The limits of the decentred state: the case of policing insurance claims fraud

Existing research clearly shows that the public–private divide is continuously being challenged, recast and transformed. However, this article argues that a sharp distinction between public and private continues to operate as an important norm for professionals involved in the investigation of insurance claims fraud in Sweden. It shows how power within private insurance companies and the police authority is organized around the public–private divide, which is in turn mobilized to justify repression and to give investigations legitimacy. The article indicates that the formal public–private distinction is far more thoroughly maintained than is suggested by the existing literature. Rather than challenging the centrality of state power, private insurers and the police construct, maintain and have a stake in the reproduction of a state‐centric monopoly of crime control.     

Model Hong Kong malls and their development in mainland China: consumer iconicity and the trans/national capitalist class

Relational geographies of capital and consumption between Hong Kong and mainland China have been forming through tourism engagement in Hong Kong and the development of model Hong Kong malls in China. This analysis of urban restructuring for the consumer economy identifies how landmark Hong Kong malls are reproduced in major cities of China by networks of Hong Kong property firms and mainland elites. Adapting Leslie Sklair's formulation of architectural iconicity in the culture‐ideology of consumerism, this economic relationship, which restructures urban space, constructs iconic built forms and develops Chinese consumerism, marks hegemonic opportunities of a national capitalist class, suggesting how Chinese state capitalism and its Hong Kong networks limit and incrementally engage transnational capital while instantiating Hong Kong‐style consumer iconicity. New malls in mixed‐use developments in China often occupy sites of historical markets and thus affirm Sklair's prediction that iconic architecture increasingly proclaims consumer space while claiming historic forms of public space.     

The rural space in Israel in search of renewed identity: The case of the moshav

This paper aims to describe and explain the changes which have taken place in the rural areas of Israel by focussing on a particular type of community—the moshav, which is a planned smallholders’ settlement, based on family farms and legally organized as a cooperative society. An analysis of the changes that have taken place in the moshav in the past few decades reveals a process of rural restructuring, similar to that which is occurring in many developed countries. New economic activities have replaced farming as sources of income, and newcomers, mostly of urban origin, have invaded rural communities in search of a better quality of life. These changes derive from a combination of structural changes in agriculture, changing government policies and cumulative decisions of rural households. The result is a more heterogeneous moshav—physically, economically and socially, and growing regional, inter-village and intra-village disparities. These developments have a direct impact on the organizational structure of the moshav, its environmental qualities and its exchange relations with the urban sector. As part of the ongoing process of change the moshav is gradually losing some of its unique features, which formed the basis for its identity as a special type of rural community. This leads to the question of whether the moshav will be able to develop a new identity as a distinct type of rural community, or turn into a suburban or urban community. The answer will depend largely on the direction taken by government policy.     

Beyond deportation: researching the control of outward mobility using a space of flows logic

Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that ‘deportation’ can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirectional, territorial and wholly controlled by individual states, but as a range of diverse practices used by states (and sometimes undermined by other parties) to try to control the circulation of people within a dynamic supra‐national space. By focusing on ‘mobility control continuums’ operating in selected countries at the peripheries of Europe, we capture the dynamics of state intervention in trans‐border flows and thereby contribute towards developing concepts and methodologies for the criminological study of border controls that are ‘sensitive to the complexities of the global’ (Aas 2007).     

Urban growth,policy and planning of public space

Under the pressure of the urbanizing tsunami, town planning and urban policies in Spain have given a residual treatment to public spaces in recent urban development. This work proposes a brief but comprehensive sociological analysis about social and morphological traits of public spaces – like paradigmatic social space – in order to show the city's irreplaceable role in citizen socialization processes. The network of streets and places, the city in this sense, make up the scenes of man's sociability. In this perspective, planning ought to be geared towards and for the city and redeem a civic impetus that pursues developing the whole instead of subjecting it.     

Police Crime: The Criminal Behavior of Sworn Law Enforcement Officers

This essay examines the criminological conceptualizations and research on police crime, that is, the criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers. It starts with an overview of the conceptualization of police crime as it relates to organizational and scholarly perspectives of social deviance. Police deviance is often conceptualized to include various misconduct, corruption, and/or crime committed by police organizations and police officers. This essay focuses on police crime resulting in the arrest of a sworn law enforcement officer and is organized within a conceptual framework that incorporates five types of police crime: sex‐related police crime, alcohol‐related police crime, drug‐related police crime, violence‐related police crime, and profit‐motivated police crime.     

