Research objectives, design and process Objectives Objectives

The main goals of the research were to examine the following questions: what are the (general) core elements of the regulations, how do the main regulation processes work in practice, and what are the key differences and similarities between national regulations, as understood by different local interest group representatives? As a consequence of the limitations in the existing research and knowledge base, a secondary objective had to be included in this thesis. Basic information on private security regulation and its structure had to be collected and analysed. This was necessary in order to provide a structure for the case study and the interviews, as well as to have a general understanding of commercial security’s regulation cross-nationally.

Design principles

There was a need for flexibility throughout the research process, which is to be expected when crossing cultural boundaries in a cross-national comparative study (Mangen 1999). Another main feature of this study was that the design of interviews was contingent on prior analyses of documentary material which strategy has been handled by Mason (1996), as one alternative. The actual research process consisted of (a) a

general literature review, (b) a documentary pre study on reasons to regulate, (c) a cross-national pilot study on existing private security regulation, and (d) the comparative case study of six chosen jurisdictions focusing on documentary analysis and interviews concerning the regulatory environments and models in place in these regulatory regimes. Three questions structured the research:

 Why regulate manned commercial security?

 What and who to regulate within the scope of manned commercial security?

 How to implement manned commercial security regulation in practice?

Throughout the study, the principle of using different methods and replication was observed at all stages, utilising archival records, published documents, surveys, and interviews, applying the general ideas of triangulation. Thus an acceptable level of reliability of the results could be achieved, for example, by following the principles of Singleton’s (1999:405-407) strengths and weaknesses summary table. The fundamental idea of triangulation, according to which the weaknesses of any method can be compensated for by the strengths of another method, was recognised. In a way, the idea of varying the ‘working universe’ to validate the results was also exploited in this research by choosing and using remarkably different objects of research.

Pilot study

It became apparent during the literature review and the documentary pre study that it was not possible to have a structured and reliable enough summary knowledge of cross-national private security regulation from existing published sources. The fragmented data had to be confirmed in some way because the whole study would otherwise have been based partly on assumptions. In order to proceed, a pilot study was used to gather basic cross-national knowledge of the situation concerning commercial security regulation.

The pilot study combined documentary survey and interview data from 40 regulatory regimes, including the EU member states.²⁴ Ninety hand-picked national experts participated in this study. It covered the basic legal and administrative structures plus the regulated segments and subjects within commercial security regulation. The choice of topics to be included was based on previous studies in this area and on the personal experience of the participants. The findings have been presented in Fallon and Samuels (2006:43) and Hakala (2007).

Previous data from the literature review and the documentary pre-study (Hakala 2008) together with the survey findings sharpened and confirmed, in a structured manner, the cross-national understanding of private security regulation models. As a result, choosing the main topics for the case studies could be made with a high certainty that the most significant subjects were included. The core aspects of private and commercial security regulation chosen and handled throughout the study were: legal and administrative structures, licensing of companies and personnel, compulsory training, equipment, and weapons. The pilot study and the documentary pre study also supported the choice of the six case study regulatory regimes by showing that they all had regulation, although diverse, concerning the above mentioned core research topics and thus allowed a full-scale comparison.

Case studies

It has been emphasised that the nature of case studies is essentially an analytical focus rather than a method per se, since they incorporate several approaches, a combination of interviews and documentary research being the most typical in cross-national research (Mangen 1999:115). This was the approach chosen in this study and the qualitative research relied on quantitative data to obtain a sensitive and multi-dimensional perspective of commercial security regulation in the regulatory regimes under study.

The case studies of the six chosen regulatory regimes consisted of two main parts: a documentary analysis of existing private security regulation in order to have a comparison platform, and a qualitative, interview-based analysis of the opinions of the interest group representatives. The main research questions were extended for the case study interviews. In addition to the ‘why’, ‘what and who’ and ‘how’ questions the present situation in local regulation was explored during the interview sessions by asking:

 Is the present local regulation model working well administratively from your perspective?

 How could the licensing procedure and control of commercial security companies and employees be improved?

 Is the compulsory training of different groups of commercial security personnel effective and sufficient?

 Are all licence holders within the industry treated equally by the authorities?

 Is there a working relationship between the different interest groups and the government/authorities?

 Are the regulations on ‘non-lethal’ weapons and fire-arm possession/use within the commercial security industry adequate?

All the questions included a number of probing follow-up points to help the interview execution. The complete fact sheet used in support of the interviews is in Appendix 3.

