Occupational culture as determinant of knowledge sharing and performance in police investigations

Police investigation units represent a knowledge-intensive and time-critical environment. Knowledge sharing is a key process in investigations. In this paper, we present an empirical study of performance in police investigations. Police investigation units are defined as value shops, where primary detective work is performed. Knowledge sharing is found to have a significant influence on the police investigation value shop. Furthermore, this research suggests that knowledge sharing is influenced by occupational culture. Occupational culture is a reduced, selective, and task-based version of organizational culture that is shaped by the socially relevant worlds of policing occupation. Four dimensions of occupational culture were identified: team culture, planning culture, theoretical culture, and traditional culture. Only the extent of team culture was found to have a significant influence on the extent of knowledge sharing and performance in police investigations.     

Regulation and evasion: Street-vendors in Manila

There are various reasons why the often stated gap between policy formulation and policy implementation is especially large in developing countries: ambiguous policy goals, decision-making without considering the needs of those affected, low degree of compliance and administrative capacity of implementing agencies etc What is perhaps most striking is the fact that interest aggregation generally occurs at the enforcement stage only. This means that laws and regulations can be sapped and distorted along the lines of the power constellations of the actors involved. The case study presented here deals with the regulatory aspects of street-vending in the particular cultural environment of a South-East Asian capital, Manila. It is demonstrated that regulations are more inspired by Western images of modernization largely removed from the harsh socioeconomic realities of the sector.Moreover, compliance is minimized by cultural values (conflict avoidance, respect of power structures) governing the behavior of lower level administrative agents and hawkers alike. The overall result is that regulations are purely symbolic and ineffective, nevertheless maintaining a climate of harassment and extortion.The paper advocates a more positive approach towards street-vendors combining minimal regulation with measures of encouragement and public assistance.     

The Persistence of Confessional Political Cultures in Switzerland: Some Puzzling Empirical Evidence from Local Parties

A comprehensive comparative study of Swiss local parties (1990) shows that ideological positions and attitudes toward political issues still differ considerably in catholic and protestant settings. Catholic parties are more likely to define themselves as “centrist”, while protestant groupings show more dispersion on the right as well as the left wing of the ideological spectrum. Among catholic parties, positions on the left-right scale and attitudes toward specific political issues are weakly associated, while in protestant settings, the coupling between ideology and concrete issues is rather strong. In protestant populations, it is found that specific occupational and class segments differ significantly by their selective preferences for either leftist or rightist parties, while in catholic settings, such differences are attenuated. Astonishingly, most of these regularities persist or get even more pronounced in communities with a highly modernized occupational structure and in groupings with a younger membership. Following Greeley (1989), it is speculated that confessional traditions survive in the “sedimented” form of implicit folks traditions and habitualizations, and that they function as “semantic codes” which find additional ways of expression in the course of societal development.     

Countries in comparative European politics

Abstract. This article reviews the place which the comparative study of European countries has occupied in the development of political science as an academic discipline, and discusses how single country studies can contribute towards the construction of new models for cross-national research. Particular attention is paid to the contribution made by the late Stein Rokkan to this development.     

Editorial

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