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Theorists and theory have lost their way, and Brown offers some guidelines for reviewing and finding new ways of writing. Brown seeks the social that which is left out and is implicit. My concern here is with the role of the tantalizing “actor” in theorizing: perhaps a puppet on a structural string, a bundle of emotions, a strategic actor employing tactics of assertion or a rational chooser. Brown correctly argues in my view that the actor is a momentary social creation. Thus, what is said about the actor implies what is not said and the dubious value of “words.” Although the body, first captured by Mauss (1968), remains a shadow figure in current thinking and not cited by Brown, I argue it acts without words. I cite studies of Manning and Fabrega summarized in Psathas (1973) to display the crosscultural relevance of the self-body connection as evidence of the situated nature of the actor and the meaning of the body in time and space.

The study of policing in Anglo-American societies has been severely restricted in the last 20 years to quasi-historical overviews, studies of policing in times of stable, non-crisis periods in democratic societies that in turn had survived the crisis as democracies. Perhaps the epitome of this is the sterile textbook treatment of policing in Canada and the United States – a sterile rubble of functions, duties, training surrounded by clichés about community policing. Scholarly writing on democratic policing and its features is severely limited by lack of inclusiveness of the range of contingencies police face, and many respects this work is non-historical and non-comparative. In the present world of conflict and strife that spreads beyond borders and challenges forces of order at every level, the role of police in democratic societies requires more systematic examination. In my view, this cannot be achieved via a description of trends, a scrutiny of definitions and concepts, or citation of the research literature. Unfortunately, this literature makes a key assumption concerning police powers in democratic societies: that the police are restricted by tradition, tacit conventions, and doctrinal limits rooted in the law or countervailing forces within the society. While these constraints are sometimes summarized as a function of “the rule of law,” this assumption is much deeper and more pervasive than belief in the rule of law. It is possible to have a non-democratic police system that conforms to the rule of law and reflects the political sentiments of the governed. It is also possible to have non-democratic policing emerge from a quasi-democratic system as I show in reference to the transformation of the police in the Weimar Republic to the police system of the Third Reich. The complex relationship between policing and a democratic polity remains to be explored.

Although numerous studies recently have appeared that identify the most‐cited scholars and works in the general criminology and criminal justice literature and in several specialty areas, no previous citation study has specifically examined the police studies literature. Through an analysis of 370 articles and research notes appearing from 1991 to 1995 in the areas of police studies, published in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and four academic periodicals devoted to police studies, we list the 50 most‐cited scholars and the 36 most‐cited works. The lists of the most‐cited scholars and works in the specialty area of police studies are compared to general lists taken from leading criminology and criminal justice journals and introductory textbooks. We conclude with some thoughts about the relevance of citation analysis to specialists in police studies.

This remembrance discusses the intellectual climate and circumstances under which David Maines came to the Metro Detroit area in the early 1990s. It discusses his impact on graduate students at Wayne State University and how he met the historian Linda Benson whom he would marry. It chronicles his arrival to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan in 1997, which provided him a well-deserved academic home after his long 25-year journey in academia. Maines was tenured there in 1998, promoted to full professor in 1999 and chaired the department from 2000–2006.