Three-day, 40 hour, compressed work weeks are atypical in American labor circles. They are especially rare among law enforcement agencies. Positive and negative attributes of compressed work weeks have remained largely untested and particular to specific industries. This case study is an evaluation of the attitudinal and productivity effects of a three-day work week schedule as implemented by the Bexar County Sheriff's Department, Patrol Division, responsible for policing unincorporated areas surrounding San Antonio, Texas. The findings of this research are consistent with previous evaluations of compressed work weeks in private industry. Positive impacts on both productivity measures and the self-reported attitudes of patrol officers are found. Furthermore, the quality of policing provided to citizens did not decline. These data lead to the conclusion that a three day compressed work week with 13 hour and 20 minute work days is a work hour allocation strategy that may be successfully applied to policing agencies with benefits to both the organization and line patrol officers.
Given the importance of contextual influences on the diffusion of innovations, the theories and methodologies that take context into account are increasingly relevant to research and practice. One such approach, the systems of innovation approach, considers context to be a cascading set of effects arising from various participants and innovations surrounding the production and diffusion of a focal innovation. Based on this approach, we focus on a public program involved in the diffusion of e-business systems to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). E-business systems are complex innovations, and the contextual influences are particularly important here, because SMEs often lack the knowledge and resources to strategically adopt, modify, and use these innovations. Using the systems of innovation approach, we examined the contexts around public program interventions with an SME in order to explain their form and influence on e-business adoption processes. The empirical findings suggest that many public programs fail to effectively deliver interventions because program contexts restrict program personnel's ability to completely assess and respond to the range of adopter needs. While some aspects of the program contexts can be altered by the program directors, others are further removed and are currently beyond our collective control at this point-in-time. The implications for diffusion research and practice are discussed.
This research investigates a relevant gap in the academic literature on enterprise policy—namely, the nature of discretion and the causes that permit it during policy implementation. We found in our case studies that the programme workers who deliver policies exerted considerable discretion. Further evidence suggests that the main influences on what we call informal discretion—discretion clearly outside programme objectives—include the design of programme evaluation and audit as well as the influence of evaluators and auditors in these processes. We also found evidence of formal discretion—discretion allowed within programme objectives—through broad and ambiguous policies and procedures. Our findings and theoretical framework illustrate how discretion cannot be so easily curtailed by the market logics and strict rules of the new public management practice. Instead, we conclude that the possibility of refraining policy statements and evaluation as a learning process, from programme successes and failures, would transform our approach to policy implementation. This would require a number of institutional and incentive changes for policy actors and the public.
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