Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments

COMPSTAT, the latest innovation in American policing, has been widely heralded as a management and technological system whose elements work together to transform police organizations radically. Skeptical observers suggest that COMPSTAT merely reinforces existing structures and practices. However, in trying to assess how much COMPSTAT has altered police organizations, research has failed to provide a broader theoretical basis for explaining how COMPSTAT operates and for understanding the implications of this reform. This article compares two different perspectives on organizations—technical/rational and institutional—to COMPSTAT's adoption and operation in three municipal police departments. Based on fieldwork, our analysis suggests that relative to technical considerations for changing each organization to improve its effectiveness, all three sites adopted COMPSTAT in response to strong institutional pressures to appear progressive and successful. Furthermore, institutional theory better explained the nature of the changes we observed under COMPSTAT than the technical/rational model. The greatest collective emphasis was on those COMPSTAT elements that were most likely to confer legitimacy, and on implementing them in ways that would minimize disruption to existing organizational routines. COMPSTAT was less successful when trying to provide a basis for rigorously assessing organizational performance, and when trying to change those structures and routines widely accepted as being "appropriate." We posit that it will take profound changes in the technical and institutional environments of American police agencies for police departments to restructure in the ways anticipated by a technically efficient COMPSTAT.     

What We Wish We Knew: Reflections of Brand-New Teaching Assistants

The learning curve on how to become a Teaching Assistant (TA) can be rather steep. In this paper, the authors explore three areas they wish they were advised in prior to beginning their teaching careers. The lessons are centered on balancing expectations and responsibilities in the following areas: 1) prioritizing their own work and research over teaching and vice versa, 2) the dual role of instructor and mentor, and 3) adapting prepared lesson plans when unexpected circumstances arise. The authors are three doctoral students in political science with approximately three years of teaching experience each. As such, they offer a unique perspective: each are settled into their position as TA but remember the challenges they faced while on the path to this role.     

Private Preferences for Public Goods: Towards a Model for the Interaction of Pressure Group and Electoral Politics

This essay explores two contrasting paradigms of collective action in the context of some observed anomalies in the development of the welfare states, focussing on private interest mod& of public expenditure growth versus models emphasising social choice and the degree of congruence between the political responsiveness of interest groups to the public expenditure crisis since the early 1970s, and the assumptions underpinning these models on political behaviour in the mixed economies. A bifurcation of the political system, resulting from the development of systems of functional interests representation alongside parliamentary and representative government, gives rise to a potential for strong governments to maintain regime support because of, rather than despite, the political fragmentation of majorities.     

Criminal justice theory: A case of trained incapacity?

Theories are scientific tools which give meaning to the social and physical reality that scientists study. They also play a crucial role in generating and storing the information of a discipline. The academic field of criminal justice has a wealth of facts but a dearth of theory. As a result, this field is still only partially developed. This article is a call for greater attention to theory so that the analysis of the criminal justice system and its components can be more fruitful.A survey of 25 criminal justice textbooks published since 1975 shows that the analysis of criminal justice retains a facts-without-theory flavor. For criminal justice as an academic field of study to grow, theory must be integrated much more into criminal justice research and education than has been the case. The theoretical frameworks of such social theorists as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, among others, are suggested as sources to draw upon to develop an integrated comprehensive theory of the criminal justice system.