Crime, policing and social order: on the expressive nature of public confidence in policing

Public confidence in policing is receiving increasing attention from UK social scientists and policy-makers. The criminal justice system relies on legitimacy and consent to an extent unlike other public services: public support is vital if the police and other criminal justice agencies are to function both effectively and in accordance with democratic norms. Yet we know little about the forms of social perception that stand prior to public confidence and police legitimacy. Drawing on data from the 2003/2004 British Crime Survey and the 2006/2007 London Metropolitan Police Safer Neighbourhoods Survey, this paper suggests that people think about their local police in ways less to do with the risk of victimization (instrumental concerns about personal safety) and more to do with judgments of social cohesion and moral consensus (expressive concerns about neighbourhood stability, cohesion and loss of collective authority). Across England and Wales the police may not primarily be seen as providers of a narrow sense of personal security, held responsible for crime and safety. Instead the police may stand as symbolic 'moral guardians' of social stability and order, held responsible for community values and informal social controls. We also present evidence that public confidence in the London Metropolitan Police Service expresses broader social anxieties about long-term social change. We finish our paper with some thoughts on a sociological analysis of the cultural place of policing: confidence (and perhaps ultimately the legitimacy of the police) might just be wrapped up in broader public concerns about social order and moral consensus.     

Children's experience of public space

Children and young people regard the external physical environment as important for their needs. Their use of space varies according to age and circumstance and includes designated play and leisure facilities as well as other informal areas within their neighbourhoods. However, children have little influence over the development of public space as they do not have the opportunity to contribute their views to local processes. This paper explores children's and young people's views and experience of public space in regeneration areas. It considers whether children's perspectives are accurately reflected in public policy. It draws on primary research with young people aged ten to 14 years and representatives from local organisations in a disadvantaged urban area in Scotland.     

The social order of transnational migration markets

The ‘infrastructural turn’ in labour migration studies has shifted attention away from the experiences of migrants to the role of public authorities and private actors in facilitating migrant mobilities. As part of a broader turn towards studying transnational mobilities rather than immigration and settlement, this research shows that the formalization of transnational labour migration has made mobility both freer and more difficult. In this article, I reinterpret mobility infrastructures from a market sociological perspective. Transnational labour migration, I argue, is more clearly conceptualized as the organized ‘making’ of cross‐border labour markets. Moreover, from a market sociological perspective the construction of cross‐border labour exchanges is at the same time a question of how the uncertainties inherent in market exchanges are coordinated by market actors. In its focus on how exchanges across borders are possible at all, a market sociological perspective makes note of the conflicting interests, power imbalances and uncertainties that must be handled for a social order of transnational migration markets to emerge. An important question concerns whether alternatives to the less regulated neo‐liberal market order that is evident in most migration corridors are possible and under what conditions. With reference to the challenges facing the regulation of cross‐border labour markets, in my conclusion, I map an agenda for future research.     

Incorporation and Gated Communities in the Greater Metro-Los Angeles Region as a Model of Privatization of Residential Communities

ABSTRACT

The privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing, redesign, and policing of public parks and plazas, the development of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that monitor and control local streets and parks, and the transfer of public air rights for the building of corporate plazas ostensibly open to the public. In the suburbs, privatization also takes the form of conservation easements that restrict access to public lands, the creation of shopping malls and new town centers relocated within these private commercial developments, and the building of gated residential communities. Accompanying this expansion of private interests are changes in strategies of governance and regional differences in how local governments and residents are encouraging private encroachment on public space. This article focuses this third set of privatization practices by discussing how gated communities manipulate municipal and town planning laws to control public space and tax dollars. To accomplish this task, I discuss the emergence of gated communities as a new form of privatization of urban/suburban space and then tease out the legal and institutional underpinnings of this spatial governance. The geography of gated communities in greater metro-Los Angeles region and their use of the strategy of incorporation to capture public taxes for private use is employed as a model for understanding the future of gating in the United States. The Los Angeles model is then compared to current gating patterns in urban and suburban gated communities in New York and Texas. These manipulations of private land use controls in the United States are not necessarily new, but with gating there is an accelerating trend away from governmental and public control of land use toward an increased reliance on privately created controls. The consequences of this shift toward privatization of land use control is an impoverishment of the public realm and access to public resources, especially public space.     

