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A considerable amount of police evaluation research focuses on innovative approaches to reduce crime at places. This is hardly coincidental; policing and place-based scholars have found crime is highly concentrated, and when police focus on these places, they can prevent and reduce crime. The regularity of such findings led Weisburd (2015) to assert the existence of a “law of crime concentration.” Given that bold assertion, the authors test whether the law of crime concentration is generalizable to one of the most common public safety concerns that police handle—traffic crashes.

To determine whether the law of crime concentration applies to traffic crashes, the authors examined crash locations and times in all counties in Utah across four years. Following and expanding on Weisburd's methods, the authors calculate the bandwidth of concentration for these crashes and analyze various types by severity and possible explanations for variations in crash concentrations across the state.

A small proportion of street segments and intersections experience a disproportionately high number of crashes, and the degree of concentration of crashes may be even higher than that of crime. Further, there are variations in the levels of crash concentration across counties and in the severity of injuries resulting from the crashes.

Place-based criminologists and policing scholars have not often explored traffic crashes in their analyses. Yet, traffic problems take up a significant amount of law enforcement time and resources and are often priorities for most law enforcement agencies. Given what the authors know from traffic, policing and crime and place research, targeted approaches at micro traffic crash hot spots can be beneficial for public safety prevention.

This study is the first to explore the application of Weisburd's Law of Crime Concentration to traffic crashes. Given that police spend a significant amount of time and resources on traffic-related problems in their jurisdiction, finding more effective, evidence-based approaches to address this public safety concern should be a high priority for police and researchers alike.

In this study, the authors report visitors' and personnel's safety experiences and concerns in order to understand the safety conditions of a library.

The analysis is based on answers from a small sample survey of library visitors, interviews with the personnel and incidents recorded in a library in Stockholm the capital of Sweden.

Dealing with visitors under influence of drugs/alcohol or feeling intimidated by groups of young individuals are examples of situations in which the staff feel most unsafe. Visitors declare witnessing problems of public disturbance and disorderly conduct, fights and other types of aggression. Although the vast majority of visitors declare feeling safe in the library, their perceptions vary according to the library's environment and their individual characteristics, including their previous victimization.

The study is novel because it indicates the importance of the environment to ensure the safety conditions of the library for both visitors and staff. Finally, research on safety in libraries is often from North America and Western European contexts, while this study contributes to the international literature by illustrating libraries in a Nordic European context.

The study indicates that more social control, both formal and informal, is at the top of the list of recommendations for visitors. Among personnel, recommendations include the need for cooperation with other local actors to solve problems in surrounding areas as well as better education for librarians in dealing with the current safety challenges of libraries as multifunctional public facilities.

Combine visitors' and personnel's safety experiences to better understand the safety conditions of a public library.

This study aims to analyse the effect of gun-related violence on housing values, controlling for the area's crime levels and locational factors. Previous studies that aimed to find a causal connection between crime and housing values used instrument variables to solve the endogeneity problem. Here, the authors have instead been able to take advantage of the fact that shootings have occurred in random time and space. This has made it possible to estimate models to create windows around the shooting (event) and to estimate the causal effects of the shootings. Thus, the authors aim to contribute to the regression discontinuity design method in this context to estimate the short-term effects.

Using the regression discontinuity design method, the authors can estimate the short-term effects of shootings.

Findings from the analysis indicate that shootings directly affect those who are impacted by shootings and indirectly affect the environments where shootings occur. The indirect effect of shootings is momentary as it is capitalised directly in housing values in the immediate area. The effect also appears to be relatively long-term and persistent as housing values have not returned to the price level before the shooting 100–200 days after the shooting. The capitalisation effect is higher the closer one gets to the central parts of the city. On the other hand, the capitalisation effect is not higher or lower in areas with a higher crime rate per capita.

The article contributes to the previous literature in several ways. First and foremost, it provides an explicit analysis of shootings in built-up areas and their hypothesised effect on property prices through the impact on attractiveness and perceived safety. As far as the authors know, no study has analysed this issue on the international level or in Sweden. In this way, the authors aim to develop a study that can provide critical knowledge about one of the adverse effects of shootings. The authors also contribute to the literature by utilising unique data material, which allows the authors to merge information from the police about the exact location of shootings in the Stockholm area with data on sales of apartments in the same residential areas. In addition to the exact location of the shootings (coordinates), the authors also have access to data about whether the shootings led to injuries or deaths. Thus, the authors have separated the effect of shootings and fatal shootings, which has not been done before. Finally, the authors set out to highlight the results as a contribution to the debate on shootings.

This research aims to analyze to what extent sustainability and its related core aspects are integrated in media and communication's curricula of higher education institutions in Europe.

