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The legitimacy crisis faced by law enforcement has been suggested to be the result of a new media environment where citizens can record encounters with police and place these recordings online. The purpose of this paper is to examine the motives of individuals who cop-watch, or record the police, but not the factors influencing visiting cop-watching websites.

Using a cross-sectional, national sample of 702 American adults, and drawing on theories of legal socialization and selective exposure, the current study examines the prevalence and correlates visiting “cop-watching” websites.

Approximately 9 percent of the sample reports having ever visited these sites. Results from a series of logistic regressions indicate legal cynicism is positively associated with having ever visited these sites, having done so recently, following these sites on social media and visiting these sites more frequently after Ferguson. Police legitimacy reduced the likelihood that individuals had ever visited these sites, but was unrelated to other outcomes.

The cross-sectional nature of the survey precludes discussion of causality, but results are fairly consistent with theoretical expectations.

The current study reflects an early attempt to understand correlates of public consumption of “cop-watching” material.

This study attempts to answer the question: “how are the two drivers, accountability focus and organizational learning, independently and interactively associated with public agencies’ proactive policy orientation?” The first driver is the multiple accountabilities that public agencies pursue: (1) bureaucratic, (2) legal, (3) professional and (4) political. The second driver is the organizational learning activities of public agencies: (1) socialization, (2) externalization, (3) combination and (4) internalization.

For data, 800 respondents from the public agencies in South Korea were surveyed.

The analysis provided several findings: (1) the discretionary accountabilities (professional and political) have a greater positive influence on the proactive policy orientation; (2) the conventional accountabilities (legal and bureaucratic) tend to have negative impacts on the proactive policy orientation and (3) among the four types of accountability, legal accountability can be more significantly complemented by organizational learning activities, which can enable both visionary and realistic administration in a balanced manner.

This study provides a unique insight on how organizational proactivity can be ensured through the interactions of organizational accountabilities and organizational learning.

The rule of law and an efficient legal system are the core factors that ensure growth in BRIC economies. Weak institutions and failures with respect to the rule of law in Russia call into question its position as one of the BRIC countries. The purpose of this paper is to propose that the legitimization of newly created formal legal institutions in Russia is impossible without a new set of values that reflect the ideals of professionalism. It aims to explore the role institutional stakeholders play in establishment of the new set of professional values.

A survey of existing legislation and academic research on professionalism and the development of the legal profession in Russia was undertaken to determine the state of the development of its formal and informal legal institutions. The role of stakeholders in the development of new professional institutions was also examined.

The paper finds that the creation of formal institutions supporting the rule of law in Russia is largely completed. Yet, in some cases the institutions lack legitimacy and public trust. Professionalism – a vital informal institution that promotes trust in legal systems and legitimizes its formal institutions is in the process of development. The agents of professional socialization such as the state, educational institutions, professional bodies and organizations play different roles in development of professionalism. Potential avenues for enhancing legal professionalism by the agents of socialization are identified.

The current study contributes to the literature on institutional change in transition economies and suggests a complicated relationship between various formal and informal institutions in the Russian legal sector. Future empirical research should focus on the investigation of the newly forming informal institutions and the impact of old informal institutions on this process.

Companies doing business in Russia should be aware of the fact that the legal systems in the country are still in the process of development. Even though major formal legal institutions have already been created, some informal institutions still represent a serious challenge to safe and efficient business in the country.

The paper contains ideas for the future development of legal professionalism in Russia.

While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.

Throughout history, social philosophers have justified titles of possession by the right of occupation, labour, and social contract, while the economic justification rests on efficiency grounds. Subscribing to the extremely contestable argument that there is a connection between private property rights and the performance and prosperity of capitalism, de‐socialization of ownership was to become the backbone for market oriented reforms in post‐communist society. The absence of clearly defined property rights, their capricious enforcement, widespread cronyism and criminal activity, in combination with a lack of resolution to terminate the quasi‐property rights of the former ruling elite, and imperfect markets have created a situation where, in the final analysis, the original foundation of most rights to property and wealth would hardly survive the test of justice and be validated in any socially responsible society. Moral precepts aside, given these circumstances, it would be hard for an economist to argue that the present process of re‐allocation of rights could be explained on efficiency grounds.

