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Drawing from literature on organizations that function efficiently and effectively while maintaining low levels of errors and occupational injuries and deaths, we argue that police departments can enhance their legitimacy by adopting the practices found in such organizations because doing so can reduce the frequency of unnecessary force against citizens and lower officer injury rates.

To support our argument, we review literatures on the causes and avoidance of errors in organizations, identify how well-run organizations in high-risk environments are able to operate safely, and describe how police departments can adopt similar practices as a mechanism to enhance officer safety and lower the rate at which officers use force against citizens.

By adopting the practices of successful organizations in other fields, police departments and their officers can promote and enhance their safety while simultaneously reducing their use of force against citizens. By doing so, police can raise the level of legitimacy they hold in the eyes of the American public, which has arguably decreased in the wake of recent events involving police gunfire.

Our ideas contribute to the policing literature by: (1) highlighting a preexisting body of literature and outlining its application to police organizations and (2) detailing how both the police and the public can benefit from improved police practices.

Field emergence poses an intriguing problem for institutional theorists. New issue fields often arise at the intersection of different sectors, amidst extant structures of meanings and actors. Such nascent fields are fragmented and lack clear guides for action; making it unclear how they ever coalesce. The authors propose that provisional social structures provide actors with macrosocial presuppositions that shape ongoing field-configuration; bootstrapping the field. The authors explore this empirically in the context of social impact investing in the UK, 2000–2013, a period in which this field moved from clear fragmentation to relative alignment. The authors combine different computational text analysis methods, and data from an extensive field-level study, to uncover meaningful patterns of interaction and structuration. Our results show that across various periods, different types of actors were linked together in discourse through “actor–meaning couplets.” These emergent couplings of actors and meanings provided actors with social cues, or macrofoundations, which guided their local activities. The authors thus theorize a recursive, co-constitutive process: as punctuated moments of interaction generate provisional structures of actor–meaning couplets, which then cue actors as they navigate and constitute the emerging field. Our model re-energizes the core tenets of new structuralism and contributes to current debates about institutional emergence and change.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment are considered core development objectives (SDG 5) and instrumental in achieving other SDGs such as economic growth and food security and improved health and education. Cocoa is seen as a ‘man’s crop’ and there is entrenched gender bias in its value chain. However, women play a crucial role in the tending and post-harvesting of cocoa which are key to the price paid. This chapter investigates, via a 20-year in-depth case study, the partnership between Fair Trade Social Enterprise Divine Chocolate Ltd and Kuapa Kokoo (KK) cocoa farmer’s cooperative in Ghana. The case takes an in-depth look at women’s role in the cocoa value chain and how their strategic interests, practical needs and power can be addressed.

The Divine–Kuapa Kooko partnership, which implemented a clear resourced gender equality strategy, has made a positive contribution to reducing inequality, empowering women cocoa farmers and improving their rights. Setting quotas for women’s representation at all levels of KK’s structure has improved the strategic interests of women cocoa farmers and transformed the political structures of the cooperative. Also setting gender equality as part of the KK’s constitution enhances the empowerment and power of women cocoa farmers. Providing equal access to training and resources also enhances the practical capabilities of women.

The chapter proposes a framework of how to achieve improvements in gender quality and women’s empowerment. This case will assist other organisations who have targeted Sustainable Development Goal 5 of gender equality and women’s empowerment as part of their strategy.

Investigating some enriching perspectives on mid-career PSM and UrbEd ‘teaching, researching and innovation’ (Public Sector Management; Urban Education).

Alternative approaches, analyses, designs and methods (1) focused on national and local problems and policies, (2) to be reconstructed, researched, taught and enriched in practice-oriented MEd-courses for mid-careerists and (3) which might strengthen their capacities to shift from reflection in action to reflection on action. Two decades of UrbEd and PSM experiences in Amsterdam and Rotterdam are analysed. New perspectives – Social Quality and Artistic Empowerment initiatives – are assessed. The implications for current and future higher education policies and perspectives are then considered.

Initiatives implemented since the 1980s are bearing fruit. These address urban problems, foster innovation, enhance mid-career education and enable cross-border initiatives such as Social Quality measures. Such measures are well supported at the moment by practice-oriented policies at Applied Science Universities (ASUs).

The chapter’s recommendations might incite lecturers, (mid-career-) professionals of ASUs and local managers and authorities to intensify their cooperation with urban renewal projects and vice versa.

This chapter will report on the issues that surround the coverage of police shootings in the United States. It will also look at the issue of race and policing. In particular, the events at Ferguson, St. Louis in August 2014 and other controversial incidents will be explored. The chapter will utilize theories of policing, employ a media analysis, and develop an issue history to explain the background to problems with policing in African-American neighborhoods over many decades, culminating in the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This chapter addresses the shortcomings of current self-efficacy models describing the health information practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) communities. Informed by semi-structured interviews with 30 LGBTQIA+ community leaders from South Carolina, findings demonstrate how their self-efficacy operates beyond HIV/AIDS research while complicating traditional models that isolate an individual’s health information practices from their abundant communal experiences. Findings also suggest that participants engage with health information and resources in ways deemed unhealthy or harmful by healthcare providers. However, such practices are nuanced, and participants carefully navigate them, balancing concerns for community safety and well-being over traditional engagements with healthcare infrastructures. These findings have implications for public and health librarianship when providing LGBTQIA+ communities with health information. Practitioners must comprehend how the collective meanings, values, and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ communities inform how they create, seek, share, and use health information to engage in successful informational interventions for community health promotion. Otherwise, practitioners risk embracing approaches that apply decontextualized, deficit-based understandings of these health information practices, and lack community relevance.