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Focuses on three management developments for improving organizational performance, with specific reference to fire services. Claims to have applications for most organizations, including rescue services, emergency and disaster planning units. Suggests that opening minds and accepting new information will enable these services to access the benefits of benchmarking and teaming. Provides a literary review, and considers the subject areas as part of an individual vocational study of 15 organizations in three countries (the UK, the USA and Denmark).

LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER : BEFORE Opening, as we do, a new volume of THE LIBRARY WORLD, especially as with it we reach the venerable age of sixty‐one, does suggest retrospective and prospective view. The magazine is the oldest amongst independent library journals, though others existed before 1899 in different forms or under other titles than those by which they are known to‐day. When at the end of last century it was felt that utterances were needed about libraries, unfettered by uncritical allegiance to associations or coteries, librarianship was a vessel riding upon an official sea of complacency so far as its main organisation was concerned. It was in the first tide, so far as public libraries were concerned, of Carnegie gifts of buildings, not yet however at the full flood. The captains were men of the beginnings of the library voyage; who were still guided themselves by the methods and modes of the men who believed in libraries, yet feared what the public might do in its use of them. Hence the indicator, meant to show, as its name implies, what books were available, but even more to secure them from theft, and to preserve men and women from the violent mental reactions they would suffer from close contact with large numbers of books. There were rebels of course. Six years earlier James Duff Brown has turned his anvil shaped building in Clerkenwell into a safeguarded open access library in which he actually allowed people, properly vetted, to enter and handle their own property. This act of faith was a great one, because within a mile or so some 5,000 books had been lost from the Bishopgate Institute Library, which has open shelves, too, not “safeguarded”. Brown's “cave of library chaos” as a well‐known Chairman, who by one visit was convinced of its good sense and practicability, called it, focused the attention of scores of librarians—so much so that Brown had to beg them to keep away for about a year, so that the method might be better judged after sufficient trial. It also focused the attention of the inventors of the indicator, who, presumably, had more than a benevolent interest in its sales. So there was war against this threat and for several years this childish contention raged at conferences, in private conversations amongst library workers, and in letters to the press aimed to convict Brown and all his satellites of encouraging dishonesty, mental confusion and other maladies public. Hence Brown, L. Stanley Jast, William Fortune and others initiated this journal to teach librarians and library committees how libraries were to be run. That, in extreme brevity, is our genesis. For sixty years it has encouraged voices, new and old, orthodox or unorthodox, who had something to say, or could give a new face to old things, to use its pages. Brown was its first honorary Editor, and with some assistance in the later stages remained so for the thirteen years he had yet to live. Nearly every librarian of distinction in his day has at some time or other contributed to these pages. So much of our past may be said and we hope will be allowed.

The effective school paradigm has dominated educational and political thinking concerning the nature of schools for the last two decades. This paradigm asserts that it is the characteristics of schools that are the important factors that influence academic achievement. It is a perspective that is the opposite of the view that was widely held in the 1960s and early 1970s; which placed a much greater emphasis on the social context. Explores weaknesses in the effective school paradigm, considers how adequately the effective school paradigm explains recent developments such as the events at Hackney Downs in the London Borough of Hackney, and stimulates a debate on how the social environment affects what happens inside schools.

Contemporary views concerning the management of change in the literature on organizational theory deal with the issue of change on two levels. The first is descriptive and seeks to perceive and list manifestations of change. The second is analytical and attempts to categorize change in terms of abstract concepts. Aims to apply a dialectical analysis to the nature of change in organizations in order to highlight the fact that social class as an issue in management theory has become marginalized. Intends to argue that the application of laissez‐faire economics to welfare provision, especially in the sphere of education, is continuing to result in an unequitable system. As educationalists, if we seriously wish to provide an equitable system of education we need to develop a critique of how programmes of legislation, not just education, but also in areas such as housing and social services, are funded for specific purposes by central government. It is inadvisable to assume that these programmes will have the achievement of equality of provisions as a central objective.

Introduction All people of responsibility in marketing need to plan for the future. The marketing manager has to ensure that his company has the resources and products that will be needed in the 1980s and beyond. The marketing educator is training the marketing executives of the future. To do this they need to be aware of the direction of change of the total environment in which they operate and the organisations in which they work. The alternative to planned change toward a target in an identified future is to drift aimlessly or to make changes to suit crises as they arise.