Doing Gender Within the Police

Abstract

This volume, a revised sociological dissertation for the University of Bielefeld, is a clearly constructed and theoretically sound examination of the (Bavarian) police, their inspirations, work practices, conflicts, and changes due to the sudden rise of women in the force. It finds its rightful place among the now numerous publications on the subject in both German and English. Unfortunately, however, the historical presentation of the theme (chapter 2.2.1) displays many errors and perpetuates clichés. In addition, the chapter summaries—entitled “relevancies"—are not that which they profess to be. The publication would have been well served by slight reductions and by deleting popular terms (for example “discourse strands,” “factual de-gendering”, “variability of equality and difference”, and “thematizing, de-thematizing, and re-thematizing”) as well as useless explanations (such as at the end of paragraph 3 on page 73).