A total of n = 1068 bachelor and master’s degree programs, as well as their related curricula/program specifications, from 28 European countries were analyzed by means of content analysis.

Results show that the level of curricular integration of sustainability aspects in the field of media and communication is low (14%) to very low (6%) on module level. In most cases, sustainability remains an abstract guiding principle that is not translated into a dedicated course offer. This can indicate the difficulty of operationalizing such a concept as sustainability, which is experienced by not only higher education institutions but also policy and society as a whole. In addition, the results leave space for a reflection on the social and educational responsibility of higher education institutions.

The authors are aware that not all teaching (content) is depicted in curricula. Especially where teaching is research-based, The authors assume that sustainability (communication) is more present as the curricula' analysis can represent it. In addition, the fact of solely investigating English language curricula can be seen as a further limitation.

This research is one of the few attempts to verify the actual integration level of sustainability aspects in the curricula of a specific sustainability-relevant discipline, which is neither conducted as a case study nor as a single-country analysis.

This study aims to assess the spread of environmental literacy graduation requirements at public universities in the USA, and to highlight factors that mediate the adoption of this curriculum innovation.

The author analyzed the undergraduate general education curriculum requirements at all 549 public BA-granting higher education institutions in the USA between 2020 and 2022.

The study found that only 27 US public universities out of 540 have an environmental literacy graduation requirement, which represents 5% of universities and is substantially lower than previous estimates.

First, this study provides a more complete, more reliable and more current assessment of the graduation requirement’s presence at US tertiary institutions, and shows the number of universities that have implemented this innovation is lower than was estimated a decade ago. Second, it draws from the scholarship on the infusion of sustainability into the university curriculum to provide a comprehensive discussion of factors that mediate the pursuit and implementation of the graduation requirement. As well, it identifies factors that played a key role in one pertinent case.

Environmental social work (ESW) is an approach and a perspective in social work focusing on ecological and environmental sustainability and justice within the context of sustainable development (SD). This study aims to analyse students’ reflective tasks on challenges for ESW education and practice from a critical theory perspective. The purpose of this study is to discuss the implications of the findings for accelerating the implementation of SD in social work curricula.

The research participants comprised 49 master level students from four different cohorts studying the course “Social Work and Sustainable Development” at the University of Gävle, Sweden. The sample comprised only those students who had completed at least one of the three non-mandatory reflective tasks that were set within the course. The reflective tasks of the research participants were gathered as data for this study. A qualitative methodological approach with the help of ATLAS-ti V8.4 was used to analyse the gathered data.

This study discusses three primary results, which are categorised as “Being Boxed”, “Safe and Saviour Sweden” and “Politics and Power”. Based on the results, this study argues for a transformative and emancipatory pedagogy (TEP) in the teaching and learning of ESW to accelerate the implementation of holistic SD within the social work curriculum.

This study is mainly based on the analysis of “problematic” discourses of some of the students. The majority of the students and their respective discourses are not considered. Moreover, it would have been interesting, and probably enlightening to explore the background of the students (such as gender, ethnicity and religion) and any concomitant beliefs or prejudices (whether consciously held or otherwise) that would need to be addressed for an effective social work outcome. For ethical reasons, the background of the students was not recorded and analysed in this study.

Based on the results, this study argues for TEP in catalysing environmentalism within the social work curricula.

Social workers have a political mandate from their professional ethics to work for the protection of the planet and for the well-being of all – including non-humans. This study therefore argues for ESW education within social work curricula in promoting SD through social work practice.

Within the context of SD, there is a global call for social work education to shift from an anthropocentric to an eco-centric paradigm. However, ESW education is still in its infancy stage and very few universities are focusing in this particular area. This study therefore brings an important and well-needed layer of empirical evidence in considering the implications for catalysing environmentalism within the social work curricula.

Attempts to transform health systems have in many countries involved starting to pay healthcare providers through a DRG system, but that has involved managerial workarounds. Managerial workarounds have seldom been analysed. This paper does so by extending and modifying existing knowledge of the causes and character of clinical and IT workarounds, to produce a conceptualisation of the managerial workaround. It further develops and revises this conceptualisation by comparing the practical management, at both provider and purchaser levels, of hospital DRG payment systems in England, Germany and Italy.

We make a qualitative test of our initial assumptions about the antecedents, character and consequences of managerial workarounds by comparing them with a systematic comparison of case studies of the DRG hospital payment systems in England, Germany and Italy. The data collection through key informant interviews (N = 154), analysis of policy documents (N = 111) and an action learning set, began in 2010–12, with additional data collection from key informants and administrative documents continuing in 2018–19 to supplement and update our findings.

