In Britain, substantial cuts in police budgets alongside controversial handling of incidents such as politically sensitive enquiries, public disorder and relations with the media have recently triggered much debate about public knowledge and trust in the police. To date, however, little academic research has investigated how knowledge of police performance impacts citizens’ trust. We address this long-standing lacuna by exploring citizens’ trust before and after exposure to real performance data in the context of a British police force. The results reveal (...) that being informed of performance data affects citizens’ trust significantly. Furthermore, direction and degree of change in trust are related to variations across the different elements of the reported performance criteria. Interestingly, the volatility of citizens’ trust is related to initial performance perceptions, and citizens’ intentions to support the police do not always correlate with their cognitive and affective trust towards the police. In discussing our findings, we explore the implications of how being transparent with performance data can both hinder and be helpful in developing citizens’ trust towards a public organisation such as the police. From our study, we pose a number of ethical challenges that practitioners face when deciding what data to highlight, to whom, and for what purpose. (shrink)

A growing literature addresses the ethical implications of electronic surveillance at work, frequently assigning ethical priority to values such as the right to privacy. This paper suggests that, in practice, the issues are sociologically more complex than some accounts suggest. This is because many workplace electronic technologies not designed or deployed for surveillance purposes nevertheless embody surveillance capacity. This capacity may not be immediately obvious to participants or lend itself to simple deployment. Moreover, because of their primary functions, such systems (...) embody a range of other features which are potentially beneficial for those utilising them. As a result, more complex ethical dilemmas emerge as different desired goods compete for priority in the decision-making of individuals and groups. From a sociological point of view this raises interesting questions about the way ethical dilemmas arise in the context of the ongoing social relationships of work. The paper explores these issues using data from a study of the development and implementation of a computerised instructional package in a maternity setting. This medical setting illustrates clearly how seeking to assign ethical priority to a particular concern, such as the right to privacy, cannot but oversimplify the real day to day dilemmas encountered by participants. At the same time,the example of the instructional package demonstrates that it is difficult to predict in advance what ethical issues will be raised by technologies that almost always turn out to have a range of capabilities beyond those envisaged in their original design specification. (shrink)