Stefan Soeparman, Casper Geurtz and Gabriel van den Brink
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the different and competing demands on police, and how they affect the credibility of police performance. The paper also looks at a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the different and competing demands on police, and how they affect the credibility of police performance. The paper also looks at a possible way out of situations with competing claims.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is based on a research project that focused on the interactions of police with their environment. In total, 40 qualitative, open‐ended interviews were obtained with people who had been in contact with the police in the previous 12 months. These interviews were transcribed and analysed with the help of qualitative data analysis software.
Findings
This analysis led to the discovery of four types of facets within these interactions which the authors labelled: situational, symbolic, institutional and professional. These are aspects of the horizontal relationships within the police environment, but at the same time police also have a vertical relationship (a “baseline”) with their superiors that is highly important.
Research limitations/implications
The paper explores these different and competing accountability claims on the police and looks at specific policing situations, in order to assess the influence of police performances on the credibility of the police. It is also a stepping stone for further research into the relationship between horizontal and vertical aspects of police performance.
Practical implications
The paper shows why police performances can easily lack credibility and is important because it analyses different facets that police need to keep in mind when interacting with civilians.
Originality/value
The paper looks at some of the innate tensions in contemporary police work, which causes a “credibility trap” that is almost impossible to avoid, but can have severe implications for the legitimacy of the police.
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Susan Elizabeth Mate, Matthew McDonald and Truc Do
The purpose of this study is to contrast how the relationship between career and leadership development and workplace culture is experienced by women in two different countries…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to contrast how the relationship between career and leadership development and workplace culture is experienced by women in two different countries and the implications this has for human resource development initiatives.
Design/methodology/approach
The study used a qualitative narrative research design to understand how the lived experiences of Australian and Vietnamese early- to mid-career female academics is engendered.
Findings
The study identified a number of key barriers and enablers that affected women’s career and leadership development. For the Australian participants, the main barrier included the competing demands of work and life and male dominated organisational cultures that discriminate against women in covert ways. The main enabler was mentoring and the building of professional networks that provided their careers with direction and support. For the Vietnamese participants, the main barriers were overt and included male-dominated organisational and societal cultures that limit their career and leadership development opportunities. The main enabler was having a sponsor or person with power in their respective organisation who would be willing to support their career advancement and gaining recognition from colleagues and peers.
Research limitations/implications
Gaining a deeper understanding of the barriers and enablers that effect women’s career and leadership development can be used to investigate how culturally appropriate developmental relationships can create ways to overcome the barriers they experience.
Originality/value
The study analysed the contrasting experiences of barriers and enablers from two cultures. The participants narrated stories that reflected on the gender politics they experienced in their career and leadership development. The narrative comparisons provide a unique lens to analyse the complex cultural experience of gender and work with potential implications for human resource development.
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There has been an explosion of interest in “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” (EDI) – also referred to as DEI among other acronyms. On the one hand, this management trend has the…
Abstract
There has been an explosion of interest in “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” (EDI) – also referred to as DEI among other acronyms. On the one hand, this management trend has the potential to draw attention to the ways in which organizational practices and climates can be transformed to have a positive impact on the underrepresentation of women and other marginalized and excluded groups in the workplace. On the other hand, there may be real consequences for women as EDI replaces other concepts such as women's rights, gender equality, affirmative action, employment equity, gender discrimination, etc. This chapter applies a gender lens to the EDI concept and management policy and practice. It juxtaposes EDI's emergence with the lack of progress on gender equality that is observed and measured in many regions of the world and highlights several critiques that may explain this lack of progress. It also identifies what EDI policies and practices need to take into consideration to better address gender inequality in the workplace. Legal approaches are discussed along with a list of potential areas of research on EDI and gender equality to determine the best path forward for making concrete progress on true equality for women in the workplace.
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Emre Amasyalı and Axel van den Berg
The use of the concept of “agency,” in the sense of action that is to some extent free of “structural” constraints, has enjoyed enormous and growing popularity in the sociological…
Abstract
The use of the concept of “agency,” in the sense of action that is to some extent free of “structural” constraints, has enjoyed enormous and growing popularity in the sociological literature over the past several decades. In a previous paper, we examined the range of theoretical rationales offered by sociologists for the inclusion of the notion of “agency” in sociological explanations. Having found these rationales seriously wanting, in this paper we attempt to determine empirically what role “agency” actually plays in the recent sociological literature. We examine a random sample of 147 articles in sociology journals that use the concept of “agency” with the aim of identifying the ways in which the term is used and what function the concept serves in the sociological explanations offered. We identify four principal (often overlapping) uses of “agency”: (1) purely descriptive; (2) as a synonym for “power”; (3) as a way to identify resistance to “structural” pressures; and (4) as a way to describe intelligible human actions. We find that in none of these cases the notion of “agency” adds anything of analytical or explanatory value. These different uses have one thing in common, however: they all tend to use the term “agency” in a strongly normative sense to mark the actions the authors approve of. We conclude that “agency” seems to serve the purpose of registering the authors' moral or political preferences under the guise of a seemingly analytical concept.
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The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the affective entanglement of both researcher and practitioners in a study of workplace diversity with a transformative…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the affective entanglement of both researcher and practitioners in a study of workplace diversity with a transformative agenda.
Design/methodology/approach
Events and experiences related to interventions in a municipal center are presented. The study is embedded in critical diversity research and applies engaged ethnographic methods.
Findings
The researcher reflects on how interventions designed to challenge the status quo faced difficulties while considering the impact of the research entry point, efforts to mobilize organizational members in favor of a diversity agenda and the micro-politics of doing intervention-based research.
