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At the end of 1984, the Certification Officer listed 365 trade unions in Britain with a total membership of 10,753,993. Eighty‐nine of these organisations were affiliated to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) whose total membership at that time was 10,082,144 (p. 47), (p. 1). There are no up‐to‐date figures providing the numbers of full‐time officers and lay officials of TUC unions currently. But an estimate by the TUC in 1973/74 suggested that there were about 2,800 full‐time officers in affiliated unions at that time. There were also 400,000 voluntary officers in union branches or at their places of work, with an annual turnover of 20 per cent (p. 2). Given that TUC affiliated membership was just over 10 million at 31 December 1973, it can reasonably be assumed that there are similar numbers of full‐time officers and voluntary office holders today. The potential education and training needs of these 3,000 paid officials, but especially of the 300,000 work‐place representatives and 100,000 branch officials, as well as those of millions of trade union members generally, are very large indeed. And, given the limited resources available to satisfy them, they can only be marginally addressed by the trade union movement.

The greatest changes in personnel activities since the late 1970s are in industrial relations, High unemployment, low growth and widespread redundancies, for example, are leading trade union negotiators to adopt far more defensive and cautious approaches in pressing for improvements in their members' living standards than they did in the 1970s. There is now considerable concern with protecting jobs, and lower expectations of increases in pay and improved conditions of employment. According to the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), management's reaction in many cases is to look closely at their communications structures to ensure that employees receive as much information as possible concerning the policies and prospects of the enterprise directly from management. While some employers are seeking the active cooperation of employees by extending joint consultation and forming joint working parties to consider particular problems, others are imposing organisational changes on employees unilaterally. This is done through direct approaches to them over the heads of their recognised trade unions.

This article shows that regulation of the employment relationship in European public services has tended to give more importance to collective bargaining than to unilateral employer regulation. Although collective bargaining is a general trend, it is not the same in every country. This article concentrates on collective bargaining levels and the outcomes of collective bargaining in selected European states. A major explanatory factor of the extent of collective bargaining is the nature of the civil service system. Reformed “non‐career” systems tend to adopt collective bargaining institutions, resulting in binding collective agreements between employers and unions, while classical “career” systems do not.

Analyses union membership trends in the UK since 1979. Confirms the conventional wisdom that overall there has been a substantial membership leakage from UK trade unions for almost a decade and a half. Summarizes and discusses reasons for this. Goes on to show, however, that this overall trend masks a surprisingly steady and sustained growth of employee membership of “non‐affiliated” unions of professional workers and of staff associations, during the 1980s and early 1990s. Examines this stark contrast between falling membership among highly unionate traditional unions and lowly unionate, “non‐political” employee organizations. Explores the characteristics of the “new moderate unionism” in terms of its membership, size, sectoral, gender and industrial distributions and discusses the future prospects of this remarkably resilient group of employee organizations. Classifies them as “publicsector professional associations” and “privatesector staff associations”. Finally, evaluates the nature and ideologies of the “new moderate unionism” in the context of recent managerial employment strategies.

This introduction seeks to locate the origins of the competency management in American and British management concerns with declining international competitiveness and the need for more efficient and effective managers. It examines the distinctive American and British approaches and identifies and defines the ideas, concepts and techniques associated with competency in each country. The transfer of these ideas and practices into the public sector accompanied the spread of new public management, which has increased throughout the 1990s. The movement is now an international one prompted by both the OECD and the management consultancy industry. The process of adoption and implementation has tended to be pragmatic and ad hoc but evidence suggests it is now becoming an important vehicle for organisational cultural change. This introduction provides the backdrop for the remaining five articles in this special issue of the journal, which illustrate both developments in theory and practice of competency‐based management within public services.

Britain's public sector has undergone a series of radical structural and managerial changes over the past 20 years. These changes are associated with public‐sector reform and innovations in public management. They have impacted significantly on the ways in which public employees are recruited, selected, rewarded, assessed, trained and managed. This article outlines the impact of these changes on staff participation and involvement practices in the civil service, National Health Service (NHS) and local government, and highlights some of the major trends.

Introduces the special issue, which looks at the changes experienced by public sector organisations during the last 20 years of the twentieth century, when they were being transformed from a bureaucratic system to a market‐oriented results‐driven system. States that during the 1990s the need for participation, involvement and empowerment of staff began to pervade the thinking of public managers and there was a move away from the old hierarchical command structures in the public sector in order to create more fluid responsive organisations. The issue looks at some of the negative and unanticipated effects of these changes.

This paper has the aim of revisiting the works of Beatrice and Sidney Webb in the field of industrial relations and assessing their intellectual contributions to the study of the labour market, unions and collective bargaining in Britain.

The paper discusses the Webbs' studies of trade union history and union organisation, policy and methods that were first published at the end of the nineteenth century.

In refuting critiques of unions in the market economy by English classical and neo‐classical economists, and drawing on the ideas of the German school of historical economics, the Webbs incorporated organised labour into mainstream economic and political thought. Their major theoretical propositions were to set out an “agency model” of trade unions and an advanced system of democracy, in politics and at work, which unions would play a major part in promoting. In justifying the collectivisation of the employment relationship, the Webbs provided the intellectual foundations of the pluralist‐institutional model of industrial relations, which was built upon by other scholars following the end of the World War II. Their prediction that collective bargaining would decline in importance, as democracy matured, and be replaced by legal regulation, has taken place for reasons unforeseen by themselves.

The value of this paper is its reassessment of the Webbs' contribution to theory in the field and to the British collectivist tradition of industrial relations.

This article reports and evaluates how a traditional approach to recruitment and selection in the Social Services Department of West Sussex County Council was superseded by a competency‐based approach. The authors discuss the impacts of external and internal changes on the local authority and the need to develop less subjective and more effective methods of recruitment and selection, at all levels. After describing and reviewing existing practices, they outline the results of an internal research investigation involving managers and personnel and training specialists. The research participants acknowledged the limitations of the existing recruitment and selection practices and recognised the need for a more competence‐based approach. This was clearly an important stage in the change process which the authors proceed to describe. Here, they highlight the key role of training and relationship‐building between line managers and personnel specialists. Examples are provided of traditional and competence‐based job descriptions, person specifications and forms of assessment. The authors conclude that the new system fits well into the department’s overall human resources strategy for improving workplace performance and reducing workplace conflict.

This paper aims to focus on developing critical understanding in human resource management (HRM) students in Aston Business School, UK. The paper reveals that innovative teaching methods encourage deep approaches to study, an indicator of students reaching their own understanding of material and ideas. This improves student employability and satisfies employer need.

Student response to two second year business modules, matched for high student approval rating, was collected through focus group discussion. One module was taught using EBL and the story method, whilst the other used traditional teaching methods. Transcripts were analysed and compared using the structure of the ASSIST measure.

Critical understanding and transformative learning can be developed through the innovative teaching methods of enquiry‐based learning (EBL) and the story method.

The limitation is that this is a single case study comparing and contrasting two business modules. The implication is that the study should be replicated and developed in different learning settings, so that there are multiple data sets to confirm the research finding.

Future curriculum development, especially in terms of HE, still needs to encourage students and lecturers to understand more about the nature of knowledge and how to learn. The application of EBL and the story method is described in a module case study – “Strategy for Future Leaders”.

This is a systematic and comparative study to improve understanding of how students and lecturers learn and of the context in which the learning takes place.