Managers in all three countries developed very similar workarounds to contain healthcare costs to payers. To weaken DRG incentives to increase hospital activity, managers agreed to lower DRG payments for episodes of care above an agreed case-load ‘ceiling' and reduced payments by less than the full DRG amounts when activity fell below an agreed ‘floor' volume.

Empirically this study is limited to three OECD health systems, but since our findings come from both Bismarckian (social-insurance) and Beveridge (tax-financed) systems, they are likely to be more widely applicable. In many countries, DRGs coexist with non-DRG or pre-DRG systems, so these findings may also reflect a specific, perhaps transient, stage in DRG-system development. Probably there are also other kinds of managerial workaround, yet to be researched. Doing so would doubtlessly refine and nuance the conceptualisation of the ‘managerial workaround’ still further.

In the case of DRGs, the managerial workarounds were instances of ‘constructive deviance' which enabled payers to reduce the adverse financial consequences, for them, arising from DRG incentives. The understanding of apparent failures or part-failures to transform a health system can be made more nuanced, balanced and diagnostic by using the concept of the ‘managerial workaround'.

Managerial workarounds also appear outside the health sector, so the present analysis of managerial workarounds may also have application to understanding attempts to transform such sectors as education, social care and environmental protection.

So far as we are aware, no other study presents and tests the concept of a ‘managerial workaround'. Pervasive, non-trivial managerial workarounds may be symptoms of mismatched policy objectives, or that existing health system structures cannot realise current policy objectives; but the workarounds themselves may also contain solutions to these problems.

Recent studies in education attempt to ‘criminologise’ some of the current practices and policies of higher education institutions – that is, to deconstruct certain philosophies and practices which may be discriminatory, offensive, and biased to certain social groups. Recent theoretical frameworks problematize current higher education policies, many of which are taken for granted. This paper adopts a critical perspective, shedding light on some practices as they occur in higher educational institutions, by human and non-human agencies. The study applies a ‘detective’ approach examining some problematic uses of technology a higher education institution. In this proposed approach, researchers play the role of ‘detectives’, investigating possible breaches of good practice (possibly discriminatory) committed by higher education actors (referred hereafter as ‘defendants’). Most of these offences are committed through the use of educational and institutional technologies. The purpose of this theoretical approach is to empower alienated social groups against such practices by identifying ‘defendants’ and the implications of their acts. The study uses empirical data from interviews, visits, and observations to explain the ways in which defendants respond to the accusations levelled against them by other users of educational technologies. The investigation revealed that technology was used, among many other functions, to manoeuvre around the legal and ethical system serving the interests of some stakeholders. Then, the study categorises these manoeuvres, explaining the legal implications of each category, and recommending consideration of important academic and institutional issues.

This paper aims to critically evaluate contemporary Irish police practice, with an emphasis on emergent procedural innovations, in light of the needs of suspects with intellectual disabilities.

A review of published prevalence data in respect of people with intellectual disabilities in the Irish criminal justice system, of the Irish legal and policy landscape and the results of a recent empirical inquiry are used in critical evaluation.

In line with extant international research, the article identifies three sites of concern with respect to the protocols that exist within An Garda Síochána for identifying and responding to intellectual disability, including: (1) barriers to communication; (2) a need to build awareness and skills for police and persons with intellectual disabilities; and (3) a need for institutional change to secure equal access to justice for people with intellectual disabilities. Progress is being made at a systems level towards a human rights approach in Irish policing.

In representing the first international analysis of its kind, the article locates the barriers confronting suspects with intellectual disabilities in Ireland within a discourse that is sensitive to ongoing research-led, procedural reforms within An Garda Síochána (Ireland's national police service). Owing to the universalised nature of these barriers across policing systems internationally, the format of these reforms from this will be of relevance to many other policing states, in particular the 162 other signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.

This study aims to investigate how different academic fields within and outside of international business (IB) engage with the topics of social value creation in the context of multinational enterprises (MNEs). The aim is to take stock of the main themes and offer suggestions for future research avenues.

The paper undertakes a scoping review. The authors use the Web of Science database to identify relevant articles. The database search yielded 466 articles. The NVivo software was used to code and identify key thematic areas.

The matrix analysis performed in NVivo yielded 15 main thematic areas spanning 37 research fields. However, further analysis revealed that 89 per cent of the articles originated from 13 fields. Furthermore, while IB journals represent the second-largest field home to publications related to the social value creation of MNEs, they only account for 12 per cent of the sample.

The paper responds to prior calls to reduce disciplinary silos through the performing of a thematic analysis across a multitude of research fields.