Happy Ever After? Making Sense of Narrative in Creating Police Values

This paper explores how New Zealand Police used story-telling as a crucial driver of co-creation in order to affect a major culture change. Using evidence from over 240 semi-structured interviews, our research challenges current thinking about police cultures and shows how allowing members of an agency to develop and share reflective narratives can promote attachment to new cultural values, through sensemaking. In so doing it extends current literature on co-creation and co-production, and the impact of story-telling on power relationships in organizational culture. It suggests that the crafting and sharing of stories enables value-attribution in a co-creative environment.