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This paper aims to take stock and to increase understanding of the opportunities and threats for policing in ten European countries in the Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Legal (PESTL) environment.

This study is part of the large EU‐funded COMPOSITE project into organisational change. A PESTL analysis was executed to produce the environmental scan that will serve as a platform for further research into change management within the police. The findings are based on structured interviews with police officers of 17 different police forces and knowledgeable externals in ten European countries. The sampling strategy was optimized for representativeness under the binding capacity constraints defined by the COMPOSITE research budget.

European police forces face a long list of environmental changes that can be grouped in the five PESTL clusters with a common denominator. There is also quite some overlap as to both the importance and nature of the key PESTL trends across the ten countries, suggesting convergence in Europe.

A study of this magnitude has not been seen before in Europe, which brings new insights to the target population of police forces across Europe. Moreover, policing is an interesting field to study from the perspective of organisational change, featuring a high incidence of change in combination with a wide variety of change challenges, such as those related to identity and leadership.

Technology is an important driver of organizational change and often strategically used to facilitate adaptations in organizational processes and cultures. While the link between technological and organizational change is widely recognized, the role of macro‐context for this link remains undervalued. Based on data from technology implementations in European police forces the paper aims to illustrate the importance of integrating analyses of the macro‐context to understand the complexity of technology driven organizational change.

The authors conducted 56 interviews and five focus groups with police officers from 13 countries on two of the major technology trends in European police forces: automatic number plate recognition systems (ANPR) systems and social media. They further conducted site visits to police forces in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom to observe technology usage first hand. Comparing accounts across countries they analyzed how macro‐context impacted adoption decisions and implementation processes. In this analysis they concentrated on the five macro‐contextual factors in the PESTL framework, i.e. political, economic, social, technological and legal factors.

In analyses of ANPR systems and social media the paper details how the macro‐context of police organizations impacted decisions to adopt a technology as well as the intra‐organizational alignments of processes and structures.

Organizational decision makers and implementers need to be aware not only of the strong agency of technology for organizations' structure and processes, but also of the relevance of the organizational macro‐context for the process and impact of technology implementations on the organizational as well as individual level.

The paper illustrates the impact of the macro‐context of organizations in shaping the link between technological change and organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the diversity of professional perspectives on police culture in an international context.

In a first step the authors developed a standardized instrument of 45 occupational features for comparative analysis of police professional views. This set was inductively created from 3,441 descriptors of the police profession from a highly diverse sample of 166 police officers across eight European countries. Using this standardized instrument, Q-methodological interviews with another 100 police officers in six European countries were conducted.

The authors identified five perspectives on the police profession suggesting disparities in officers’ outlooks and understanding of their occupation. Yet, the findings also outline considerable overlaps in specific features considered important or unimportant across perspectives.

The study emphasizes that police culture needs to be described beyond the logic of distinct dimensions in well-established typologies. Considering specific features of the police profession determines which aspects police officers agree on across organizational and national contexts and which aspects are unique.

The feature-based approach provides concrete pointers for the planning and implementation of (inter)national and inter-organizational collaborations as well as organizational change.

This study suggests an alternative approach to investigate police culture. It further offers a new perspective on police culture that transcends context-specific boundaries.

The purpose of this study is to design, implement and evaluate an instructional module aimed at architecture students, using the cartography of controversy approach to inquire into the issue of spaces of care in the city. This research addresses the critical need for students to engage with the complexities of care in domestic and public spaces.

This research employs a case study approach, complemented by elements of action research, to investigate the impact of an instructional module on architecture students. The module is implemented with 18 architecture students. Results are obtained through the analysis of students' works: initial controversy maps, collaborative cartography and final design proposals.

The results obtained suggest that the instructional module helped students to reflect on spaces of care in the city from a multidimensional, systemic and critical perspective. A significant shift in students' perspectives on it, with a notable increase in a more critical position by the end of the module. The initial controversy maps made it possible to visualize the level of complexity of the controversy perceived by the students. The projects carried out by the students relate and develop aspects of care that appeared in the initial controversy maps and collaborative mapping.

This study contributes to the field of architectural education by highlighting the value of cartography of controversy as a novel approach for fostering a critical view of spaces of care in the city. This could help students in designing their projects to address the complexities of care spaces in the city.