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Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examines how control is manifested.

The study is based on a netnographic study and analysis of tribal members’ confessions across three online consumer tribes devoted to opera (Loggionisti, who are opera aficionados of the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy), sports (football and hockey fans of Djurgården, Sweden), and cars (Alfa Romeo owners).

We demonstrate how confessions align consumers with the common tribe ethos and how this constitutes members into various subject positions, which are fundamental social processes for reinforcing the tribe. More specifically, it demonstrates four types of subject positions: the ‘pastor’, ‘regular sheep’, ‘good sheep’ and ‘black sheep’, and how these subject positions regulate the actions of tribe members.

The present study theorizes how control is manifested and facilitated in consumer tribes. The study also explicates the confession and its role as a religious regulating practice fundamental for the life of a consumer tribe.

Community managers can recognize the different subject positions that emerge within a community and help facilitate the interactions among community members.

Previous studies are silent about how confessions reproduce control in consumer tribes. The present study highlights confession practices and the constitution of subject positions, which regulate as well as reinforce consumer tribes.

This is a two-voice autoethnographic dialogue about Rousseau's Confessions and their relevance for the contemporary autoethnograpy. The paper examines the possibility that Rousseau was not only the creator of modern autobiography but also a forerunner of autoethnography. Many features of the Rousseau's masterpiece are analyzed and systematically compared to our contemporary autoethnographic sensibility: the purposes which brought him to write an outstandingly detailed description of his life; the fact that he acknowledges autobiography as the only source of true knowledge; his obsession for sincerity and his strong will to disclose all the truth about his own life to his readers (included the dreadful things that he did); the authority that he assigned to the readers in deciding about the truthfulness of his tale; his concern for the ethical issues and the care of the others; and the therapeutic value that he recognized to the practice of writing about themselves. In the end, Jean-Jacques was not only extraordinarily able to use his emotions to analyze human nature, but also he was a radical autobiographer at the limits of intransigence. His considerations on the value of autobiography can help us greatly to legitimize contemporary autoethnographic practice.

The purpose of this study is to identify factors in sex offenders that act to facilitate or inhibit confession to police. Moreover, it aims to assess possible interactions and differences among factors related to confession specifically for child molesters and those who attack adult victims (rapists).

The authors use a combination of CHAID and conjunctive analysis to analyze interactions and factors significantly associated with confession to police in a sample of 624 sex offenders.

The study identifies several factors, as well as interactions among those factors, related to confession to the police. Moreover, rapists and child molesters present different factors related to confession, the former being more related to the criminal event as to the latter being more related to the offender characteristics.

The findings point to the conclusion that investigators need to pay careful attention to the type of victim when preparing the interrogation. Moreover, these crime event characteristics are readily observable factors that can improve the estimation of the likelihood of obtaining a confession. Finally, the several interactions identified confirm the complexity of the decision making leading to confession to police as well as the need to look at the factors in combination as opposed to individually.

This paper is the first attempt to apply a combination of innovative multivariate statistics (CHAID) and a qualitative technique (conjunctive analysis) to investigate factors leading to confession for two specific types of sex offenders.

This paper seeks to highlight the contribution of the Catholic practice of confession and the Protestant Reformation to the development of the modern concept of accountability.

A historical analysis of the literature is carried out to identify the contribution of key features of the practice of confession and the reformation of the Church to the development of accountability in Protestant societies.

The study highlights that the practice of confession is similar to accountability and the Catholic Church developed the emotion of guilt necessary for accountability. The Protestant Reformation provided for the further development of accountability to its modern form, through the restructuring of the practice of confession and the extension of the principles of accountability to itself. The conditions necessary for the practice of accountability such as popular power of the people, the concept of contracts and the emotion of guilt developed within the above environment.

This paper highlights the historical development of accountability to provide some insights into understanding of the environment and conditions necessary for the spread of accountability, which is becoming increasingly important in the current economic environment characterized by global integration of markets.

The study investigates the use of accounting information in the form of a confession as a tool for telling the truth about oneself and reinforcing power relations in the context of the Roman Inquisition.

The study adopts Foucault's understanding of pastoral power, confession and truth-telling to analyse the accounting practices of the Tribunal of the Inquisition in the 16th century Dukedom of Ferrara.

Detailed accounting books were not simply a means for pursuing an efficient use of resources, but a tool to force the Inquisitor to open his conscience and provide an account of his actions to his superiors. Accounting practices were an identifying and subjectifying practice which helped the Inquisitor to shape his Christian identity and internalise self-discipline. This in turn reinforced the centralisation of the power of the Church at a time of great crisis.

The use of accounting for forcing individuals to tell the truth about themselves can inform investigations into the use of accounting records as confessional tools in different contexts, especially when a religious institution seeks to reinforce its power.

The study documents the important but less discernible contributions of accounting to the formation of Western subjectivity at a time which Foucault considers critical in the development of modern governmental practices.

