Mapping Police Organizational Change: From a Mechanistic Toward an Organic Model

Community police organizations have been the focus of substantial research since the 1960s. Recommendations from this research have frequently suggested some degree of reform. This reform effort has been directed in part at the oragnizational design of police departments, emphasizing movement away from a mechanistic to more of an organic approach. This article describes mechanistic and organic model constructs and relates them to both continuum and matrix change perspectives and a change problem-intervention strategy typology. The matrix and typology are used to “map” the change process associated with team policing, which is one example of attempts to make police organizations more organic.     

AN ASSESSMENT OF GOVERNMENT INNOVATION POLICIES

The authors compare the innovation policies of industrialized countries along several dimensions: the policy tools (e.g., supply, demand, environment) they use or prefer, and their national philosophies, especially whether they have explicit policies toward the development of specific industries or technologies. They also identify the principal difficulties that existing innovation policies have suffered. Among them are the lack of market know-how among policymakers, bias toward research and development-oriented stimuli rather than other aspects of innovation such as demand, and vulnerability of policies to changes in political philosophy. They conclude with a list of questions that governments initiating policies of technological choice should consider to avoid some of these pitfalls.