Mind the implementation gap?:Police reform and local policing in the Netherlands and Scotland

In 2013 the governments of the Netherlands and Scotland established national police forces, replacing a tradition of largely autonomous regional police organizations. In both jurisdictions, these radical reforms have raised concerns about the consequences of these national police structures for local policing and for relationships with local communities and local government. Drawing on documentary sources and interview material from each jurisdiction and informed by insights from the policy implementation literature, the key question addressed in this article is how has the legislation that created the new national police forces been put into effect at a local level? Focusing on the impact on the governance, organization and delivery of local policing, the article reveals how the implementation in both jurisdictions involves interpretation and discretion by multiple actors so that gaps are emerging between the national ‘policy promises’ set out in the legislation and the ‘policy products’ experienced in local contexts

Differences in muscle cross-sectional area and strength between elite senior and college Olympic weight lifters

Like elsewhere in Europe, a discourse that is hostile to migrants in general and Muslims in particular has emerged in Dutch politics and media. Can we understand this Dutch migrant-hostile discourse as a kind of racism, i.e. cultural racism? The authors studied this discourse (Dutch political and media texts) and its impact on the lived experiences of Dutch Moroccan Muslims in work settings (21 interviews). They found little evidence of the concept of cultural racism as long as it maintains notions of biological or genetic hierarchy, while it becomes redundant once it abandons such notions. Alternative concepts like cultural essentialism and cultural fundamentalism are sufficient to understand this discourse as well as its impact on Moroccan Muslims’ lived experiences. Cultural fundamentalism has become successful because it belongs to a different category than racism