Organizational Structure in American Police Agencies: Context, Complexity, and Control

A new theory accounts for the characteristics of individual police departments.

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 ...