Between Two Rationalities: The Emergence of a Boston Police-Ministerial Partnership

Institutional analysis has yet to develop an adequate theory of institutional change or emergence. I examine the emergence during the 1990's of a partnership between the Boston Police Department and a group of black inner-city ministers to deal with the problem of youth violence. What is remarkable about this story is the lack of explicit negotiations between the two groups about how youth violence should be dealt with. To put it figuratively, there is no " table " in the story. Rather the two groups discover that they are working through a series of unplanned and initially tentative encounters. In explaining the emergence of the Boston partnership, I focus on two aspects of the story. The first is how a series of events, separately for the police and the ministers, leads to a process of destructuration and a situation of liminality in terms of each group's understanding of its goals and mission. This then allows for creativity of action in the sense of Joas in which joint, unplanned efforts by the two groups occur. Second, building on the work of Karl Weick, I emphasize the backward looking aspect of meaning making. I argue that the meaning that the police and ministers come to share about youth violence emerges from a retrospective construction of how they have worked together. As result, their partnership is based not so much on a shared understanding of their current relationship or of how they will work together in the future, but rather a shared past. In this shared past they discover the common goal of " keeping the next kid from getting killed " , a goal that neither group initially embraced.