David Weisburd, Orit Shalev and Menachem Amir
The Israeli National Police began to implement community policing on a large scale in January of 1995. In this paper we describe the main findings of a three year national…
Abstract
The Israeli National Police began to implement community policing on a large scale in January of 1995. In this paper we describe the main findings of a three year national evaluation of community policing in Israel that was initiated by the Chief Scientist’s office of the Israeli police in the Fall of 1996. When community policing was envisioned and planned in Israel it was seen as part of a total reformation of the Israeli police in structure, philosophy and action. Our research suggests that this broad idea of community policing was not implemented in Israel, and indeed the program of community policing was found to lose ground during the course of our study. While community policing did have specific impacts on the Israeli police, it did not fundamentally change the perspectives and activities of street level police officers. We explain the difficulties encountered in the implementation of community policing in reference to three factors: the speed of implementation of the program; the resistance of traditional military style organizational culture within the Israeli police to the demands of community policing models; and a lack of organizational commitment to community policing. In our conclusions we argue that these barriers to successful community policing are not unique to the Israel case, and are indeed likely to be encountered in the development of community policing in many other countries.
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The difficulties that MR poses for comparativists were anticipated 40 years ago in Sidney Verba's essay “Some Dilemmas of Comparative Research”, in which he called for a…
Abstract
The difficulties that MR poses for comparativists were anticipated 40 years ago in Sidney Verba's essay “Some Dilemmas of Comparative Research”, in which he called for a “disciplined configurative approach…based on general rules, but on complicated combinations of them” (Verba, 1967, p. 115). Charles Ragin's (1987) book The Comparative Method eloquently spelled out the mismatch between MR and causal explanation in comparative research. At the most basic level, like most other methods of multivariate statistical analysis MR works by rendering the cases invisible, treating them simply as the source of a set of empirical observations on dependent and independent variables. However, even when scholars embrace the analytical purpose of generalizing about relationships between variables, as opposed to dwelling on specific differences between entities with proper names, the cases of interest in comparative political economy are limited in number and occupy a bounded universe.2 They are thus both knowable and manageable. Consequently, retaining named cases in the analysis is an efficient way of conveying information and letting readers evaluate it.3 Moreover, in practice most producers and consumers of comparative political economy are intrinsically interested in specific cases. Why not cater to this interest by keeping our cases visible?
There has been a growing trend recently to examine individual‐level values in order to better understand the attitudes and behaviors of employees in the workplace. This paper aims…
Abstract
Purpose
There has been a growing trend recently to examine individual‐level values in order to better understand the attitudes and behaviors of employees in the workplace. This paper aims to continue this trend by examining the relationship between individual values, using Schwartz's basic human values theory, and psychological well‐being (PWB) and affective organizational commitment. It also seeks to examine whether demographic variables control the relationship between individual values and the two dependent variables.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample is comprised of 271 police officers enrolled in an undergraduate program in an Israeli university.
Findings
As expected, the regression analysis showed a positive relationship between PWB and the values of benevolence, self‐direction, and achievement, and a negative relationship between PWB and the values of power and tradition. Surprisingly, organizational commitment was negatively related to achievement and positively related to power – the reverse of their relationship with PWB. The results also revealed a negative correlation between PWB and commitment.
Originality/value
The findings encourage future research on the relationship between individual values, PWB, and organizational commitment among police officers.