Security Supervision and Management, 3rd Edition

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1

Evolving a Discipline

of Security

Martin Gill

1

Although security as a form of activity has a long history, the formal academic study of

it is a much recent affair. Indeed, the discipline of security is still evolving. One paper has

lamented the lack of research, the lack of academics interested in security, and the lack of

PhDs on the topic,

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and according to these criteria, the state of the security discipline is

poor. Indeed, a “Special Issue” of the Security Journal, now the most established refereed

journal in this area, was devoted to assessing the current state of security knowledge. While

the papers were generally optimistic about the discipline moving forward, some lamented

the fact that it had not moved very far in the previous two decades. For example, Giever

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noted that the discipline is immature, lacks funding, and is evidenced by the lack of scien-

tific research. Beck,

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Gill,

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and Grabosky

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all highlighted the fact that many of the problems

that existed in previous years, including poor quality data and the lack of economic analyses

of security cases, still characterized security today.

Indeed, despite the large amount of criminological work on a variety of different types

of victims, there is still very little research on offences within, by, and against organizations.

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There are numerous very good studies on crime, crime prevention, management, and risk, but

few attempts have been made to integrate the knowledge and experience being gained, not

in a security context. And there has been little effort within the security sector for practitio-

ners and academics to learn from each other. Each has worked in relative isolation, and thus

there has been a lack of critical thinking on the links between theory and practice: academics

are suspicious of solutions to problems whose impact has not been precisely measured, while

practitioners on the other hand dislike the delay inherent in the academic process, claiming

that the commercial realities demand a swift reaction. Moreover, practitioners are sometimes

1

Director of Perpetuity Research and Consultancy International, a spinout from the University of

Leicester, [e-mail].

2

E. Borodzicz and S. Gibson (2006). Corporate security education: Towards meeting the challenge.

Security Journal 19(3):180–195.

3

D. Giever (2007). Security education: Past, present and the future. Security Journal 20(1):

23–26.

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A. Beck (2007). The emperor has no clothes: What future role for technology in reducing retail

shrinkage? Security Journal 20(1):57–61.

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M. Gill (2007). The challenges for the security sector: Thinking about security research. Security

Journal 20(1):27–30.

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P. Grabosky (2007). Security in the 21st century. Security Journal 20(1):9–12.

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Given that the interest here is in workplaces, the use of “business” is contentious. The word “organi-

zation” better reflects the fact that workplaces exist in the voluntary and public sectors. It is, however, a

less familiar word in this context. In this chapter, they will both be used to denote workplaces.