The study considers a critical but unexplored episode in Western religious history. It offers an investigation of the macro impact of religion on accounting practices. It also adds to the literature recognising the confessional properties of written information by explicitly focusing on the use of financial information as a form of confession that has profound power implications.

Although offender profiling has been cited as an effective tool to interview suspects, empirical profiling methods have completely excluded interviewing suggestions when testing the validity of this technique. The purpose of this paper is to explore the utility of empirically derived profiles of offender- and victim-related sexual assault case characteristics (n=624) in the preparation of the interrogation strategies in sexual assault investigations.

Latent class analysis was used to extract profiles of offender- and victim-related sexual assault case characteristics in a sample of 624 incarcerated sex offenders. Moreover, relationships between offender and victim profiles were conducted using χ² analyses.

Findings show that specific offender-victim profiles are related to greater likelihood of confession during the interrogation. Possible interrogation strategies for each profile are suggested and implications for the practice of interviewing suspects are discussed.

The study is the first to examine both victim and offender profiles in order to assess the significant victim-offender profile combinations and their associated probabilities of resulting in confession.

A recent Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling resulted in stricter rules being placed on how police organizations can obtain confessions through a controversial undercover operation, known as the Mr. Big technique. The SCC placed the onus on prosecutors to demonstrate that the probative value of any Mr. Big derived confession outweighs its prejudicial effect, and that the police must refrain from an abuse of process (i.e. avoid overcoming the will of the accused to obtain a confession). The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a consideration of the social influence tactics present in the Mr. Big technique would deem Mr. Big confessions inadmissible.

The social psychological literature related to the compliance and the six main principles of social influence (i.e. reciprocity, consistency, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity) was reviewed. The extent to which these social influence principles are arguably present in Mr. Big operations are discussed.

Mr. Big operations, by their very nature, create unfavourable circumstances for the accused that are rife with psychological pressure to comply and ultimately confess. A consideration by the SCC of the social influence tactics used to elicit confessions – because such tactics sully the circumstances preceding confessions and verge on abuse of process – should lead to all Mr. Big operations being prohibited.

Concerns regarding the level of compliance in the Mr. Big technique call into question how Mr. Big operations violate the guidelines set out by the SCC ruling. The findings from the current paper could have a potential impact of the admissibility of Mr. Big confessions, along with continued use of this controversial technique.

The current paper represents the first in-depth analysis of the Mr. Big technique through a social psychological lens.

The purpose of this paper is to ask how we can think about critical reflection as a pedagogical practice given the “confessional turn”. By the “confessional turn” the author refers to the idea that “subjective, autobiographical and confessional modes of expression” have expanded exponentially across a wide range of social spheres, including education, the legal system, the media and the workplace. Examining these developments, this paper asks what these debates on critical reflection and confession mean for pedagogical practice.

The main approach is a review of key debates in the literature on critical reflection and also in the wider social sciences.

The discussion compares different debates. Thus it shows that for critics, the turn to the “first person” technologies is narcissistic, psychologistic and de‐politicising. On this view, critical reflective practice might be understood as an individualistic and individualising pedagogy in spite of its claims to be critical. The paper discusses how in contrast, others see this move to talk about the subjective and the self as an extension of the feminist project of the personal is political – i.e. that personal stories, feelings and issues have social and political roots and consequences. For them, reflection can be critical, leading to political consciousness‐raising, i.e. a new awareness about social, political and personal processes. It finishes by examining the view that the idea of reflexivity might help us out of the conflict between these debates.

The paper poses a number of questions in relation to critical reflection that can be taken up by practitioners in the field.

The paper brings new literature to bear on the practice of critical reflection and raises important questions relevant to academics and practitioners.

Kathy Charmaz, a developer of constructivist grounded theory (CGT), advocated the use of grounded theory as a tool to attain social justice through research. We developed the grounded text mining approach (GTxA) method by integrating Charmaz's CGT with text mining. This technique is aimed at facilitating the systematic and comprehensive understanding of textual data. GTxA helps researchers engage in abductive reasoning by encouraging them to transition between CGT and text mining analyses. This chapter illustrates an example of how GTxA was utilized when a group of researchers analyzed depositions and semi-structured interview data of a defendant in an actual criminal case in Japan and, thus, detected the possibility of a coerced false confession. The chapter concludes by encouraging researchers to utilize GTxA for attaining social justice.

The exclusionary rule remains one of the most controversial doctrines in America’s constitutionalized criminal procedure. Jurists and commentators criticize the American exclusionary rule as a rule unique to American jurisprudence. Though American jurists and commentators’ criticism focuses on the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule, the criticism of the American exclusionary rule with reference to practices in foreign countries serves to create and maintain the misconception that the United States is the only country that has the exclusionary rule. The belief that the exclusionary rule exists only in the United States is far from accurate. This article examines the historical development and the current status of exclusionary rules in the United States, England, France, Germany, and Italy. Attentions are especially devoted to analyzing the characteristics of the American exclusionary rule with reference to exclusionary rules in other countries.