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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.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the findings of a security research project commissioned by a financial institution to identify security breaches that could facilitate illicit access to confidential information.

Using penetration and social engineering techniques to generate opportunities to steal confidential data, the project simulates a possible criminal attack.

The findings expose a vulnerability to attack by professional criminals or others prepared to use kidnap, blackmail and intimidation.

They also raise challenging questions about reconciling the human rights of both employees and clients, and the needs and responsibilities of financial institutions as employers, service providers and custodians of confidential information.

The paper is unique as it tackles the phenomenon of social networking sites from the risk perspective of any employer that needs to safeguard its assets by managing internal threats and protecting against criminal infiltration.

This paper addresses key issues in the implementation of a managed response to crime. Based on a major study of resource allocation decision‐making procedures in the British Police Service, it focuses on the “crime desk”, both as an aid to management and as an operational centre for new forms of investigation. While the authors found a clear indication that crime desks brought benefits by alleviating the administrative burden imposed by the crime recording process, evidence that their potential as an investigative resource was less clear. However, they produce a strong argument that this could be amended if key issues are understood and addressed by the police service.

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.

The authors propose a client‐side agent for exploring and categorizing documents on the World Wide Web. As the user browses the Web using a usual Web browser, this agent is designed to aid the user by classifying the documents the user finds most interesting into clusters. The agent carries out the task completely automatically and autonomously, with as little user intervention as the user desires. The principal novel components in this agent that make it possible are a scalable hierarchical clustering algorithm and a taxonomic label generator. In this paper, the overall architecture of this agent is described and the details of the algorithms within its key components are discussed.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

The editor welcomes suggestions for reference serials—both long‐established and new titles—to be reviewed. Librarians who are interested in writing reviews for this column are invited to submit information concerning their expertise to the editor (Virginia Gilbert, Deputy Collection Development Officer, 117 Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27706).

Recent studies in strategy have highlighted both the successes and failures of applying conventional perspectives in strategic management to developing markets. Within this debate, Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies, aimed at exploiting high-volume, low-margins strata at the bottom of these societies, have particularly drawn interest. We critically examine the emergence and evolution of BoP strategies and compare their anticipated outcomes to some of the empirical evidence. We then draw on the concept of global value chains to usefully extend the BoP concept, and suggest areas for further theory building and empirical research. We offer a typology of BoP ventures, and suggest appropriate levels of public–private engagement to achieve the desired social and economic outcomes.