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Since the collapse of the USSR, former Soviet republics have embarked on public service modernization, in most instances drawing on internationally dominant new public management (NPM) principles. Are post-Soviet republics ready for these administrative prescriptions? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper discusses Kazakhstan’s experience with the implementation of NPM through a qualitative case study of the country’s adoption of the European Bologna higher education reforms.

While implementation of the NPM-inspired Bologna program has produced significant achievements, there are also gaps and shortcomings. These are due to a remnant Soviet administrative practices including strong control by educational ministries, as well as incompatible organizational cultures and a tendency toward superficial formalism in the implementation process.

NPM tends to be introduced in a top-down fashion as a taken-for-granted component of state transformation, without sufficient attention to the capacities, cultures and systems required for effective and accountable performance-driven administrative reform.

Kazakhstan’s experience provides crucial insights into the governance structures, professional cultures and managerial capacities required for successful implementation of NPM in post-Soviet states.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

As is the case internationally, there is also an increased focus on urban space diversity in South Africa. Is it appropriate to pursue place diversity in South Africa? If so, what are the design factors that support place diversity and can these be accommodated by the development of medium density mixed housing in the country? Furthermore, could these emerging trends be considered as part of a larger global trend moving towards greater place diversity in cities, or does it only offer local fragments and practices of fashionable international ideas? This paper explores the multiple meanings of place diversity in the country as evident in the development of medium density mixed housing developments and highlights a number of paradoxes that emerge as a result of the context-specific realities.

The institution of food and cookery exhibitions and the dissemination of practical knowledge with respect to cookery by means of lectures and demonstrations are excellent things in their way. But while it is important that better and more scientific attention should be generally given to the preparation of food for the table, it must be admitted to be at least equally important to insure that the food before it comes into the hands of the expert cook shall be free from adulteration, and as far as possible from impurity,—that it should be, in fact, of the quality expected. Protection up to a certain point and in certain directions is afforded to the consumer by penal enactments, and hitherto the general public have been disposed to believe that those enactments are in their nature and in their application such as to guarantee a fairly general supply of articles of tolerable quality. The adulteration laws, however, while absolutely necessary for the purpose of holding many forms of fraud in check, and particularly for keeping them within certain bounds, cannot afford any guarantees of superior, or even of good, quality. Except in rare instances, even those who control the supply of articles of food to large public and private establishments fail to take steps to assure themselves that the nature and quality of the goods supplied to them are what they are represented to be. The sophisticator and adulterator are always with us. The temptations to undersell and to misrepresent seem to be so strong that firms and individuals from whom far better things might reasonably be expected fall away from the right path with deplorable facility, and seek to save themselves, should they by chance be brought to book, by forms of quibbling and wriggling which are in themselves sufficient to show the moral rottenness which can be brought about by an insatiable lust for gain. There is, unfortunately, cheating to be met with at every turn, and it behoves at least those who control the purchase and the cooking of food on the large scale to do what they can to insure the supply to them of articles which have not been tampered with, and which are in all respects of proper quality, both by insisting on being furnished with sufficiently authoritative guarantees by the vendors, and by themselves causing the application of reasonably frequent scientific checks upon the quality of the goods.

Two consumer services firms unite to create a company whose biggest assets are information and affiliations.

IT is always something of an embarrassment for a West German librarian to address his British colleagues on the problems of public libraries. What is there of interest in a system which in almost every respect is years behind the development of the English libraries? When I begin to think along these lines of the considerable and, indeed, natural role which the library plays in British society (almost a traumatic experience for a German librarian), then the inequalities of the situation become particularly clear. Even though there are many historical and political causes for this state of affairs, it is still impossible for any correspondent to free himself of a certain psychological handicap.