The sample of regulatory regimes

In a cross-national comparative study, there is the risk of choosing countries that are too similar and to use in-comparable data. To avoid this, in the choice of regulatory regimes and interviewees for the case studies, a kind of purposive convenience sampling was used. The main reasons for this were the need to have as good as possible coverage of differences with a limited sample, and to gain access to the best expert respondents/interviewees. This kind of choice has been defended in one way by Bryman (2004:100), stating: “A context in which it may be at least fairly acceptable to use a convenience sample is when the chance presents itself to gather data from a convenience sample and it presents too good an opportunity to miss.” There are, however, other critical opinions concerning convenience sampling, for example by Patton (2002:244), arguing: “Do what is easy to save time, money, and effort. Poorest rationale. Lowest credibility. Yields information-poor case.” In this study, there were no questions of saving time, money, or effort; on the contrary, an exceptional opportunity to widen the horizons of commercial security research cross-nationally was exploited. In practice, to initiate and undertake this kind of structured research on commercial security with a global reach for the first time was, with the existing circumstances, not possible in any other way.

The choice of regulatory case study was determined by the following criteria:

 There should be an existing statutory commercial security regulation system.

 Different types of government models (federal/centralised) should be included.

 There should be a geographical spread, different sizes and different wealth represented.

 There should be a clear difference, if possible, historically, culturally, politically and in the approach to commercial security matters.

There were two exclusive preconditions concerning the chosen regulatory regimes.

There should be some earlier personal knowledge of and contacts to the local commercial security industry, and the regulatory regimes should be linguistically such that the use of necessary documents and oral communication were possible without too

complicated arrangements or a need for translation/interpretation. The chosen jurisdictions: Belgium, Estonia, New York, Queensland, South Africa and Sweden filled these criteria. In chapter 7, there are comparison tables and general knowledge of different qualities describing the general dispersion of these societies.

The sample of documents

For the comparative documentary analysis, the sample in each regulatory regime under study included open archival or published statutory regulations on (commercial) private security, and selectively official committee reports, bills with explanatory notes, and parliament debates related to these bills. Access to these documents was possible through governmental official websites, by visiting the authorities responsible locally for licensing, and by working in the national archives/libraries in respective countries/states.

To support the documentary analysis and to add to the environmental data in chapter 7, concerning the national commercial security spheres, secondary documents were used.

These included country specific general information, local and international statistics, available research papers, and miscellaneous security industry information. The documentary analyses presented are based on a limited number of regulatory regimes.

Similarly as in the research as a whole, the reason for their selection was language considerations, as the texts and documents used had to be in a language accessible to the researcher (in original or translation).²⁵ In sum, only a limited sample of texts pertaining to fifty specific countries or regulatory regimes²⁶ were utilised in the study.

In addition, ten professional magazines published during the last ten years²⁷ and related in some way to the regulatory regimes under study were used for articles and news on commercial security regulation. Also the possibility to take part in over thirty international commercial security related conferences and seminars during the years 2003-2009,²⁸ as a participant, sometimes as a lecturer and occasionally as an organiser, generated a considerable amount of additional knowledge and presentation material.

The sample of interviewees

For the interviews, a purposive convenience sample of experts and interest group representatives was chosen from the regulatory regimes under study. Access was gained by using international personal contacts within the security industry, many of whom had already participated in the pilot study. The ‘sample’ of fifty-one interviewees in the countries under study was chosen from different interest groups, as presented in Table

7. The public police as a group were intentionally left outside the sample if they did not have an official active role in the regulation work. The minimum number of interviews per country was six. They were chosen whilst keeping in mind the need to have as wide and comparable an opinion base as possible with the limited number of interviews. The interviewees were categorised into three groups:

 Managers, including operational persons working within the industry.

 Industry experts, including persons from regulatory authorities and commercial security related organisations and trade unions.

 Experts, including persons who had expert knowledge of the industry but were not working within it (customers, academics and editors).

However, many interviewees also had long professional experience (careers) in different other tasks within commercial security sphere and public policing.

Table 7 Division of interviewees by commercial security background

BE EE NY QLD SE ZA Other²⁹ Total Manager 2 3 2 4 2 2 15 Industry expert 3 2 2 3 2 3 3 18 Expert 2 2 2 3 2 3 4 18 Total 7 7 6 10 6 8 7 51

3.3 Research methods