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In the current issue of the Guinness Book of Records there is a table categorizing chemical elements by their unique property—osmium as the most dense, hydrogen as the lightest, gold as the most ductile, tungsten having the highest melting point, etc. Plutonium is listed as the most poisonous and toxicity is therefore treated as an established fact, like density or ductility. But in this comparative use ‘poisonous’ needs defining to be meaningful. It may be necessary to identify a biological end‐point and specify whether the poison is acute or chronic, whether the intake is by inhalation or ingestion and, for radioactive materials, whether the comparison should be expressed in terms of mass or activity.

Although many studies have considered burnout in the human services, little research on burnout has focused on police officers. This study aims to examine the relationship between burnout and police officers' attitudes towards the use of force and attitudes towards the use of social skills to solve problems.

Data were collected from 766 police officers in Norway using anonymously completed questionnaires.

Police officers reporting higher levels of cynicism also held more favorable attitudes towards the use of force; police officers reporting higher levels of professional efficacy also held more favorable attitudes towards the use of social skills to solve problems.

Future research needs to examine these findings in other countries and using longitudinal research designs.

Organizations are advised to monitor burnout levels of front‐line service workers and introduce structures and processes to reduce burnout levels.

This study has value for senior police management and employment counselors.

Despite its widespread acceptance and application in the psychology literature, exhaustion, the core dimension of job burnout, has only recently been examined in the domain of public accounting. These studies highlighted the problem of exhaustion within the profession and examined its causes relative to the environment of public accounting. Another factor, not previously addressed in the context of public accounting, is the role personality plays on public accountants’ exhaustion. The current study addressed this void by examining how the personality traits of hardiness, workaholism, neuroticism, and Type-A behavior in public accountants affect exhaustion. The results indicated that public accountants who were high in hardiness experienced significantly less exhaustion. The role stressors of overload and conflict were also significant contributors to public accountants’ exhaustion.

Much scholarship has looked at how radical politics and its symbolism are framed and distorted by the mass media, while less attention has been devoted to how the symbolic imagery of violence and death is used in activists’ self-representations. This chapter provides one such alternative angle by probing how “visual protest materials” are creatively used in activists’ own videos to pass on stories of communion and contestation.It interrogates how activist video practices mirror the continuum between physical places and mediated spaces in political activism by analyzing a thread of videos circulating on YouTube that commemorate people who have died in connection with three protest events across Europe, putting on display the “spectacles of death” punctuating each of these events. The analysis draws on social semiotics, in particular the work of Barthes (1981) and Zelizer (2010), to examine how death is used as a visual trope to signify the ultimate prize of taking to the streets. This chapter suggests how agency and meaning travel back and forth between offline and online spaces of activism. Engaging with some implications of this interplay, the chapter argues that, in the quest to document truth and induce realism and immediacy, tensions between fact and fiction emerge in the creative appropriation and remixing of images. Finally, it demonstrates how the cityscape is recruited to document and dramatize the spectacle of death as part of a larger struggle for semiotic resources within the protest space and over media representations of social movements more generally.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the 22-month life of a three-officer specialized Traffic Enforcement Unit (TEU) within one mid-sized municipal police agency. The case study allowed for the examination of the impact of this structural change from a generalist to a specialist approach on the rate of traffic citations. Additionally, officer attitudes related to the change were considered.

The study used a mixed method approach, which included both an objective output (traffic citations) and the results of a management survey to consider officers’ attitudes.

Despite the fact that most officers reported the introduction of the TEU did not change their commitment to traffic enforcement, the findings indicate citations by non-TEU officers declined sharply over time. Likewise, citations by the three specialized officers also dropped, which, when combined with non-TEU officers, resulted in no real differences between the generalist and specialist approach on the number of citations issued.

Beyond the natural limitations of a single case study, the use of a management-issued survey concerning attitudes was not ideal.

The study provides some evidence that generalists approaches – at least as they apply to traffic enforcement – may be just as productive as specialist approaches.

While there has been a significant amount of rhetoric over the years, it seems scholars have largely ignored real differences between the generalist and specialist approaches on objective organizational outputs. This is an area that needs to be subjected to additional research.