The fly on the wheel said, “Lord, what a dust do I raise!” As Secretary of the B.M. I was the fly on the wheel, and conscious that the dust was none of my raising. Dust there was in plenty. A place of such national—and international—standing is constantly straining not only its own resources but also those of its friends to make vital and correspondingly costly acquisitions. Such was the purchase, with the generous help of John Pierpont Morgan, junior, who would have liked them for the Morgan Library, of the Bedford Hours and the Luttrell Psalter; the latter being one of the chief sources of our knowledge of English farm life in the Middle Ages. But during my fourteen years in the Office the Museum was faced with four great opportunities, quite out of the ordinary; and in all four it was successful.

1. The Committee was informed that the manufacture of shredded suet from imported premier jus is subject to control by licence and that it is a condition of the licences that the product shall contain not less than 83 per cent. of fat. This figure was adopted in 1931 by the Council of the Society of Public Analysts and Other Analytical Chemists pending the establishment of a legal standard. 2. In the manufacture of shredded suet premier jus the fat is forced into shreds or granules and a cereal or amylaceous filler is added so as to form a coating over the particles of fat, thus preventing them from adhering together and at the same time retarding the development of rancidity. 3. The amount of filler taken up by the shredded fat depends primarily on its stickiness, which in turn depends on the temperature at which the manufacturing process is conducted. Manufacturers must give special attention to the problem of securing uniformity of distribution, otherwise part of a batch will take up more than its share of the amount of filler allowed by the manufacturing formula. In spite of all practicable care, complete uniformity cannot be ensured and some tolerance is therefore necessary to allow for unavoidable variations. 4. The proportion of filler used in the past by different manufacturers has varied considerably. A purchaser of shredded suet is primarily purchasing fat and it is desirable that the fat content shall be the maximum that can be included whilst still retaining good keeping properties. The Committee is of the opinion that shredded suet, to be of satisfactory quality, should not contain substantially less than 85 percent. of fat, and that a product approximating to this standard will have the necessary keeping properties. The Committee is satisfied that the allowance of 2 per cent. for uneven distribution on and among the shreds, which was adopted by the Council of the Society of Public Analysts in 1931, is reasonable, and understands that it is considered adequate by the manufacturers of shredded suet. 5. A small amount of suet (i.e., natural unrendered fat), received by butchers as part of their meat allocation, is chopped or minced, and in the latter case mixed with cereal filler and sold under the description “shredded suet.” By whichever method it is prepared it differs from the shredded suet made from premier jus by reason of the presence of membrane and moisture. If made by chopping it will contain more fat than the product made from premier jus, but if made by mincing and admixture with a filler it is likely to contain less owing to the membrane and moisture in the raw material and the impracticability of analytical control. 6. It was suggested to the Committee that the use of the description shredded suet for the products made by butchers was misleading and that the name should be restricted to the product made from premier jus. The Committee is, however, of the opinion that the general public would be equally satisfied whether the product supplied in response to a demand for shredded suet had been prepared with premier jus or suet. Further, it is considered that a purchaser of shredded suet is not prejudiced if he receives a product containing membrane and moisture provided he also receives the appropriate amount of fat. It therefore does not appear to the Committee that there is any necessity, from the viewpoint of protecting the public in regard to quality, for recommending the imposition of this restriction. 7. The Committee noted that the statement issued by the Council of the Society of Public Analysts included an expression of opinion that “the nature of any admixture to suet should be declared.” This recommendation is, however, outside the terms of reference of the Committee and no comment is therefore made thereon. 8. The Committee accordingly recommends that shredded suet should be required to contain not less than 83 per cent. of fat.

A question of size THE Committee set up by the Minister of Education in 1957 to “consider the structure of the public library service in England and Wales, and to advise what changes, if any, should be made n the administrative arrangements, regard being had to the relation of public libraries to other libraries,” was the first such since the Kenyon Committee which reported in 1927. One of the most controversial aspects of the Roberts Committee's deliberations was the consideration of the minimum size (in terms of population) of an independent library system.

I HAVE sometimes been asked whether I am conscious, as the present editor of THE LIBRARY WORLD, of the spirit and influence of its founder, James Duff Brown, and of his editorial successors, who included J. D. Stewart and W. C. Berwick Sayers. The answer is that of course I am—how could it be otherwise?