The communicative architecture of policing: community, power and legitimacy in the age of ‘new media’

Cian Ó Concubhair's The Communicative Architecture of Policing is an ethnography of two institutions in the midst of change: local journalism, in the grip of a revenue and relevance crisis, and police communications, newly confident and increasingly adept at reaching the public directly through social media. Developed from the author's doctoral research at the University of Oxford, the book is built on two years of observational fieldwork conducted in the newsrooms and police communications department serving two pseudonymised towns, within a single English policing area, and updated with a further round of interviews carried out in 2023–2024. Across eight chapters it moves from a literature review and methodological account, through parallel ethnographies of local journalism and police communications, to a closing theoretical synthesis that draws on field theory and police legitimacy theory to reframe how institutional power operates in the local governance of crime and policing.