Police forces are long established organizations shot through with tradition and confident of their
underlying organizational identity. This means that when police practitioners collaborate with
academics, they tend to be more concerned with pragmatic questions of ‘what works?’ than they
are with existential questions of ‘who am I?’. However, on the fringes of the ‘extended policing
family’, where organizational identities are far more fluid, a different picture emerges. These less
established organizations are often equally interested in both types of question. This presents an
opportunity for academics and practitioners to work together on deeper questions regarding the
constitution of the policing landscape. Through the lens of Hatch and Schultz’s (2002) model of
organizational identity dynamics, this article profiles one such example which revolves around
a research collaboration between the Security Industry Authority – the public body tasked with
regulating the UK private security industry – and the University of Sheffield.