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The preparation of police officers for work in a multicultural society has become a major concern for police departments, local governments, and the general community. This article provides a critique of the methods used in cultural diversity training and suggests a number of principles and strategies for conducting this training. Rather than a standardized training format, the article proposes that diversity training provide participants with skills to develop and maintain cultural competence. This application suggests that successful cultural diversity training is didactic and experiential. encouraging officers to “connect” with the communities they seek to understand.

Places recent trends in policing in the USA into historical context, emphasizing the critical importance of political, economic, and social forces on the formation and development of police institutions and practices. Specifically, this paper describes four major developments in policing in relation to the US political economy: pre‐industrial police, industrial police, modern police, and postmodern police. Each of these developments has unique characteristics. At the same time, each retains certain structural imperatives which transcend the particulars and ultimately tend to preserve the police as front line defenders of the status quo. It is through an analysis of historically specific characteristics of, and fundamental structural conditions for policing that this paper contributes to a better understanding of the potential of contemporary police agencies to play a role in achieving either greater social justice or just greater social control.

No‐one can accuse Metal Box of waiting on events. Instead of letting the packaging market expand on its own, it simply initiates a new product for a food firm to put in its tins. Ken Gooding talks to Alex Page, the chairman and managing director, about this go‐ahead marketing technique. Without the company's experimental kitchen, for example, the world would probably never have seen tinned creamed rice. Having warded off the American threat on the UK market 40 years ago, Page believes that his company's emphasis on looking after its customers in this way will win out again today.

STIMULATING the interest of the employee in his job has become one of the most challenging problems facing management today. Daily repetition of tasks seemingly unrelated to the end product can very quickly cause boredom and fatigue, reducing individual efficiency and lowering productivity.

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.

IT would, perhaps, be in the nature of a precedent for an Editorial to THE LIBRARY WORLD not to be devoted to an analysis of some topic of, or controversy over, librarianship. Possibly recklessly, the Editor has decided on this occasion to establish that precedent.

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.