The private policing of insurance claims: power, profit and private justice

2017. Anders Stenström. British Journal of Criminology

Article

The article examines the ways private policing is organised with regard to profitability. While the literature on private policing has enhanced our understanding of its growth, scope and normative implications, less is known about how ‘hybrid’ policing is conducted to make profit. Informed by 38 qualitative interviews with the seven largest insurance companies in Sweden, the article details how power relations are organised to ensure that the private policing of insurance claims supports and does not pose a threat to profit. Drawing on evidence from the empirical research, a range of issues are discussed, including the relationship between private policing and state power, and the intertwined governance of both claimants and policing actors.

The limits of the decentred state

2019. Anders Stenström. British Journal of Sociology 70 (1), 339-355

Article

Existing research clearly shows that the public–private divide is continuously being challenged, recast and transformed. However, this article argues that a sharp distinction between public and private continues to operate as an important norm for professionals involved in the investigation of insurance claims fraud in Sweden. It shows how power within private insurance companies and the police authority is organized around the public–private divide, which is in turn mobilized to justify repression and to give investigations legitimacy. The article indicates that the formal public–private distinction is far more thoroughly maintained than is suggested by the existing literature. Rather than challenging the centrality of state power, private insurers and the police construct, maintain and have a stake in the reproduction of a state-centric monopoly of crime control.

The Plural Policing of Fraud

2020. Anders Stenström.

Thesis (Doc)

There is a vast literature on plural policing and the ways in which non-governmental actors now have and are assuming more responsibility for crime control. This literature argues that the connection between policing and the state is being eroded, questioned and sometimes abandoned in favour of networks in which the state acts as one actor among many others. This thesis examines the Swedish policing of insurance and welfare fraud via an analysis of the ways in which power is organized and articulated by actors in the private insurance industry, and at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency and police authority.

The three articles included in the thesis contribute to a field that has received comparatively little attention, particularly in Sweden but also internationally. The existing literature has primarily been interested in the control of street-level criminality and the operations of uniformed security actors. Investigation practices in general and the plural policing of white-collar crime in particular have received far less attention. In Sweden, studies of policing are primarily state-centred, and the interactions between the police and other policing actors require further consideration. When examining insurance fraud, scholars have not considered the ways in which the insurance institution controls fraud; instead, this literature focuses on the characteristics of fraudsters. Thus the current thesis furthers our knowledge of a field of policing about which we currently know relatively little.

The thesis takes as its general assumption the view that this form of policing is marked by a basic ambiguity between on the one hand being responsibilized and assuming responsibility for crime control, and on the other being responsible for other goals, such as promoting trust in, and the legitimacy and survival of the insurance institution. Existing research suggests that this ambiguity is resolved by simply denying compensation, adjusting premium levels, and cancelling policies or social benefits. My research shows that there is no Swedish exceptionalism in this sense.

Based on a Foucauldian understanding of power, the thesis furthers our understanding of how the insurance institution is organized to tolerate fraud. The uncertainty between crime control and additional organizational goals is embedded in attempts to police the policing actors themselves, which is reflected in forces that make the policing of fraud a professional risk for the policing actors. The thesis argues that power relations provide opportunities to ensure that organizational goals are not endangered, while at the same time maintaining the public image that crime is being controlled. In contrast with existing research, the thesis shows that the law and the state – analytical categories that existing research, and particularly post-Foucauldian approaches, tend to reject or avoid – are critical to the plural policing of fraud. It is further suggested that scholars need to pay more attention to the way different technologies of power shape relationships between the actors involved in plural policing and their definitions of their own roles. In particular, scholars need to consider the role of the state and the legal framework in such arrangements.

PLURAL GOVERNMENTALITIES

2021. Anders Stenström. British Journal of Criminology 61 (3), 773-791

Article

The criminalization of welfare and policing has often been analysed as being indicative of the global rise of a neoliberal political agenda. The current paper examines how governmental power is organized to govern investigators responsible for policing welfare in Sweden. Using empirical illustrations from the Swedish case, it shows how multiple governmental logics are enacted in the context of a broader political will to crack down on welfare fraud. Specifically, it demonstrates how so-called control investigators are tasked to realize a neoconservative agenda. To this end, these investigators are themselves governed using an amalgam of neoliberal and bureaucratic rationalities and technologies. The paper argues that examinations of the articulation of multiple governmental rationalities offer one route for thinking intelligibly about power and criminalization and by extension about the limits of neoliberal rule.

Anders Stenström

Teaching

Publications

The private policing of insurance claims: power, profit and private justice

The limits of the decentred state

The Plural Policing of Fraud

PLURAL GOVERNMENTALITIES