Urgent issues and prospects at the intersection of culture,memory, and witness interviews: Exploring the challenges for research and practice

The pursuit of justice increasingly relies on productive interactions between witnesses and investigators from diverse cultural backgrounds during investigative interviews. To date, the role of cultural context has largely been ignored by researchers in the field of investigative interviewing, despite repeated requests from practitioners and policymakers for evidence-based guidance for the conduct of interviews with people from different cultures. Through examining cultural differences in human memory and communication and considering specific contextual challenges for investigative interviewing through the lens of culture, this review and associated commentaries highlight the scope for considering culture and human diversity in research on, and the practice of, investigative interviewing with victims, witnesses, and other sources. Across 11 commentaries, contributors highlight the importance of considering the role of culture in different investigative interviewing practices (e.g., rapport building, questioning techniques) and contexts (e.g., gender-based violence, asylum seeking, child abuse), address common areas of cultural mismatch between interviewer–interviewee expectations, and identify critical future routes for research. We call for an increased focus in the investigative interviewing literature on the nature and needs of our global community and encourage constructive and collaborative discussion between researchers and practitioners from around the world to better identify specific challenges and work together towards evidence-based solutions.     

Accountability In A 'Reinvented' Government

Whether 'reinvented' government implies worker empowerment, increased managerial discretion, or decentralization, it is widely thought to mean diminished accountability. A two-dimensional typology (based on clarity of goals and certainty of cause-effect knowledge) of decision-making processes and their associated organizational structures is compared to Romzek and Dubnick's typology of accountability relations. The article argues that accountability mechanisms can be matched to public problems and agency structures and that changes in perceptions concerning the nature of public problems is at the root of contemporary enthusiasm for non-hierarchical modes of organizing.     

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? A Critique of the Ability of Community Mediation to Suppress and Facilitate Participation in Civil Life

This article revisits debate between academics and practitioners about the potential of community mediation. While mediation evangelicals make bold claims about the possibility of mediation helping to rebuild communities, academic critics have been suspicious of such contentions and claimed instead that mediation has provided just another route through which the state can interfere in the life of its citizens. It is argued here that debate on the topic has been clouded by unduly high expectations of disputes as agents of social change. Their importance has been understood by reference to their ability to rebuild communities or their potential to become test cases. It is argued here that mediated disputes make much more modest challenges to state authority but that they can be aided in this by the intervention of mediators prepared to take a pragmatic approach to the unachievable ideal of neutrality. The article does not conceive of community mediation as an alternative of the state or its agent. Rather, it suggests that mediators can be embedded within both worlds and act as message-bearers between them.     

Death for a Terrorist: Media Coverage of the McVeigh Execution as a Case Study in Interorganizational Partnering between the Public and Private Sectors

In June 2001, the Federal Bureau of Prisons helped to carry out the execution of Timothy McVeigh for his role in the infamous 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The intense national and international media attention that the execution received was virtually unprecedented in the bureau's history, and it put the bureau in the difficult position of having to carry out two potentially conflicting responsibilities: facilitating coverage of the execution by hundreds of reporters, producers, and technicians, while maintaining the safety and security of the maximum security penitentiary in which the execution was held. Historically, the Bureau of Prisons has preferred to maintain a low media profile and had no experience managing a large-scale media event. This article examines how the bureau met this challenge by forming a partnership with the news media through the creation of a Media Advisory Group. It analyzes the goals, functions, and achievements of the Media Advisory Group by employing the Dawes model of interorganizational relationships.     

The Review of the APS: Is gender really on anyone's agenda?

As recently as 2016, the Australian Government stated its commitment to increasing gender equality in the Australian Public Service (APS) workforce. In May 2018, the Prime Minister announced a broad‐ranging Review of the APS, but gender equality was not mentioned in the Review Terms of Reference. An interim Review report was released in March 2019, which was also largely silent on gender issues. We examine the submissions to the Review to assess whether, and how, organisations have considered gender equality. We found an almost universal gender blindness in submissions and conclude that this may have contributed to the Review panel ignoring gender equality issues in their interim report. We further conclude that without a focus on gender equality within the Review and ensuing reforms, the APS gender equality strategy is rendered merely symbolic. We recommend the Review implement gender mainstreaming to ensure gender equality can progress in the APS.     

Negotiation and Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis focuses on the ways that language and symbols shape interpretations of negotiators' identities, instrumental activity, and relationships. These meanings arise, in part, from language patterns that bargainers employ while they are involved in a negotiation. This article provides a brief overview of research findings on language use in six areas of negotiation: strategy, relational development, identity management, emotional expression, issue development, and framing. It also employs a case example of a real estate negotiation to illustrate how discourse patterns discursively construct the nature of risk, certainty, and loss–gain through framing and issue development.