Practical implications
The study reflects on how “useful” research with an allegedly emancipatory agenda might not be considered favorable to neither majority nor minority employees. The notion of affectivity is applied to deal with the organizational members’ multi-voiced response to the change efforts, as well as how the researcher’s position as researcher-change agent critically shaped the fieldwork experiences and their interpretation.
Originality/value
Few critical diversity scholars engage with practitioners to produce “useful” research with practical implications. In doing so, this paper contributes to critical diversity methods by exploring why presumably emancipatory initiatives apparently did not succeed, despite organizational goodwill. This involves questioning the implied assumption of the inherent “good” of emancipation, as well as notions of “useful research.”
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The purpose of this paper is to describe how a phenomenological approach can help to understand embodied dimensions and compare different and shared qualities, functions and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe how a phenomenological approach can help to understand embodied dimensions and compare different and shared qualities, functions and potential, as well as ambivalences and limitations of metaphors and stories in organisations.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a phenomenological understanding and use of multiple discourses, the specific expressive and communicative nature, linkages to meaning, mediation and integration, as well as transformational, innovating and generating potentials of metaphors respectively, narratives are analysed conceptually and discussed. Accordingly similarities and differences, overlapping and conflicting patterns, thus correspondences and rapprochements of both metaphors and narratives are shown and illustrated.
Findings
The critical comparison of various, especially transformative functions, ambivalences and ambiguous uses of metaphorical and narrative sides and practices reveals their inherently dynamic inter‐relational nexus. The analysis shows how metaphors and stories/narratives can serve each other, as well as how they work together and contribute for transformation in organizations. In turn, this also offers new potential for understanding the practical opportunities and obstacles to the management of change.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in that besides using multiple discourse, it follows an advanced Merleau‐Pontyian phenomenological approach and thus considers embodied dimensions of metaphors and stories/narratives and its implication for organizations critically. Working out the intriguing relationship between metaphor and narrative offers significant new insight and avenues for the research of organizational inertia and change.
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Elena Lasso-Dela-Vega, José Luis Sánchez-Ollero and Alejandro García-Pozo
This study conducts a comparative analysis of the impact of educational mismatch on Spanish wages. This paper aims to focus on the industrial, construction and service sectors at…
Abstract
Purpose
This study conducts a comparative analysis of the impact of educational mismatch on Spanish wages. This paper aims to focus on the industrial, construction and service sectors at three levels of disaggregation: sector, occupation and gender.
Design/methodology/approach
The over-education, required education and under-education (ORU model), was applied to data from the 2018 Spanish Wages Structure Survey conducted by the Spanish National Statistics Institute.
Findings
The industrial sector is the one that best manages over-education by offering the highest returns to each year of over-education. It is also the sector that most values the education of women, particularly those in highly qualified positions.
Originality/value
This study compares the wage effects of educational mismatch in the service, industry and construction sectors. Previous literature has ignored the latter sectors in this field of study, but the results of the present study show that the industrial sectors significantly value and remunerates worker education. Therefore, it may be worthy to focus certain economic and social policies on this sector, to contribute to reducing gender wage gaps and gender employment discrimination in the economy.
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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balanceeconomics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary toman′s finding the good life and society enduring…
Abstract
A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.
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Shanshan Qian, Vivien K.G. Lim and Yongduan Gao
This study examines why and when qualitative job insecurity (JI) leads to instigated workplace incivility.
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines why and when qualitative job insecurity (JI) leads to instigated workplace incivility.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected data from 227 Chinese full-time employees from multiple organizations at two time points. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypotheses.
Findings
Results show that qualitative JI is positively related to instigated workplace incivility through negative emotions; this indirect relationship is weaker among employees with higher self-compassion and stronger among employees with higher rumination.
Originality/value
The authors shift the predominant focus on the predictor of instigated workplace incivility from quantitative JI to qualitative JI. Based on the transactional model of stress and the stressor–emotion model of counterproductive work behavior (CWB), they provide new theoretical insights on why qualitative JI affects workplace incivility and identify new boundary conditions that affect employees' reactions to qualitative JI.
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Massimiliano Matteo Pellegrini, Francesco Ciampi, Giacomo Marzi and Beatrice Orlando
Effectively handling knowledge is crucial for any organization to survive and prosper in the turbulent environments of the modern era. Leadership is a central element for…
Abstract
Purpose
Effectively handling knowledge is crucial for any organization to survive and prosper in the turbulent environments of the modern era. Leadership is a central element for knowledge creation, acquisition, utilization and integration processes. Based on these considerations, this study aims to offer an overview of the evolution of the literature regarding the knowledge management-leadership relationship published over the past 20 years.
Design/methodology/approach
A bibliometric analysis coupled with a systematic literature review were performed over a data set of 488 peer-reviewed articles published from 1990 to 2018.
Findings
The authors discovered the existence of four well-polarized clusters with the following thematic focusses: human and relational aspects, systematic and performance aspects, contextual and contingent aspects and cultural and learning aspects. The authors then investigated each thematic cluster by reviewing the most relevant contributions within them.
Research limitations/implications
Based on the bibliometric analysis and the systematic literature review, the authors developed an interpretative framework aimed at uncovering several promising and little explored research areas, thus suggesting an agenda for future knowledge management-leadership research. Some steps of the paper selection process may have been biased by the interpretation of the researcher. The authors addressed this concern by performing a multiple human subject reading process whose reliability was confirmed by a Krippendorf’s alpha coefficient value >0.80.
Originality/value
To the best knowledge, this is the first study to map, systematize and discuss the literature concerned to the topic of the knowledge management-leadership relationship.