Metrolingual multitasking and spatial repertoires: ‘Pizza mo two minutes coming’

Drawing on data from two restaurants in Sydney and Tokyo, this paper describes the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks and social space are intertwined in terms of metrolingual multitasking. Rather than the demolinguistic enumeration of mappable multilingualism or the language‐to‐language or language‐to‐person focus of translingualism, metrolingualism focuses on everyday language practices and their relations to urban space. In order to capture the dynamism of the urban linguistic landscape, this paper explores this relationship between metrolingual multitasking – the ways in which linguistic resources, activities and urban space are bound together – and spatial repertoires – the linguistic resources available in a particular place – arguing that a focus on resources, repertoires, space, place and activity helps us understand how multilingualism from below operates in complex urban places.     

Everyday territories: homelessness,outreach work and city space

This article develops a situational approach to understanding urban public life and, in particular, the production of urban territories. Our aim is to examine the ways in which city space might be understood as comprising multiple, shifting, mobile and rhythmed territories. We argue that such territories are best understood through attending to their everyday production and negotiation, rather than handling territory as an a priori construct. We develop this argument from the particular case of the street‐level politics of homelessness and street care. The experience of street homelessness and the provision of care in the public spaces of the city is characterised by precarious territorial claims made and lost. We describe some of the ways in which care work with rough sleepers is itself precarious; ‘homeless’, in lacking a distinct setting in which it might get done. Indeed, outreach work takes place within and affirms homeless territories. The affirmation of territory is shown to be central to the relationship developed between the workers and their rough sleeping clients. We also show, however, the ways in which outreach workers operate on territory not their own, twice over. Outreach work is precarious in that it is practised within, and can run counter to, other territorial productions in which the experience of urban need and the work and politics of care are entangled. In sum, this article aims to move beyond static and binary understandings by developing a mobile and situational approach to city space which recognises the intensive yet overlooked work of territorial production.     

Neighborhood Organizations and Resident Assistance to Police1

Police and scholars note that successful crime fighting requires police and residents to “co‐produce” public safety. However, residents are often reluctant to get involved in policing initiatives or even report crimes they witness. One possible means of stimulating resident involvement in crime‐control activities is through neighborhood organizations. This research, conducted on 1,313 residents of 42 neighborhoods in western South Carolina, investigates whether neighborhood organization participation increases the likelihood of assisting police in crime‐control efforts. Results indicate that organization participants are more likely to assist police than are nonparticipants, even after controlling for social cohesion, perceptions of police legitimacy, various policing strategies, fear of crime, and demographic factors.     

城市生态绿化项目的政府投资方式改革——基于绿地建设与房产开发商的利益互动关系研究

通过对公共产品的内涵分析表明，仅由政府提供公共产品经常会出现不经济现象；只要解决外部性问题，公共产品是可以由私人提供的。以上海公共绿地为例，在分析目前公共绿地政府投资方式的基础上，研究绿地建设与房产开发商的利益互动关系，探讨城市绿地外部效应内部化的投资方式改革，提出房产与绿地联合开发建议，以期减轻政府建设城市绿地的资金压力，为实现城市公共绿地的最优投资提供理论上的依据。     

From smiling to smirking? 3D printing,upgrading and the restructuring of global value chains

3D printing (3DP) has been heralded as a revolutionary technology that can alter the way production is organized across time and space – with important redistributive effects on geography and size of production activities. In this article, we examine the impacts that a widespread adoption of 3DP could have on restructuring, upgrading and distributing value added along manufacturing global value chains (GVC) – with brief examples from the aerospace and automotive industries. We highlight two possible scenarios for GVCs – a complementarity scenario of 3DP and traditional manufacturing overlapping, which would reproduce power relations in GVCs and the current distribution of value added in a ‘smiling curve’; and a substitution scenario of 3DP partly or fully superseding traditional manufacturing, which would have more transformational effects in terms of ‘rebundling’ activities, regionalizing or localizing GVCs, and flattening the smiling curve into a ‘smirk’.     

