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The traditional measure of detective performance is the clear‐up rate. Though this has the merit of being easy to calculate, it is not without certain disadvantages. At present, a detective may take great pains with work generally considered to be of a high standard only to find that his efforts are reflected by no change in the clear‐up rate—or even by a decrease in the clear‐up rate. This paper shows how concepts drawn from information theory may be used as the basis of a measure that does not suffer from such inconsistencies.

Over the last decade, trust repair has become an important theoretical and practical concern in HRM. The purpose of this paper is to explain why organisations fail to repair their stakeholders’ trust following a series of trust breaches.

Archival data is used to investigate the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Using the analytical frame of the detective novel, the authors analyse reputational scandals in RBS, and in doing so, they explore the interweaving of two stories: the story of the “crime” (the bank's actions which led to breaches of trust) and the story of the “detectives” (parliamentary, regulatory and press investigators).

Based on their analysis, the authors argue that the organisation's failure to repair trust is associated with ineffective detection of what went wrong in the bank and why.

HR practitioners dealing with similar situations should understand the complicated and unfolding nature of repeated transgressions, and the reasons why previous trust repair efforts may have failed.

An organisation may be showing willingness to accept responsibility for the violation of trust, but while new transgressions happen, trust repair efforts may fail. Therefore, what is needed in organisations is a longitudinal analysis that takes into account organisational history, including earlier wrongdoings.

The paper is one of the few analysing trust repair from a process perspective and using the metaphor of the detective novel to provide insights into organizational reintegration.

The purpose of this paper is to explore investigative decision-making processes in the context of major crimes as experienced by the law enforcement agents.

Episodic interviews were conducted with six agents from medium-sized police forces in the UK. Following the framework of naturalistic inquiry, qualitative content analysis took place with the assistance of Atlas.ti software. To ensure the validity of findings, the within method triangulation was preferred, by additionally analysing the interview transcripts with Alceste.

Findings from this study revealed a variety of internal factors at play, shaping the decision-making course into an act of balancing various desired goals. Detectives appear to assess a situation based on their experiences confirming that the naturalistic decision-making model may assist in understanding investigative decision-making.

Due to the busy schedule of law enforcement agents the number of participants was limited and availability difficult; therefore, this study can be thought of as a pilot study that will inspire researchers to use the same method for in-depth understanding of investigative decision-making.

Results captured the ill-defined goals in the police environment and provided ways of decreasing their impact on investigative decision-making thus should help detectives to understand their decision-making limitations and strengths.

This project will enhance the psychological understanding of investigative decision-making.

This project assists in understanding the psychological aspect of investigative decision-making during police duty and provides the opportunity to law enforcement agents to re-evaluate situations in order to improve the investigative decision-making process; while adds to existing literature.

Presents recent research on private detectives in the UK which raised fascinating differences between British and American investigators. Not only are these evident from analysis of their roles, responsibilities and histories, but also in cultural representations of private investigators in literature, film and factual reporting in the mass media. How private investigators are portrayed in the two countries raises interesting questions about public and private policing and differing attitudes to the politics of order maintenance. Explores private investigators’ British and American history, both in fact and fiction. Develops an original perspective on individual and collective approaches to policing and justice.

Much research has focused on the police response to domestic violence; however, relatively little research has considered performance differences of various types of police officers. Although there has been widespread adoption of community policing by police departments across the country, it is not conclusive as to whether units with a specific community policing philosophy perform better than traditional units when handling domestic violence calls. The current study addresses this issue by analyzing the factors associated with victim participation; specifically, do officers and detectives operating under a specific community policing mandate produce higher rates of victim participation? Bivariate and multivariate analyses indicate that victim participation rates did not differ by a community policing orientation; rather, situational factors exert the strongest effect on victim participation.

Detective work is a mainstay of modern law enforcement, but its effectiveness has been much less evaluated than patrol work. To explore what is known about effective investigative practices and to identify evidence gaps, the authors assess the current state of empirical research on investigations.

The authors assess the empirical research about the effectiveness of criminal investigations and detective work in resolving cases and improving clearance rates.

