During the 1990s the urban became an important “institutional laboratory” for state‐initiated policy experiments to address the social costs and political repercussions of economic polarisation and social exclusion associated with neo‐liberalism. One such policy experiment has been neo‐communitarianism, emphasising the contribution of the “third sector” to improving social welfare and reinvigorating a sense of civil society. Focusing on the UK, I examine the background to and implications of the emergence of a neo‐communitarian strategy under the “new” Labour government, which came to power in 1997. First, I consider the repositioning of the third sector within contemporary policy discourse as a result of the Labour government's programme of welfare reforms and Prime Minister Blair's “Third Way” political philosophy, which attempts to combine neo‐liberalism with a neo‐communitarian stance of stressing the importance of civil society for social cohesion. Then, I draw on Foucauldian notions of governmentality to examine how Labour's neo‐communitarian agenda has involved a fundamental reconfiguration of the governance of the third sector, centred on the creation of government–voluntary sector “compacts” at national and local levels. These compacts are of strategic importance for the restructuring of the UK third sector and so the local implications of such restructuring are then considered. In particular, case study evidence from Glasgow is used to critically evaluate government claims that the third sector can contribute to the “reinvigoration of civic life” by highlighting the importance of the internal characteristics and political environment of local third sector organisations for the differential development of social capital and citizenship.

Against a background of concerns about the ability of advanced capitalist states to meet the welfare needs of their populations, the erosion of citizenship and declining social capital, voluntarism is increasingly presented in political and academic discourses as a ‘panacea’ to social and political problems facing liberal democracies. Building on human geographers' established interests in this field, this paper focuses on contemporary developments in voluntarism within advanced capitalist states. It examines how national programmes of welfare reform in the UK and the USA are affecting voluntary organizations and their ability to contribute to the welfare of local populations, and how place-based differences in the nature and meaning of voluntary activity are impacting on strategies to promote active citizenship and social capital. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the empirical, methodological and theoretical limitations of current geographical perspectives on voluntarism in order to suggest ways in which research in this field can move forward.

While contemporary social and political theory views voluntary activity as key to the promotion of active citizenship, this paper argues that the connections between voluntary welfare associations and citizenship are more complex than these discourses allow. Drawing on research undertaken in the Scottish city of Glasgow and debates about an increased bifurcation of the voluntary sector, it considers how the different settings within which voluntary welfare associations are organised can act to facilitate or constrain the development of active citizenship. In doing so, it focuses on the tensions voluntary associations face between organisational growth and restructuring in order to provide good quality services, on the one hand, and the positive engagement with volunteers and empowerment of local people on the other. It demonstrates how the drive towards organisational growth can result in disempowerment and the promotion of passive citizenship; however, it is argued, that this is not a necessary outcome. Organisations can and do address the need to deliver professional and complex welfare services while remaining committed to active participation.

IntroductionAgainst a background of growing global and local concerns about the political, economic, and social problems confronting advanced capitalist nations, the last ten years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in the role of voluntary associations as a possible`panacea' to`the crisis of post-Fordism' (Brown et al, 2000, pages 54^59). Faced with fears about declining political participation, anxieties about meeting welfare needs, and worries about the nature and meaning of citizenship, there is evidence of increasing state-initiated moves to develop the role and responsibilities of voluntary associations. This is particularly evident in the United Kingdom, which provides the immediate context for this paper. From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, successive Conservative governments encouraged the``devolution of service responsibilities to voluntary organisations in order to save money and give consumers more choice'' (Deakin, 1995; Wolch, 1990, page 94). With the election of a Labour government in 1997, the momentum behind developing the role of the voluntary sector has continued as part of`New Labour's' programme of welfare reforms (Clarke et al, 2000;Powell, 1999). This has found expression in a variety of recent policy initiatives, ranging from voluntary sector`compacts' that contain commitments by government and the voluntary sector to improve the ways they work with each other (Lewis, 1999) to an Active Communities Initiative designed to increase public involvement in community life through volunteering, and to the introduction of new tax benefits for charitable organisations (Kendall, 2000). The cumulative product of these developments has prompted researchers to observe that,``From being a shadowy enclave at

Responding to reports of missing persons represents one of the biggest demands on the resources of police organisations. In the UK, for example, it is estimated that over 300,000 missing persons incidents are recorded by the police each year which means that a person in the UK is recorded missing by the police approximately every two minutes. However, there is a complex web of behaviours that surround the phenomenon of missing persons which can make it difficult to establish whether someone's disappearance is 'intentional' or 'unintentional' or whether they might be at risk of harm from themselves or others. Drawing on a set of missing person case reconstructions and interviews with the officers involved with these cases, this paper provides insights into the different stages of the investigative process and some of the key influences which shape the trajectory of a missing person's investigation. In particular it highlights the complex interplay between actions which are 'ordered and conditioned' by a procedural discourse around how missing persons investigations should be conducted, and the narratives that officers construct about how they approach investigations which are often shaped by a mix of police craft , 'science' and 'reputational' issues.

As a consequence of the 2013 police reforms in the Netherlands and Scotland, the police in both countries have made a shift towards a fundamentally different kind of organisation: the Abstract Police. The increasing abstract character resulted in changes in the internal and external relations of the police. The police became more formalised and dependent on rigid systems and system information. Citizens and communities became more at a distance. Gradual and long-term processes may have similar consequences. For that reason it may be expected that the increasingly abstract character of the police may also be found elsewhere.This paper puts forward the thesis that over the past years the police in many Western European countries have made a shift towards a fundamentally different kind of organisation, a change with far-reaching consequences, but which have remained unnoticed until now. To understand this process, we introduce a new concept, Abstract Police. With this concept we mean that, both internally and externally, the police have become more at a distance, more impersonal and formal, less direct, and more decontextualised. The abstract police are also less dependent on personal knowledge of officer(s), as this is increasingly being replaced by 'system knowledge', framed within the 'logic' and categorisations of computer data systems (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997).This break with traditional ways of organising the police can especially be found in countries such as the Netherlands and Scotland, where police reforms in 2013 have resulted in considerable organisational scale enlargement and highly centralised national forces Fyfe, 2014, 2015). The main arguments for these reforms were to improve the effectiveness of the police (especially with regard to transregional problems), partially also their efficiency, and to find solutions for problems of organisational fragmentation (Fyfe and Scott, 2013;Terpstra, 2013). As we try to show in this paper, the rise of the abstract police can partially be seen as a significant unintended outcome of these reforms. However, more gradual and long-term social developments have also contributed to this new kind of police organisation. Seen from that perspective, the 2013 police reforms in the Netherlands and Scotland have mainly strengthened and accelerated this process, making it more prominent than elsewhere. This implies that it may be assumed that increasingly abstract police forces can also be found in other Western European countries, perhaps as yet in more modest and rudimentary forms.We expect that in the future the abstract character of the police will gain in importance and have far-reaching consequences for the relations between members of the police services, for police work, and for the relations with citizens and local communities. It may also have an impact on the dominating views about what is 'good' policing and about police professionalism and leadership. For that reason we believe that the abstract police is also an important concept for reflecting on future d...

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Do we stand before a rising tide of incivility, of disrespect? Or, is this the latest moral panic? Examining (the UK) New Labour's approach to incivility in the city, as manifest in the respect and urban renaissance agendas, this paper argues that the current zero-tolerance approach to incivility is based upon a confused understanding of anti-social behaviour and contradictory evidence of its occurrence and impact. Ultimately, it is proposed that a version of urbanity that endeavours to enforce respect and create the respectable city will prove counter-productive. Rather, respect and the respectful city require tolerance of, and engagement with, incivility.