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40 J. Crime & Just. 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/jlcmadjc40 and id is 1 raw text is: JOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE, 2017 Routled e VOL. 40, NO. 1, 1-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2017.1281490 Taylor & Francis Group EDITORIAL Introduction to the special issue on police organizations Nearly two centuries ago, the British Parliament established the legal basis forthe London Metropolitan Police Department by passing the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 (Klockars 1985; Uchida 1997). The department's first commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, faced the extensive task of creat- ing an operational body capable of preventing crime.They decided on what would become historically critical matters such as uniforms, equipment, guiding principles, and the division of labor. According to Critchley's history of the London police (1967), It was decided to divide the Metropolitan district into seventeen police divisions each containing 165 men, making a grand total of nearly 3,000 ... Each division was to be put in charge of an officer entitled'superintendent: under whom were to be four inspectors and sixteen sergeants ... Each sergeant had control of nine constables (51). Interestingly, the choice to structure the'New Police'geographically (referred to as spatial complexity today) and to organize it vertically (referred to as vertical or hierarchical complexity) was done so without the benefit of a science of organizations. For most of the 1800s, the very period when police agencies were emerging in cities in England, the United States, and elsewhere, writers focused primarily on the challenges associated with industrialization such as labor shortages and the lack of skilled workers (Wren 1972). Two centuries later, the story is quite different. As the articles in this special issue show, not only has a field of organizational theory and behavior developed, the organization itself has also emerged as a critical focal point in policing research. The roots of organizational theory and behavior are often traced back to three scholars writing around the turn of the twentieth century in different parts of the world, Frederick Taylor (1913), Max Weber (1946), and Henri Fayol (1949).1 Through discussions of scientific management, bureaucracy, and administrative management, respectively, they offered prescriptions for the best way to structure and supervise work. Gulick (1937,1) referred to these collective principles as a'theory of organization. Just 15 years later, noted organizations scholar Herbert Simon (1952) offered a much broader definition of'organization theory; including not only the structural features of organizations but also internal processes such as power, decision-making, motivation, and culture (1132-1139; see also Starbuck 2003). Since mid-century, however, organization scholars have adopted a more precise nomenclature to identify particular study areas (Starbuck 2003). Organizational theory refers to the body of literature addressing the organization as a whole - a macro-level approach (Porter, Lawler, and Hackman 1975; Scott and Davis 2007;Tompkins 2005).Organizational theory researchers typically examine and explain variation across organizations and study interrelationships between agencies. For instance, do agency structural characteristics affect department-level use of force rates (Smith 2004; Willits and Nowacki 2014)? Why is innovation likely to occur in some departments more than others (Morabito 2008; Skogan and Hartnett 2005; Weisburd and Lum 2005)? In contrast, organizational behavior focuses on the indi- vidual within the organizational context, or a micro-level approach (Porter, Lawler, and Hackman 1975). Organizational behavioral researchers examine the informal organization, workgroups, and culture as well as the effects of the organization on individual behavior, values, and attitudes. Do officers accept new reforms (Morabito, Watson, and Draine 2013)? How can the organization encourage officers to engage in certain behaviors (Johnson 2009, 2010; Mastrofski, Ritti, and Snipes 1994). After successfully proposing the idea of a special issue on police organizations to the Journal of CrimeandJustice's editor, Mike Leiber, we approached scholars in the field who had done or were doing © 2017 Midwestern Criminal Justice Association

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