The authors’ analysis of the literature produced 80 studies that focus on seven categories of investigations research, which include the impact that case and situational factors, demographic and neighborhood dynamics, organizational policies and practices, investigative effort, technology, patrol officers and community members have on case resolution. The authors’ assessment shows that evaluation research examining the effectiveness of various investigative activities is rare. However, the broader empirical literature indicates that a combination of organizational policies, investigative effort and certain technologies can be promising in improving investigative outcomes even in cases deemed less solvable.

From an evidence-based perspective, this review emphasizes the need for greater transparency, evaluation and accountability of investigative activities given the resources and importance afforded to criminal investigations.

This review is currently the most up-to-date review of the state of the research on what is known about effective investigative practices.

While popular genre fictions like detective novels are often centred around formulaic plots and stereotypical characters, they also undergo several exciting changes when adapted in a diverse array of cultural and linguistic contexts. My chapter examines the first female detective of a Bangla crime writing series, Detective (Goyenda) Krishna as a figure that challenges patriarchal stereotypes related to violent women and dismantles the illusory neatness of binaries associated with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ femininity. The gun-toting, vengeance-seeking literary detective is also examined as mediating shifts and transitions in gendered practices and norms in Bengal – its socio-political as well as literary contexts – as it negotiated ideas of decoloniality from the first decade of the twentieth century and emerged as part of a new, partitioned nation in 1947. She is seen as a creative response to the changes related to gender that had been gradually taking shape in colonised Bengal and as articulating radically re-imagined possibilities and opportunities related to female subjectivities in a newly decolonised nation.

This paper aims to examine the influence of police cultural knowledge on the investigation of violent serial crimes. Specifically, it aims to identify whether such knowledge impacts the way in which investigative techniques are implemented. Of particular interest is the police knowledge specific to victims of violent serial crimes.

A case study analysis of five incidents of serial murder and four incidents of serial rape in Australia was conducted. This included a qualitative analysis of cold case files from New South Wales Police, Australia. These data were triangulated with data obtained from interviews with detectives who had investigated incidents of serial murder and serial rape from that agency.

The police cultural knowledge relating to the victims of these crimes at the time of reporting negatively impacted the subsequent investigation of these cases. This resulted in a marked delay in the recognition of cases as part of a series of crimes and a delay in the allocation of investigative resources. This knowledge was informed by police experience in street policing, not from experience in the investigation of violent serial crimes.

This paper is limited to selected cases of serial crimes that occurred in Australia.

This research suggests that police cultural understandings of victims need to be reviewed and changed to include knowledge of serial crime victims, offenders and their crimes. Such changes could contribute to improved recognition of related crimes as being serial in nature, essentially opening the way to preventing further victimisation.

There is no research that considers the impact of police cultural knowledge on the investigation of violent serial crime, and its subsequent contribution to the length of time of the series of crimes remains unconnected.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the links between “informal economies” and the concept of “resistance.” The author argues that the petty illegalities of the dominated and subaltern classes should be seen in their connections to the illegalism of the élites and the state. Within this framework, the informal economy is seen as both the outcome of a set of material conditions aiming at the subordinated inclusion of entire classes of citizens, and the mark of the willingness by these same subalterns to evade the bonds imposed on them by the legislations and the social hierarchies.

A review of the ethnographical and socio-economical literature on the issue of informality, accompanied by ex-post reflections on pertinent studies conducted in the past by the researcher.

Against the dominant public rhetoric, the informal economy is here seen as a particular space of enactment by the dominated and subalterns aimed at self-producing paradoxical forms of inclusion within social contexts characterized by barriers to access integration within mainstream society. It is argued that in consideration of the power relations that structure the “field,” researchers themselves become part of the struggle counterpoising individuals and institutions, and should thus make a choice among the clashing parties.

The paper draws on a vast body of literature that appears to go in the same direction. However, it radicalizes the instances proposed by previous authors and studies, and draws conclusions concerning the nature of the object and the ethics of research, that are opposed to the prevalent approaches to the subject.