Author : Edward R. Maguire
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791487903
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)
Book Synopsis Organizational Structure in American Police Agencies by : Edward R. Maguire
Download or read book Organizational Structure in American Police Agencies written by Edward R. Maguire and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although most large police organizations perform the same tasks, there is tremendous variation in how individual organizations are structured. To account for this variation, author Edward R. Maguire develops a new theory that attributes the formal structures of large municipal police agencies to the contexts in which they are embedded. This theory finds that the relevant features of an organization's context are its size, age, technology, and environment. Using a database representing nearly four hundred of the nation's largest municipal police agencies, Maguire develops empirical measures of police organizations and their contexts and then uses these measures in a series of structural equation models designed to test the theory. Ultimately, police organizations are shown to be like other types of organizations in many ways but are also shown to be unique in a number of respects.