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A report on the use of audio‐visual group systems to give instruction in engineering theory to first year apprentices by the Head of Educational Technology, Bromsgrove College of Further Education.

Richard Cox responds to the attacks by Nicolson Baker against the library community. Deals with each of Baker’s main points: that a lie was foisted on the public about the care of newspapers, the insidious destruction of original newspapers, the resultant loss of trust by the public in libraries and archives and a set of wrong priorities leading to the misguided microfilming and destruction of newspapers.

In this article Alec Hughes looks at interviewing, with a close concentration on appraisal and selection. This is an attempt to provide an improved service to readers, and could be provided for other film subject areas. Write to the editor and tell him whether you have found this article useful, and what other areas of film would interest you.

This article looks at the part played by programmed instruction and packaged training in preparing British industry — in particular the service industries — for the change to decimal currency. The change to the new currency was a non‐event, and was marked by the withdrawal from circulation twelve months before the original date of the old penny and threepenny piece. The almost complete absence of confusion and ill‐feeling on the part of the public derived to a great extent from the attitude and skill of the front‐line troops: the bus conductors, bank and GPO counter clerks, supermarket checkout girls and all those others involved in the critical tasks of cash‐handling, numerical recording and change giving. No doubt some people ascribed this achievement to the inherent ability of the British to keep a stiff upper lip in a crisis. As it happened there was no call for the Dunkirk spirit. Instead, most staff performed their duties with pre D‐Day assurance and efficiency. They were able to do so because they were well motivated and well trained. Administratively the training exercise had been, of necessity, massive. Moreover as a training problem decimalisation was unique in that there were no experienced practitioners in the subject matter. However, the trainers overcame all the problems. And it is our contention that where they did so to the best effect they succeeded by the use of training schemes and materials which were based upon the principles of programmed instruction. Such schemes may not all have included materials recognisably influenced by what one writer has called ‘the dreaded frame syndrome’! None the less — as will be shown — they were programmed in a clearly observable sense. Furthermore a study of the most comprehensive and carefully structured packages suggests, a priori, certain conclusions about the use of the media in large‐scale training which may be of general application.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate contrasting ways of tackling self-employment in the informal sector. Conventionally, the participation of the self-employed in the informal sector has been viewed as a rational economic decision taken when the expected benefits outweigh the costs, and thus enforcement authorities have sought to change the benefit-to-cost ratio by increasing the punishments and chances of being caught. Recently, however, neo-institutional theory has viewed such endeavor as a product of a lack of vertical trust (in government) and horizontal trust (in others) and pursued trust-building strategies to nurture voluntary compliance.

To evaluate these contrasting policy approaches, data are reported from special Eurobarometer survey 92.1 conducted in 2019 across 28 European countries (the 27 member states of the European Union and the United Kingdom) involving over 27,565 interviews.

Using probit regression analysis, the finding is that the likelihood of participation in informal self-employment is not associated with the level of expected punishments and chances of being caught, but is significantly associated with the level of vertical and horizontal trust, with a greater likelihood of participation in informal self-employment when there is lower vertical and horizontal trust.

The outcome is a call for state authorities to shift away from the use of repressive policy measures that increase the penalties and chances of being caught and toward trust-building strategies to nurture voluntary compliance. How this can be achieved is explored.

Evidence is provided to justify a shift toward seeking trust-building strategies by state authorities to engender voluntary compliance among the self-employed operating in the informal sector in Europe.

To transcend the long-standing debate regarding whether workers are driven into the informal economy by either their involuntary “exclusion” or voluntary “exit” from the formal economy, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the existence of a dual informal labour market composed of an exit-driven “upper tier” and an exclusion-driven “lower-tier” of informal workers, and to explore its policy implications.

To do so, data are reported from a 2015 survey of the informal economy conducted in South-East Europe involving 6,019 face-to-face interviews in Bulgaria, Croatia and FYR Macedonia.

Identifying a dual informal labour market with three exit-driven informal workers for every exclusion-driven informal worker, a multinomial logit regression analysis reveals that, compared to the exclusion-driven “lower tier”, the exit-driven “upper tier” is significantly more likely to be populated by the formally employed, retired and those not struggling financially. Participation is not affected by the perceived severity of penalties and likely risks of detection, but relative to those in the exclusion-driven “lower tier”, there is a significant correlation between those doing so for exit rationales and their lack of both horizontal trust and vertical trust in formal institutions.

The outcome is a call to transcend the conventional deterrence approach of increasing the penalties and risks of detection. Instead, to tackle those driven by exit rationales, tackling both the lack of horizontal trust that other citizens are operating in a compliant manner and the lack of vertical trust in formal institutions is advocated. To tackle exclusion-driven informal workers, meanwhile, a focus upon the macro-level economic and social conditions which lead to their participation is required.

This is the first paper to empirically evaluate the existence of a dual informal labour market and to evaluate its policy implications.

The term ‘digital library’ now seems to have become an encompassing term for what was once known as the ‘virtual’ or the ‘electronic’ library. In a stimulating essay on ‘Information Specialists of the Future’, given at the impressive (in terms of contributions) Essen Symposium on the Information Superhighway: The Role of Librarians, Information Scientists and Intermediaries (Essen, Universitatsbibliothek, 1995) Sheila Corrall wondered if the profession is ‘suffering from some sort of identity crisis’ in definitional terms.