Consequences of governance restructuring for quality of urban living in the transformation era in Beijing: A view of job accessibility

One of the major issues concerning present-day public policy in a transitional and developing country is its ability to enhance the quality of urban living and individual social well-being in the context of rapid urban growth. A dramatic decline in overall job accessibility due to increases in commuting time is already a serious problem affecting the quality of urban living in Beijing. Understanding the impact of governance restructuring on overall job accessibility is of primary importance if politicians are to make policy innovations in development management. This paper applies the institutionalist approach to analyse the impact of governance restructuring on job accessibility. The analysis shows that current governance restructuring has a negative effect on overall job accessibility due to competition between different local governments increasing the degree of spatial fragmentation; revenue-enhancing development introducing constraints affecting the local jobs-housing balance; and the coexistence of the old planning system alongside the new market system leading to a fragmented land-use right transfer mechanism, intensifying scattered and low-density development. With respect to future policy, stronger municipal development management might be one direction in implementing public policy to enhance overall job accessibility, insofar as it addresses the negative impact of fragmented development management in the current transformation process.     

In Search of Housing: Urban Families in Rural Contexts*

Researchers have been following a trend posited by the renowned anthropologist Janet Fitchen, which examines the increasing movement of low‐income people to rural communities drawn not necessarily by labor market forces, but by the characteristics and amenities found in rural towns. This study adds to that literature by focusing on the ways in which public housing availability, changes in housing policy, and rural economic restructuring create opportunities for low‐income families to relocate from urban to rural communities in search of affordable housing. Data collected from an ethnographic sample addressed the following questions: (1) what motivates individuals and families to leave their urban neighborhoods and relocate to rural towns and (2) what challenges do individuals and families have in sustaining stable housing in rural communities? Two main sets of literature relevant to this discussion include studies of patterns of residential mobility and explanations of rural economic restructuring. Both form the conceptual approach of this article by offering a framework to better understand the housing choices and behaviors of low‐income families and the contexts in which these actions are situated.     

Policing the Homeless: An Ethical Dilemma

The homeless challenge police to reconsider their social role, the constituency they serve, the alliances they should form, and the activities they should engage in. This paper considers three conceptions of the police role — law enforcement, order maintenance, and social peacekeeping — and indicates how they impinge on treatment of the homeless. The moral challenge posed by the homeless favors the peacekeeping conception, but the inadequate resources available to police make it essential that they consider alliances with social service organizations, and even some form of collective lobbying or public conscientization.     

Organizational communication and the symbolic construction of police murder investigations

This paper draws upon a range of empirical data to consider the ways in which police murder investigations are symbolically constructed, both within and outside of the police organization. It is argued that a range of communicative formats serve to produce the activities associated with police murder investigations in a way that serves to legitimate the police function to both members of the public and police officers alike. A particular emphasis is placed upon understanding the connections between informal and formal communications, and the instrumental and expressive objectives that variously underpin them.     

Community organization moderates the effect of alcohol outlet density on violence

There is growing evidence from multiple disciplines that alcohol outlet density is associated with community levels of assault. Based on the theoretical and empirical literatures on social organization and crime, we tested the hypothesis that the association between alcohol outlet density and neighbourhood violence rates is moderated by social organization. Using geocoded police data on assaults, geocoded data on the location of alcohol outlets, and controlling for several structural factors thought to be associated with violence rates, we tested this hypothesis employing negative binomial regression with our sample of 298 block groups in Cincinnati. Our results revealed direct effects of alcohol outlet density and social organization on assault density, and these effects held for different outlet types (i.e., off‐premise, bars, restaurants) and levels of harm (i.e., simple and aggravated assaults). More importantly, we found that the strength of the outlet‐assault association was significantly weaker in more socially organized communities. Subsequent analyses by level of organization revealed no effects of alcohol outlet density on aggravated assaults in organized block groups, but significant effects in disorganized block groups. We found no association between social (dis)organization and outlet density. These results clarify the community‐level relationship between alcohol outlets and violence and have important implications for municipal‐level alcohol policies.