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Decentralisation spreads over Europe. It started approximately a decennium ago with the election of Mrs Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Britain. She initiated a large number of privatisations and decentralisations of governmental responsibilities given the enormous federal deficit and the poor condition of the British economy. At the same time, the end of the 70s, the beginning of the 80s, the Dutch faced similar problems: an excessively large governmental deficit, an increasing number of civil servants, high unemployment rates, an overstretched social security system and a somewhat unstable economy. By the mid 80s a worldwide economic boom ensued, during which the Dutch economy was growing at average rates of 2–3 percent a year, reducing the urge in the Netherlands to make structural choices. The system itself was not changed.

The article aims to understand why performance management schemes or targeting were introduced in the Dutch police organisation after 2002. This question is relevant for two reasons. First, Dutch political culture is traditionally not overly concerned with performance of public organisations, and second, police work seems especially averse to targeting.

The article explores changes in Dutch politics, and especially the rise and agenda of Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant politician who disrupted the traditional political relations in the Dutch polity, and who put government performance on top of the political agenda. Analysis of secondary sources is used to track the response of police management, and field work is used to investigate the reactions of street level police officers.

The introduction of targeting is directly attributable to changes in the polity. As such, they represent a pendulum swing that will move back, especially when the limitations of targeting will become clear, and when the political discourse has moved on to topics other than public accountability.

Managers of public organisations could learn from this case that political pressure can have far‐reaching consequences, which cannot always be ignored, and can lead to far‐reaching effects in the organisation, that may be counterproductive.

This article asks simple questions: Why are Dutch police forces using performance contracts involving targets negotiated between the department of home affairs, the mayor and the police chief? Why were they introduced from 2002 on? And will they be a lasting practice in the Dutch police?

In 2001, Dutch politician Jacques Wallage introduced the concept of “communication in the heart of policy”, which sought to bridge the perceived gap between the government and the populace. He also advocated for a stronger focus on the proper representation of cabinet ministers in the mass media. The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications experienced by communication professionals in the Dutch public service in terms of integrating this approach.

This paper is based on a series of 17 qualitative semi-structured interviews held with communication professionals either previously or currently employed in the Dutch public service.

The findings show that it has become increasingly difficult for communication professionals in the Dutch public service to maintain the strict separation between government communication and political communication that once characterised their work.

The focus of this paper is on government communication in the Netherlands at a national level.

This paper argues that a stronger focus on the image and reputation of cabinet members blurs the line between government communication and political communication, which may defeat the purpose of “communication in the heart of policy”.

This paper offers a unique insight into government communication practices in a consociational state, where politics are marked by negotiation and a common striving for broad consensus, and where the public service is controlled by coalition governments rather than one particular party.

The purpose of this paper is to address the changing organization and culture of the Dutch police over the last decade.

Drawing on personal observation, desk research and a survey among the police and administrative elite in The Netherlands, the paper describes, analyzes and reflects upon developments which are out of tune with the Dutch tradition.

From the 1960s onwards, The Netherlands was famous for her pragmatic, decentralized and friendly style of community policing. The slogan “the police are your best friend” summarizes the “essence” or the “soul” of Dutch policing. Increasingly, however, the typically tolerant, friendly and social policing style has come under pressure. The system of relatively independent regional police departments has been fiercely criticized because of the lack of effectiveness and efficiency in solving crime, safety and security challenges. National government now wants a much bigger say in setting its police programs and priorities. Moreover, as elite government officials stipulate, the police must be more “tough” on crime and terrorism. This attitude has led to centralization, penalization and, at the local level, responsibilization, which signifies that a variety of private, (often profit‐seeking) policing agencies and companies are made responsible for public order maintenance. Such changes are leading toward a “state‐centered” police model at some distance from citizens, a development that is seen as contrary to the social soul of Dutch policing.

The paper offers an analysis into the changing “soul” of Dutch policings.

This introductory chapter opens up with the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’ and the appropriation of trauma as a cultural form in modernity aided by technologies of vision and sound. Trauma in modernity has been intimately welded with witnessing and testimony, illuminating an inter-relationship with technologies which simulates our senses and affect, with its capacities to re-present past events through present consciousness, and its ability to produce a moral economy in their own right. Humanity's reliance on technologies to narrate and circulate trauma as a cultural form of exchange and transaction articulates a moment of transcendence in which media as cultural artefacts reconfigure trauma as a cultural form. The notion of second-hand witnessing and the simulation of trauma as a shared and popular genre unleashes trauma as a resonant genre bound with technologies which renew human bonds. Equally it can be reduced to fiction or give way to compassion fatigue. In historically tracing the movement of technologies of trauma as a cultural form over time from televisual witnessing to its aesthetic or perverse renditions in the digital age, the chapter discerns trauma's machinic bind and its enactment as a cultural artefact couched within the sensorium of affect and ethics. The development of mass technological forms over time, from print to the digital age, also concerns the rise of trauma as a cultural form in terms of witnessing, testimony, memorializing, mourning and commemoration. Within these configurations the traumatized human figure is submerged through time as one equally enacted and abstracted through the formats of technology and consumption.