Examines the expectations of those graduates recruited by organizations for their “high‐flyer” programmes. Looks at the socialization process that such graduates are exposed to once recruited and evaluates the adjustment and change processes that graduates experience.

While public support for and cooperation with the police has been deemed vital for police effectiveness, what shapes such support and cooperation has not been fully examined. The purpose of this study is to explore three perspectives on public cooperation with police simultaneously: (1) police legitimacy, (2) legal cynicism, and (3) neighborhood norms.

The data used in this study came from a survey conducted with 408 residents across three neighborhoods in Detroit, Michigan, in 2009. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used to assess the relationship between the three groups of theory-based predictors, representing police legitimacy, legal cynicism, and neighborhood norms, and the dependent variable of cooperation.

The findings partially support the legitimacy model, as trust in police, but not perceived obligation to obey, predicts cooperation with police. This study provides strong support for the legal cynicism and neighborhood norms perspectives. Specifically, residents who have higher levels of legal cynicism and who report a stronger anti-snitch neighborhood subculture report being less inclined to cooperate with the police.

This study is the first to compare the relative influences of three major perspectives on public cooperation. Future studies should continue to analyze competing theories in explaining public cooperation with the police and determine if findings from this study are applicable to locations outside Detroit.

Using archival data from the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri and current data from Fatal Encounters (FE), this study descriptively compared concentrated incidents of fatal police shootings of civilians in St. Louis, Missouri at two points in time – 1970 to 1980 and 2000 to 2010. This study also explored connections to race and income by mapping the composition of Black residents and levels of concentrated economic disadvantage using 1980 and 2010 United States Census data. Geographic Information Systems (GISs) results revealed noticeable similarities in the sites of fatal police shootings of civilians across the two time periods. Specifically, most of the incidents occurred in the northern and southeastern sectors of St. Louis City in neighborhoods with a higher number of Black residents and impacted by economic disadvantage. All of the individuals shot and killed by the police were male, and a majority were 22 years old or younger, and armed during the incident. Results from police perceptions studies from the 1970s and early to mid oughts are also discussed to posit that a persistence of police violence historically and presently may help offer key insights into how legal estrangement may ensue.

Measuring the normative obligation to obey the police, a key component of police legitimacy, has proven difficult. Pósch et al.’s (2021) proposed scales appear to overcome the problems associated with traditional measures. This study introduces new items for these scales and empirically assesses whether such additions have the desired effects on scale performance.

This study uses data from a national online survey administered in July 2022 (N = 1,494). Measures of internal consistency and factor analysis were used to evaluate the properties of the obligation to obey scales. Linear regression was used to test the hypothesized effects.

The results show that adding the new items to the existing scales increased the level of internal consistency and improved how well the factor model fit the data. In terms of antecedents, procedural justice and bounded authority concerns were correlated with normative and non-normative obligations to obey the police in the expected direction and relative magnitude, findings that held for both the original and expanded scales. Although both normative obligation scales were significantly associated with willingness to cooperate with the police and significantly mediated the effect of procedural justice on cooperation, the relationship for the expanded scale was stronger and the mediation more pronounced.

This study extends previous research working to overcome some of the setbacks associated with measuring a crucial feature of police legitimacy. Effectively navigating this challenge will help advance legitimacy studies in criminal justice settings.

An enriched theoretical model of regulatory compliance is developed in this paper. The body of empirical evidence demonstrates that the pure deterrence model of regulatory compliance, which focuses primarily on the certainty and severity of sanctions as key determinants of compliance, provides only a partial explanation of compliance behavior. To offer a more complete explanation, the model developed herein integrates economic theory with theories from psychology and sociology to account for both tangible and intangible motivations influencing individuals’ decisions whether to comply with a given set of regulations. Specifically, the model accounts for moral obligation and social influence in addition to the conventional costs and revenues associated with illegal behavior. While cast in a natural resource management context, the theory developed here is applicable to a variety of institutional conditions. The resulting framework enables the design and implementation of more efficient compliance and regulatory programs than was heretofore possible.