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This study examines empirically the extent to which there is evidence of an endemic sub‐culture of policing among a sample of sheriffs’ deputies. While failing to observe widespread adherence to the sub‐cultural norms and values suggested in the literature, such adherence is observed among a subset of our sample. Advanced statistical techniques (i.e. cluster analysis and discriminant function analysis) are then used to create, replicate, and validate a numerical taxonomy of policing. The taxonomy reveals three types of law enforcement orientations: “Sub‐Cultural Adherents,” “COP Cops,” who represent a nouveau sub‐culture strongly committed to public service, and “Normals,” who, on average, are quite average and are not especially committed to either sub‐cultural form.

Many criminologists have investigated the implementation process concerning the transformation toward community‐oriented policing, while researchers interested in the area of work and occupations and/or complex organizations have examined factors which contribute to or inhibit successful organizational change. To date, however, there has been little empirical research addressing the issue of employee receptivity to such change. The present study examines the effects of sheriff’s deputies’ socio‐demographic characteristics, work orientations, and perceptions of agency readiness/preparedness on their receptivity to organizational change. These deputies are employed in a sheriff’s department undergoing an agency‐wide shift toward community‐oriented policing. Our findings suggest that a service orientation and a belief that the agency has attained an appropriate level of preparedness positively influence their receptivity to change.

Numerous prior studies have explored the level of job satisfaction of police officers. Some research has also focused on officer perceptions of community policing as practiced in municipal police agencies. There has been little empirical research on either topic conducted in sheriffs’ offices throughout the US. The present study examines the relative effects of work orientation on levels of job satisfaction among deputy sheriffs in an urban sheriff’s office which practices community policing on an agency‐wide basis. Our findings suggest service‐oriented deputies are somewhat more satisfied with their jobs than their crime control oriented counterparts.

Kendall P. Cochran has claimed that John Maynard Keynes “developed a theory that would try ‘to account for things as they are’. In so doing he became another important social economist.

The school counselor can reduce barriers to college access for students in underserved communities but there is a lack of focused support and professional development resources to assist them with this task. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how a collaborative partnership reframed professional development to increase counselors’ capacities and enrich their role in addressing educational inequities in a local context.

The authors employed an action-oriented qualitative case study through the lens of social justice to critically consider how urban school counselors took action to address local educational inequities in the postsecondary process. Data were collected over a ten month period and consisted of semi-structured interviews, 17 hours of meeting transcriptions, meeting notes, field observations, numerous field notes, researcher reflections, weekly e-mail correspondence, electronic data, counselor demographic surveys, and document analysis.

The inter-agency networked learning community model encouraged the school counselors to take ownership for their professional development, starting small led to greater collaboration, the counselors engaged in collective learning and counselors took a responsibility for the broader school community.

Inter-agency partnerships can address social inequities and initiate transformative change but further research is needed to explore how to address what happens as actors move in and/or out of the partnership. Acknowledging and validating the experience of the school counselors empowered them to take risks, invite new ideas, and adapt the new idea to their local school site. Reframing professional development began to transform how the counselors were viewed by the broader school community. Further research is needed to explore how educational systems can be empowered to engage in conversations to embrace change.

This study illustrated the transformative power of school counselors in building community, collaborating, and constructing bridges between each other, school administrators, and postsecondary researchers. Unless the current devaluing of school counselors shifts, the benefits associated with networked collaborative partnerships will likely go unrealized. We call on policymakers to reconsider the role of school counselors and call on them to ensure these positions are mandatory in all K-12 schools.

This study demonstrated how an inter-organizational collaboration between a university and a K-12 local education agency initiated transformative change. The collective action of the network equipped counselors with tools to build community with each other, within their individual school sites, and in the local community. Many studies provide models regarding what school counselors should do but few explore how to empower them to use the models to enact change. The action-inquiry approach provided an opportunity to explore how urban school counselors experienced and understood the process of engaging in professional development designed to help them try something new in addressing educational inequities in underserved communities.

This paper presents case studies of three student teachers negotiating the demands of the National Council of the Social Studies' (NCSS) five characteristics of powerful teaching and learning (meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active instruction) while engaged in the context-specific tasks of student teaching. For these three student teachers, the context of both their teaching and beliefs about teaching combined to help them focus on two of the five characteristics more deeply than the others. These case studies suggest that social studies pre-service teachers can constructively use their student teaching semester to focus on developing strengths in those characteristics most appropriate to their beliefs about teaching and their teaching contexts, and that social studies methods courses can aid in this process by helping student teachers to reflect on these factors prior to their student teaching semester.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the environment in which law enforcement officers operate is a main source of their job satisfaction, which is related to their overall work performance. In this line of research, a recent study by Johnson (2015) examined the organizational, job, and officer characteristics that may predict a police officer’s organizational commitment.

The current study replicates and extends the analyses performed in that study using an alternative data source to understand the influence of these measures on sheriff deputies’ organizational commitment during their organization’s shift to community-oriented policing.

Our results, while similar to those of Johnson (2015), revealed some unique findings. For example, in the current analyses, several organizational- and job- factors were significantly associated with deputies’ commitment to the sheriffs’ office. Specifically, deputies who report receiving higher supervisor feedback, higher peer cohesion, higher job variety and autonomy, and lower job-related stress were more highly committed to their law enforcement agency.

Key implications emerge for police administrators aspiring to influence employee organizational commitment during major agency shifts.

Overall, the present paper largely supports and progresses the findings of Johnson (2015) by extending them to sheriffs’ deputies, who are still largely underrepresented in policing research, and to an agency undergoing a dramatic organizational change. As such, the present study represents an important next step in understanding the factors that influence organizational commitment in law enforcement organizations.

This paper examines the Random Walk Hypothesis (RWH) for aggregate New Zealand share market returns, as well as the CRSP NYSE‐AMEX (USA) index during the 1980‐2001 period. Using several indices, we rely on the variance‐ratio test and find evidence to support the rejection of the RWH with some evidence of a momentum effect. However, we find evidence to suggest the behaviour of share prices to be time‐dependent in New Zealand. For example, we find the indices tested were closer to random after the 1987 share market crash. Further analysis showed even stronger results for periods subsequent to the passage of the Companies Act 1993 and the Financial Reporting Act 1993. We also find evidence that indices based on large capitalisation stocks are more likely to follow a random walk compared to those based on smaller stocks. For the USA index, we find stronger evidence of random behaviour in our sample period compared to the earlier period examined by Lo and Mackinlay (1988)