e need a holistic understanding of

virtue that accounts for both character and behavior in

context.’

In a sense, we cannot get very far talking about virtues

in the abstract; they need to be understood in terms of a

way of doing things. This entails consideration of an

individual moral agent or character, but also a group and a

context in all its historicity. A limitation of this study is that

our data do not let us speak to topics such as gender, race,

and culture (though see *reference withheld*). Police work

at street level regularly involves ascribing categorical

judgements, to do with illegality or risk, and these are

associated with strong senses of occupational identity and

homogeneity in culture (Bayley and Mendelsohn 1969;

Harris 1973; Van Maanen 1975). Sometimes this can be to

the detriment not just of the public but also of other police

officers, for instance female officers who experience dis-

crimination (Brown 1998; Holdaway and Parker 1998),

potentially as part of a ‘hegemonically masculine’ culture

(Fielding 1994) or through sexualised ‘banter’ (Dick and

Cassell 2004). The wider topic of police culture is beyond

our scope, but this is a potential consideration for future

work, since the interviewees we spoke to were predomi-

nantly male, reflecting that public order policing is gen-

dered. In common with some other street-level bureaucrats

(Lipsky 1980), but more dramatically and instantly,

judgements by police officers actually produce member-

ship of social categories, changing the identity of members

of the public to suspect, witness, victim, and arrestee.

These can be understood as acts of ‘Othering’ and as such

they ultimately rest on judgments by police officers about

their own identities (Collinson 2006): that they are tasked

with various duties and responsibilities, competent and

sufficiently equipped to discharge these responsibilities,

governed by a statutory framework and accountabilities,

and so on.

A strength of this study is multi-source, multi-site lon-

gitudinal primary data, based on observing and interview-

ing police officers. We reiterate that we do not claim to

have identified virtue in officers nor to have analysed a

virtuous system. Nor do we draw an equivalence between

training, habit, and virtue. However, we do raise interesting

and empirically informed considerations in terms of the

role habituation can play in supporting the cultivation of

virtues. In doing so, we differentiate between different

senses of habituation (Ryle 1945) as drilling or automa-

ticity, and habituation as supporting judgement. In doing

Governance and Virtue 395

123

so, we add some empirical flesh to Rorty’s (1970) idea of

first- and second-order habits. As we have suggested, in-

depth analysis of an empirical setting can raise interesting

questions that may perhaps not be broached in purely

theoretical discussion. It may also lead to richer and more

nuanced cases to study and to discuss. Each of these things

may be helpful, given a literature that is predominantly

theoretical, but which ultimately concerns an applied

discipline.

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