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Confidence in government continues to plague our field. Based on a dissertation inquiry, this essay offers a theoretical critique of public service through the lens of democratic legitimacy, suggesting many role conceptualizations promoted in the field conflict with powerful characteristics of the U.S. political economy. Beyond the traditional bureaucrat accountable to the Executive as dictated by the Constitution, role conceptualizations call for a variety of reinterpretations that contest our system of separated powers and representation through election. Furthermore, roles that promote social and economic justice conflict with many capitalist interests. While concurring that a facilitative role in pursuit of democratic social and economic justice is appropriate, this transformation must be undertaken using methods appropriate to what it actually represents: a revolution.

This paper analyzes how public servants who work with young people discursively cope with competing demands on their agency, defined as their orientation toward and capabilities to influence their clients. Previous studies revealed how public servants treat their clients when facing competing demands but paid less attention to how public servants define their agency.

Micro-level discourse analysis is applied to analyze how public servants represent their agency in client relationships, drawing on interviews with nine individuals in a Finnish city who work with young people lacking jobs or school placements.

Instead of describing their agency coherently, the interviewees applied several discourses to represent their agency differently in relation to different demands. This ability to navigate contradictory discourses is discussed as reflexive discursive coping strategy, which enables public servants to maintain a positive image of their agency despite tensions at work.

Although the method does not allow direct generalizations, it reveals discursive strategies likely to be found in many contemporary public organizations.

The study indicates a need to better acknowledge and nurture the multifaceted nature of agency to improve service quality.

The findings deepen the view on tensions in public servants' work and show that diverse discourses not only create anxiety but also help individuals dealing with contradictory work.

The purpose of this paper is to contrast the historical rise of the managerial function and its reception in law. It thus contributes to the debates on the separation of ownership and control, by showing that managers were never recognized in law. As a result, the managerial function was not protected in law.

This paper brings together management history and the history of UK company law to study the emergence of management in the early twentieth century and the law’s response. The authors bring new historical evidence to bear on the company law reforms of the second half of the twentieth century and, in particular, on the changes inspired by the Cohen Committee report of 1945.

Scientific progress and innovation were important rationales for the emergence of managerial authority. They implied new economic models, new competencies and wider social responsibilities. The analysis of this paper shows that these rationales have been overlooked by company law. The lack of conceptualization of the management in law allowed reforms after 1945 that gave shareholders greater influence over corporate strategy, reducing managerial discretion and the scope for innovation.

This paper focuses on the UK. Further research is needed to confirm whether other countries followed a similar path, both in terms of the emergence of management and in terms of the law’s approach.

This paper is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to examine the law’s historical approach to management. It calls for a reappraisal of the status of managers and the way corporate governance organizes the separation of ownership and control.

In the 1990s, North American archivists and records managers shifted some of their concern with electronic records and record keeping systems to conducting research about the nature of these records and systems. This essay describes one of the major research projects at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, supported with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Specifically, the essay focuses on the project's four main products: recordkeeping functional requirements, production rules to support the requirements, metadata specifications for record keeping, and the warrant reflecting the professional and societal endorsement of the concept of the recordkeeping functional requirements.

The Board of Agriculture, by virtue of the powers conferred upon them by the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1899, have made regulations whereby it may be presumed, until the contrary is proved, that milk containing less than 8·5 per cent. of solids‐not‐fat, or less than 3 per cent of fat, is adulterated within the meaning of the Act. The suggested limit for fat in milk recommended by the special committee appointed by the Board of Agriculture was 3·per cent., and it will therefore be observed that the new regulations have fixed a standard for milk‐fat which is even lower than the low limit recommended by the committee. There are even rumours that a further lowering of this standard is to bo urged upon the authorities. Although from the point of view of Public Analysts and the officials responsible for the enforcement of the Food and Drugs Acts it is satisfactory that an official standard for the composition of milk has at last been set up, it is idle to suppose that the fixing of such a limit will materially improve the character of the milk‐supply as a whole. It should be remembered that milk which contains only 3 per cent of fat, although under the new regulations legally “genuine,” is, as a matter of fact, of the poorest quality, and is only produced by a cow when in bad condition, or by a particular breed of cow which is remarkable more for the quantity than for the quality of the fluid yielded. Producers and vendors of milk of good quality have been placed in a very unfortunate position by the new regulations, as the tendency of the trade will be to lower all milk to the official limits, with the result that those dealers who are still desirous of maintaining a high standard of quality will have to compete in the matter of price with less conscientious traders, who, taking advantage of the protection afforded by the regulations, will be enabled to sell to the public “genuine” milk, from which all “superfluous” fat has been removed. Gradation of quality in an article of food cannot, of course, be provided for by official regulation, and for the purpose of legal classification it is only possible to differentiate between legally “genuine” and adulterated articles. Therefore, in a legal sense, and also in a popular sense, a milk containing 4 per cent. of fat is no more “ genuine ” than one containing 3 per cent., although the former is, of course, a superior article. Competition in the dairy trade, which has of late years become very keen, will, as the result of the fixing of this standard, become more acute than before, and to keep their position it will be necessary for those milk‐vendors who are desirous of maintaining their reputation as vendors of milk of good quality to give to their customers some guarantee that their product is indeed superior to the legalised article. Any statements of the traders themselves upon this point will naturally be received by customers with reserve, as proceeding from an interested source, and the guarantee, to be effective, must therefore be given by an authority whose statements are above suspicion. It is hero that the system of Control will be found to be a necessity both to the milk dealer and milk consumer.

IN order to be able to discriminate with certainty between butter and such margarine as is sold in England, it is necessary to carry out two or three elaborate and delicate chemical processes. But there has always been a craving by the public for some simple method of determining the genuineness of butter by means of which the necessary trouble could be dispensed with. It has been suggested that such easy detection would be possible if all margarine bought and sold in England were to be manufactured with some distinctive colouring added—light‐blue, for instance—or were to contain a small amount of phenolphthalein, so that the addition of a drop of a solution of caustic potash to a suspected sample would cause it to become pink if it were margarine, while nothing would occur if it were genuine butter. These methods, which have been put forward seriously, will be found on consideration to be unnecessary, and, indeed, absurd.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Few will complain that 1974 has not been an eventful year; in a number of significant respects, it has made history. Local Government and National Health Services reorganizations are such events. This is indeed the day of the extra‐large authority, massive monoliths for central administration, metropolitan conurbations for regional control, district councils corresponding to the large authorities of other days; and in a sense, it is not local government any more. As in other fields, the “big batallions” acquire greater collective power than the total sum of the smaller units, can wield it more effectively, even ruthlessly, but rarely appearing to take into account the masses of little people, the quiet people, who cannot make themselves heard. As expected, new names of authorities are replacing the old; new titles for departments and officers, ambitious and high‐sounding; a little grandiose for the tongues of ordinary folk. Another history‐making event of 1974, in the nature of a departmental transfer but highly significant for the course of future events as far as work in the field is concerned, was handing over of the personal health services—health of expectant mothers, babies, children, domiciliary midwifery, the school health services and their mainly medical and nursing personnel—from local health authorities to the newly created area health authorities. The public health departments over fifty years and more had created them, built them up into the highly efficient services they are. If anything can be learned from the past, new authorities are always more expensive than those they replace; they spend freely and are lavish with their accommodation and furnishings. In their first few months of existence, the new bodies have proved they are no exception. News of their meetings and activities in many areas is now scanty; even local newspapers which usually thrive on Council news—or quarrels—seem to have been caught on the wrong foot, especially in the small towns now merged into larger units. The public are relatively uninformed, but this doubtless will soon be rectified.