Tatrai_Viktor_Professzionalizacio_es_karriermobilitás

Until the mid-nineteenth century, public order and safety was traditionally the remit of municipia, organized along the principles of the Estates system. Thus, the officer responsible for municipal policing was the captain, who controlled the police bureau operating under the city council. Policing was an organic part of municipal administration, and it required no special training. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the acceleration of urbanization brought about social changes that traditional policing could no longer handle to the standards of social expectations. On the one hand, the study examines the efforts, as formulated by police officers, positioning their job as an independent profession in the latter half of the Age of Dualism. On the other hand, it focuses on the Lord Lieutenants’ criteria for recruiting the leadership of municipal police departments as well as the authorities’ expectations from the chiefs of police. Finally, sidestepping the macro-level socio-historical approach of institutional history, the author traces the professionalization of policing through the microlevel analysis of the lives and career mobility of eighty-five chiefs of police at the helms of the police departments of municipal towns of Hungary between 1886 and 1918.