This paper aims at providing a theoretical perspective to study the effects of the communication management/public relations of organizations on the social cohesion of individuals, groups and societies.

The possible connections between communication management and social cohesion, social integration and diversity are explored by looking at the concept of social capital. After discussing aspects of the hypothesis of decreasing social capital and of the hypothesis of increasing contingency of Western societies, questions are raised about the societal role of communication management as a profession that is usually described as being concerned with building relations. To study questions like these empirically, the actor network theory (ANT) is suggested as an analytical perspective and a methodological approach to elaborate the position of reflective communication management.

ANT or the sociology of associations seems a suitable theoretical perspective for studying the relations between communication management, social capital and social cohesion. ANT sheds a light on fact and meaning construction, on issues of power and framing and on coalition building activities and translation: who is bridging or bonding with whom and with what consequences?

Research from the perspective of ANT could result in a comprehensive understanding of communication management/public relations incorporating functionalistic, social psychological, relationship and rhetorical approaches.

Purpose – With political tensions surrounding migrants in post-9/11 Western societies, scholarship on second-generation immigrants has surged. This study explores the narratives of second-generation Iranian-Dutch women, a previously unstudied group, in relation to their positionality regarding identity and belonging.

Methodology/Approach – By combining focus group discussions with in-depth individual interviews, we explored the narratives of 13 second-generation Iranian-Dutch women. Our focus was on their senses of belonging, cultural identities and lived experiences as they navigated between Dutch society and their parents’ complicated heritage, against the backdrop of the post-9/11 world.

Findings – Although these women are perfectly ‘integrated’, they are still frequently approached and labelled as ‘foreigners’ in society, which negatively impacts their sense of belonging in Dutch society. However, our participants navigated contradicting parental and societal expectations, finding new ways to belong and fashioning cultural identities in multiplicity.

Originality/Value of the Paper – To our knowledge, the specific experiences of second-generation Iranian-Dutch migrants have received no scholarly attention. Our findings further the understanding on relevant second-generation themes such as the immigrant bargain, solidarity between different ethnic minority groups, and new ways of belonging.

Mediated trauma pumped through information and communication technologies (ICTs), in highlighting the shared vulnerabilities and precarity of human lives, is also invested in the re-distribution and re-articulation of wounding and violence. This chapter examines what is transacted in the dissemination of human trauma through ICTs and how, within this affective architecture, we can come to understand the notions of wounding and woundedness as a pervasive condition of modernity invoking the human figure as continuously transgressed with the enlargement of trauma as a site of the political, visceral and commemorative whilst raising questions over our human qualities to feel as a community of affect through technologies which transmute trauma as part of their material commodification. The transmuting of trauma through technologies in the digital age means that trauma is re-absorbed as data and altered through its platform economics. Equally, trauma can be refracted through the digital terrain as banal content in which the wounded human becomes a transacted form within an incongruous spectrum ranging from the politics of pity to voyeurism. In the digital economy, trauma imagery enters another realm of disorientation in which it is pulled into typologies and vast ahistorical image repertories that hold non-contextual image as data. The digital economy re-modulates trauma through its own modes of (il)logic and turbulence, patterning trauma through its own modes of violence.

In 2019, FIU-the Netherlands celebrated its 25th anniversary. This study takes the occasion to reflect on the role of the FIU in financial surveillance and to describe its core practices of collecting, analysing and disseminating financial intelligence.

Because FIU practices are often secret and its transaction data classified as state secrets, the FIU’s daily operational activities remain obscure. Drawing on interviews, public reports and an online training course, this study encircles secrecy and offers a fine-grained analysis of the FIU's core activities.

The article finds that the FIU plays a pivotal role in financial surveillance because it can operate at various intersections. An FIU operates at the intersection of finance and security, in between the public and private sector and at the national and international domain. This pivotal role makes the FIU indispensable in the surveillance of payment systems and spending behavior.

The article poses that the desirability and effectiveness of financial surveillance has to date not received sufficient consideration, while it affects (the privacy of) anyone with a bank account. The article asks: is it ethically justifiable that transaction information is declared suspect, investigated, and shared nationally and internationally, without the individual or entity concerned officially being notified and legally named a suspect?

This case-study is not only relevant for the study of finance/security, AML/CFT and financial surveillance, but also to policy makers and the broader public who merit an understanding of how their financial behaviour is being surveilled.