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This chapter describes the shortfalls in local police budgets following the economic woes experienced by police departments during the Great Recession. Providing a timeline of external events impacting police budgets, in particular, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the Great Recession, this chapter places these events since 2000 in an economic context. In addition, multiple sources, that is, interviews with police administrators, survey data, and news media content, are used to analyze police budget cuts. Most police administrators have already cut their budgets and report their jurisdictions anticipate more effects from the economic crisis. Significant reductions in police budgets, personnel and training are discussed. Both a police administrator and academic perspective of policing in an economic crisis are included in this chapter to better understand how recent budgets cuts affect the quality of policing.

The neighborhoods north and northwest of downtown St Louis are blighted by their abundance of substandard, abandoned, and demolished housing. Crime, poverty, and unemployment are high while family stability, educational achievement, and health outcomes are low. These conditions are not unique to St Louis, but can be found in neighborhoods in every city in America. How did this happen? What factors led to the demise of these neighborhoods? This chapter examines the history of St Louis along with theories of neighborhood succession to identify possible explanations for the city's collapse.

In Seattle and other cities, recent expansions of trespass law make the regulation of public space easier and more extensive. A range of new tools allow police officials to clear spaces of those deemed undesirable; they define zones of exclusion and increase the police's power to make arrests. The use of these tools extends contemporary practices of using criminal law to address instances of urban “disorder.” We draw on data from Seattle to catalog some of these new tools, the capabilities they create, and the implications they generate. One important such implication is that they work to push undesirables so far to the margins – spatially, socially, politically, legally – as to render them far outside the body politic. The use of these techniques thus raises important questions about the advisability of addressing social problems by increasing the power of the criminal law.

Almost every city in America has felt the effects of the current home foreclosure crisis. It has been reported that 94 of the top 100 metropolitan areas reported an increase in home foreclosures in 2008. Yet, some of the varying costs of this ongoing crisis are relatively unknown. This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the influence an increase in vacant homes due to home foreclosure may have on criminal behavior. It does so by first discussing the breadth of the home foreclosure crisis. Next, the chapter covers strain, social disorganization, and disorder theories and addresses their explanations of the potential criminal consequences of vacant homes due to home foreclosure. Then, the chapter discusses if these classic theories actually apply to this crisis. This is done by introducing the concept of suburban insulation. Finally, the conclusion links the key concepts and ideas from the aforementioned theories and how they best relate to this current phenomenon.

This chapter begins with the premise that much that has been considered ‘new’ within Centre-Western institutions of research and learning has already been there outside the West but not recognised as such. A reconstructed ethnographic account, using creative non-fiction, of the experience of a doctoral student abroad in a Western university shows how she struggles to recover the unrecognised ‘new’ from her own deCentred past. The element of struggle is made harder by powerful Centre narratives of denial that she meets and also brings with her. This analysis follows a postcolonial, critical cosmopolitan approach informed by the social action theory of Max Weber. This is embodied in my grammar of culture, at the centre of which small culture formation on the go brings intercultural experience from the everyday past. However, this deCentred, hybrid, third-space process is constantly derailed and truncated by Centre discourses and narratives that seek to segment and rationalise learning and research processes within positivist and neoliberal structures and false essentialist conceptualisation of hybridity and third space. The chapter also addresses my own positionality as a Western researcher and educator and how I am able to write about the deCentred Self struggling against a divisive Centre Other. I claim insider knowledge of the workings of Centre structures and a neoliberal West as steward discourse that covertly Others beneath a seductive yet false veneer of well-wishing. My own interculturality is enriched by a personal struggle to find hidden realities. The reconstructed ethnographic account will therefore also demonstrate how false perceptions from the Centre make it difficult for all of us to arrive at deCentred understandings.

The study of policing in Anglo-American societies has been severely restricted in the last 20 years to quasi-historical overviews, studies of policing in times of stable, non-crisis periods in democratic societies that in turn had survived the crisis as democracies. Perhaps the epitome of this is the sterile textbook treatment of policing in Canada and the United States – a sterile rubble of functions, duties, training surrounded by clichés about community policing. Scholarly writing on democratic policing and its features is severely limited by lack of inclusiveness of the range of contingencies police face, and many respects this work is non-historical and non-comparative. In the present world of conflict and strife that spreads beyond borders and challenges forces of order at every level, the role of police in democratic societies requires more systematic examination. In my view, this cannot be achieved via a description of trends, a scrutiny of definitions and concepts, or citation of the research literature. Unfortunately, this literature makes a key assumption concerning police powers in democratic societies: that the police are restricted by tradition, tacit conventions, and doctrinal limits rooted in the law or countervailing forces within the society. While these constraints are sometimes summarized as a function of “the rule of law,” this assumption is much deeper and more pervasive than belief in the rule of law. It is possible to have a non-democratic police system that conforms to the rule of law and reflects the political sentiments of the governed. It is also possible to have non-democratic policing emerge from a quasi-democratic system as I show in reference to the transformation of the police in the Weimar Republic to the police system of the Third Reich. The complex relationship between policing and a democratic polity remains to be explored.

If police are perceived as legitimate, communities are more likely to assist in the fight against crime making policework easier and resources go further. The problem is, members of a diverse community may view the police in different ways making it difficult for police to be everything to everyone. This study reveals two strands of emerging vulnerability in relation to law and order in a rapidly urbanising area, affecting perceptions of police legitimacy for both groups. The study also demonstrated the relationship between global processes and local issues. The chapter draws on data from a larger study which explored the legitimacy of Victoria Police in the Monash Local Government Area in Melbourne, Australia. Community perceptions of the police were collected during 6 focus groups and 18 interviews. For the past decade, Monash had experienced declining results in the government’s quarterly policing survey in areas that assessed police legitimacy. This research utilised qualitative methods to gather detailed community opinions, in contrast to the quantitative government survey. The chapter focusses on the key finding that there had been many changes in Monash during the preceding decade, including intense urbanisation and increased ethnic diversity. However, police services had not been correspondingly increased or diversified and were not thought adequate to respond to current demands. As a result, community members felt vulnerable and this influenced community perceptions of Victoria Police. Rapid urbanisation has implications for police legitimacy. It is important that police services and infrastructure are not neglected during periods of urban change in order to mitigate feelings of vulnerability in different communities.

This chapter examines the processes of entrepreneurial network and capital formation at a university-based incubator. Incubators could help overcome start-up firms to gain access to entrepreneurial networks and credibility with external stakeholders, by supporting the entrepreneurial processes including the acquisition of variety of capitals and resources. However, the actual evidence on the effectiveness of incubators as a policy tool for business support has been rather contested. This chapter makes a contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by addressing the underlying processes of incubation as a key factor critical to achieve accelerated firm growth at the university-based technology incubator. Drawing on interviews and survey of start-up firms at a university-based incubator, co-evolution of business models with capital mobilisation and re-combination of resources is illustrated. The chapter concludes by arguing that more detailed processes and trajectories of ‘soft starter’ business model would contribute to the understanding and development of policy support for entrepreneurial processes.

In this chapter, we discuss the Change Laboratory as an intervention-research methodology in higher education. We trace its theoretical origins in dialectical materialism and activity theory, consider the recommendations made by its main proponents and discuss its use in a range of higher education settings. We suggest that the Change Laboratory offers considerable potential for higher education research, though tensions between Change Laboratory design recommendations and typical higher education contexts require consideration.