How leadership enhances employees’ knowledge sharing: the intervening roles of relational and organizational identification

Knowledge exchange among employees is crucial to organizational effectiveness. Leadership can enhance or detract from employees’ willingness to share knowledge. This study examines how leadership affects knowledge sharing in a knowledge-intensive work setting. It proposes and tests a model which posits that (1) transformational leadership affects the extent to which employees identify with their manager; (2) this relational identification, mediated by the quality of LMX (Leader-Member Exchange), leads to greater identification with the organization and its goals, which in turn results in greater knowledge sharing. The sample consisted of two hundred and three R&D employees engaged in advanced technological projects. Path analysis results indicated that there are both direct and indirect (through LMX) relationships between transformational leadership and relational identification: relational identification promotes organizational identification which, in turn, is positively related to knowledge sharing. These results highlight the importance of transformational leadership and LMX for promoting relational and organizational identification, thereby facilitating employee knowledge sharing.     

Much better than the sequential lineup: a 120-person lineup

Abstract

Large lineups may be more reliable than small ones. However, research has found greatly reduced identifications in 40-person lineups of photos shown sequentially one at a time. The task may be more difficult than necessary. Grouping photos may provide an easier one. Three studies had compared seven-page lineups (42, 84, or 168 members) with lineups of about 20. In the first two studies identification and mistaken choice rates were identical in the large and smaller lineup. Identifications in the 168-person lineup were much less. This study tested a 10-page 120-person lineup, and added a 12-person lineup. No difference was found between the 120- and 24-person lineups, and an interaction in 12-person lineups was found between graduate lab student witnesses and others. False identifications, and the probability that the suspect is innocent when ‘identified’, is much less in 120-person lineups than the 24- or 12-person lineups, or the sequential lineup.     

Gated Communities in Law's Gaze: Material Forms and the Production of a Social Body in Legal Adjudication

This article focuses on the legal geography of gated communities. Sociolegal research has paid comparatively little attention to how specific material forms fare within legal contexts. Drawing on work in legal geography and in science and technology studies, this article isolates judicial decisions that deal with the borders of gated communities from other cases involving private homeowner associations. By focusing on these boundary disputes in which outsiders are excluded from the area, this article finds that courts are resisting the localism presented by gated communities and are instead articulating a social imaginary in which the landscape flows uninterrupted by the exclusionary presence of gates. In contrast to the privatopia literature, this article finds that courts are not complicit in promoting neoliberal visions of community. The social imaginary being developed by courts resists the spatial differentiation of gated communities, producing in its place a thoroughly modern polity in which legal, economic, and political relations flow easily between those inside and outside the gate.     

Knowledge on Tap: Police Science and Common Knowledge in the Legal Regulation of Drunkenness

Although scholars have devoted considerable attention to the formation, modification, and dissemination of knowledges in and around the legal complex, few systematic inquiries have been made into the sociology of legal knowledges. In this paper, we focus on two areas of law–liquor licensing and drunk driving–and contextualize their development from the perspective of police science. We document the ways in which contemporary police science authorizes a "common knowledge," which is not to be confused with lay knowledge, or even trade knowledge. Rather, the "common knowledge" that is authorized is what legal authorities believe everyone should know, despite any lay or trade knowledge individuals may have. This analysis demonstrates the need for further work on the ways in which knowledges are formed and authorized within law, with particular emphasis on documenting how a "responsibility to know" comes to be deployed beyond the state.     

Swaying the Hand of Justice: The Internal and External Dynamics of Regime Change at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

This article develops a conflict approach for studying the field of international criminal law. Focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, we draw on Burawoy's (2003 ) elaboration of reflexive ethnography to determine how external political changes affect the work of an international legal institution. We explore how political frameworks of legal liberalism, ad hoc legalism, and legal exceptionalism result in internal office, organizational, and normative changes within this Tribunal, thereby linking national political transformations with the construction of the global. Drawing on rolling field interviews and a two-wave panel survey, we conclude that the claims to universals that underwrite transnational legal fields cannot be understood solely through an analysis of external political forces, but must be combined with attention to how these are refracted through internal organizational change within international institutions.