The leadership styles of police managers

Leadership involves both the activity and behavior of managers. There are at least six leadership theories, one of which, the personal-situational, has resulted in the development of a number of contingency models of managerial style. The one created by Hershey and Blanchard is used to assess the styles of 155 police managers. Findings of this research indicate that police managers use two or three styles, are as effective as nonpolice managers, and tend to avoid “risky” styles, particularly delegating.     

A case of homicide by lethal injection with lidocaine

This report describes a homicide by overdosage with lidocaine. The decedent, a 32-year-old male hospitalized for a lengthy period with acute intermittent porphyria and chronic pancreatitis, suffered apparent asystole and seizure. Failed resuscitation preceded death. A forensic autopsy was conducted based upon suspicions of alleged patient mistreatment by one of the attending nurses. Toxicological analyses revealed the presence of lidocaine in blood, liver, kidney, brain, and heart at 22.2 mg/L and 43.6, 28.3, 23.1, and 13.1 mg/kg, respectively. Also present were diazepam, phenytoin, and promethazine. Both diazepam and phenytoin had been administered during resuscitation, but lidocaine had not. The cause of death was determined to be ventricular arrhythmia precipitated by lidocaine overdosage. The administered dose was calculated to have been approximately 1500 mg. The manner of death was determined to be homicide. The nurse was arrested and subsequently tried for murder by administering a lethal quantity of lidocaine.     

Religious Characteristics and the Death Penalty

Using one mock trial scenario, this study investigated whether religious and demographic factors were related to death penalty attitudes and sentencing verdicts. Those who favored the death penalty differed from those who had doubts about the penalty in gender, affiliation, fundamentalism, evangelism, literal Biblical interpretism, beliefs about God’s attitudes toward murders, and perceptions of how their religious groups felt about the death penalty. These relationships generally held after mock jurors were death qualified. Gender, fundamentalism, literal interpretism, beliefs about God’s death penalty position, and perceptions of how one’s religious group felt about the death penalty predicted death penalty sentencing verdicts. Future research could determine whether using peremptory challenges to exclude potential jurors based on religion can help lawyers choose a more favorable jury. The present research was supported by the National Science Foundation award number 0351811, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the American Psychology-Law Society, and the University of Nebraska Law-Psychology Program. This research was presented at the 2006 conference of the American Psychology-Law Society. The authors are grateful for the research assistance of Nick Fanning and Beth Herschlag and for the helpful comments from Brian Bornstein, Rich Wiener, Bob Schopp, Dick Dienstbier, and several anonymous reviewers.     

Dueling Security Stories: Wilson and Lodge Talk Strategy

Perhaps the most consequential effort to expound a grand strategic narrative was Woodrow Wilson's campaign to persuade the American people, the US Senate, and world public opinion to embrace his concept for making the world safe for democracy. Wilson and his interlocutors in grand strategy illustrate the role of rhetoric and narrative in managing two kinds of complexity in discussions of grand strategy: the conceptual integration of facts and values (of “is” and “ought”) in strategic persuasion and the political integration of diverse perspectives among partners in a strategic coalition. In particular, I explore the hypothesis that rhetorical and narrative persuasive devices permit grand strategists to obfuscate internal contradictions in their vision, facilitating persuasion in the short run but producing characteristic patterns of eventual policy failure and thereby serving as an engine of change in grand strategy.     

The Recent Environmental History of Tiger Leaping Gorge: environmental degradation and local land development in northern Yunnan

Over the past 150 years few Western and Chinese scholars have examined the nature of the environment in Hutiao xia (Tiger Leaping Gorge) and its various inhabitants. However, as a unique geographical and geological feature, one of Asia's deepest gorges, part of the headwaters of the Yangtze River, and a common destination for tourists, the gorge has taken on greater and greater significance. Americans, Chinese literati, Party Cadres, and others have commented on Tiger Leaping Gorge. This essay will examine both the local environment and local environmental practices related to the gorge. Considering historical and contemporary land use practices, the gorge and its changing status can act as a microcosm of western China's various kinds of land development strategies, their implications for local and larger concerns, and land use ideologies of various sorts. Through discussing soil composition, water management, natural vegetation patterns, population growth, and recent developments in tourism, this essay will discuss the human impact on the natural environment of Tiger Leaping Gorge between the 1870s and 2002. It will not only demonstrate patterns in environmental degradation based on both natural and human processes, it will also show that depending on the form of institutional authority and local management practices, the environment in the gorge has been most effected by the political and ideological changes of the last half-century in comparison to earlier times. However, despite increasing challenges in the face of various human factors, some recent environmental practices have succeeded in helping to minimize elements of local soil and vegetation degradation.