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The purpose of this paper is to examine police officers' perceptions about their role in interviewing children, and to compare these perceptions with those of child eyewitness memory experts.

A diverse sample of 23 police officers (from three states of Australia) individually participated in in‐depth interviews where they were asked to define what makes a good interviewer in the area of child abuse investigation.

Irrespective of the background of the officers, the important role of interviewers' personal attributes was emphasised (e.g. having a relaxed, empathetic, warm nature). Such personal attributes were more prominent in the participants' descriptions than knowledge of legislation and children's development, prior job experience, and interviewing techniques.

The paper shows that while child eyewitness memory experts acknowledge the importance of establishing a bond of mutual trust between the interviewer and the child, the importance of utilising an open‐ended questioning style for enhancing rapport, and for eliciting a detailed and accurate account of abuse cannot be overstated. The possible reasons for the police officers' emphasis on personal qualities are discussed.

This paper has revealed that limitations in the competency of police officers in interviewing children is not merely a problem of “doing” (i.e. learning to ask open‐ended questions), but may also reflect ingrained attitudinal and organisational barriers.

The purpose of the current study was two‐fold: to explore police officers' perceptions of the daily challenges involved in child abuse investigation and how those challenges affect their ability to undertake child abuse investigations, and to explore how these challenges are managed on a daily basis.

This study employed a qualitative research design. In‐depth interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of 25 police officers working in child abuse units across three Australian states.

Inductive thematic analysis revealed that heavy caseload and collaboration with other professional groups are two key sources of negative work stress frequently associated with child abuse investigation. Further, despite the provision of organisational strategies aimed at reducing work stress, the officers tended to rely predominantly on informal coping mechanisms.

This study has raised many questions for further research aimed at developing interventions to assist police organisations in managing work stress.

This paper provides an in‐depth analysis of the key challenges associated with child abuse investigation and the coping mechanisms employed for overcoming these challenges from the unique perspective of police officers authorised to investigate child abuse.

The purpose of this paper is to apply current understanding of service user involvement (SUI) to forensic practice with reference to the benefits and drawbacks. Specifically, it discusses models of SUI and their application to a psychologically informed planned environment (PIPE) located in a Category C male prison.

Drawing upon residents’ experiences, the evaluation reflects on the contribution of cultural, environmental and political factors to the success or failure of SUI within the PIPE service.

The evaluation will review current systems and explore ways of improving and strengthening strategies by referring to the “whole systems approach” to SUI (Wright, 2006).

The evaluation makes recommendations for local and national SUI within PIPE services.

Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm – a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, the authors investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations.

Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator's thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. The authors supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions.

Participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse.

This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.

Human resource (HR) process research emerged as a response to questions about how (bundles of) HR practices related to organizational outcomes. The goal of HR process research is to explain variability in employee and organization outcomes by focusing on how HR practices are intended (adopted) by senior managers, the way that these HR practices are implemented and communicated by line managers, and how employees perceive, understand, and attribute these HR practices. In the first part of this chapter, we present a review of 20 years of HR process research from the start, to how it developed, and is now maturing. Within the body of HR process research, several different research theoretical streams have emerged, which are largely studied in isolation without benefiting from each other. Therefore, in the second part of this chapter, we draw on previous work to propose a staged process model in which we integrate the different research streams of HR process research, recognizing contingencies in the model. This leads us to an agenda for future research and practical implications in the final part of the chapter.

In this chapter, we review the historical development of elite theory, and then we propose a way forward beyond it. Elite theory emerged as a critique of democracy in the late 19th century. Although it used historical materials illustratively, it tended to be ahistorical theoretically because its primary aim was to demonstrate the perdurance of elites even in conditions of mass suffrage. Lachmann was the first scholar to develop elite theory as a truly historical and explanatory framework by combining it with elements of Marxism. Even Lachmann's theory, however, remained inadequate because it did not rest on a fully articulated theory of power. In this introduction, we suggest a “relational power theory” as a remedy to this situation, and we use it to formulate a general heuristic for the study of elites, nonelites, and their interrelationships. To illustrate its utility, we show how it can illuminate the chapters in this volume (though they were not necessarily written for these purposes).

This study aims to explore the impacts of long-term trends in the closure of abattoir businesses in the UK on the robustness of the network of abattoirs which provides private kill services.

This proof-of-concept study uses responses from a farmer and an abattoir survey in a spatial analysis to help visualise the private kill network. Monte Carlo simulation is used to estimate the impacts of possible further closures of private kill abattoirs on the robustness of the private kill network.

In August 2020, 18% of the area of the UK was more than 45 km from a private kill abattoir, 21% was serviced by one, 14% by two and 47% by three or more abattoirs. After randomly removing 9 and 18% of private kill abattoirs, to reflect the current trend in the closure of private kill abattoirs, the area of the UK more than 45 km from a private kill service and the areas with one and two providers increased, whilst the area with three or more providers decreased for each scenario. This approach, therefore, can be used to quantify the network's resilience to further closures.

The additional information that would be needed to allow this approach to help policymakers identify strategically valuable abattoir businesses is discussed.

No other national or international study has attempted to quantify the robustness of the network of private kill abattoirs.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an explication of the concept of “maturity,” as it applies to communication evaluation and measurement (E&M) practice, along with contextualization of recent maturity model adoption within academic and professional communities.

Drawing from previous work on maturity models within other fields, recent communication scholarship and industry practice, this paper fills a gap in the literature by offering a theoretical conceptualization of communication E&M maturity, including the construct’s core dimensions and sub-dimensions.

Communication E&M maturity is conceptualized into four essential elements: holistic approach, investment, alignment and culture. The contribution of E&M efforts is represented as the direct support of corporate strategy, and ultimately increased value, from the communications function. Operational elements of maturity include levels of analysis, time, budget, tools, skills, process, integration, motivations, relationships and standards.

In exploring the factors necessary for “mature” E&M programs, and specifically emphasizing the need for a holistic approach, along with sufficient investment and alignment, and conducive cultural factors, the research builds upon existing work examining how communication can serve to inform corporate strategy and create value for an organization. Greater understanding and application of the maturity concept has the potential to advance the field by increasing both accountability and credibility for the work done by the communications function.

Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.