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Examines methods of protecting organization from being bullied by customers who take customer service too far, the main aim being to minimize any damage and unpleasantness. Several steps are defined – defining what is possible and can be expected, recognizing types of customer, and training staff and managers. Concludes that most importantly, staff must be supported when following company policy.

Identifies ways in which customer satisfaction may be eroded and outlines how staff and managers can be prepared to deal effectively with customer complaints. Suggests a ten‐stage approach for front‐line staff who may need to deal with customer’s complaints.

This article summarises an interesting training situation. It describes how a major express parcels delivery organisation went about improving the public interface of its business and how retail skills were introduced to area managers. The training aspects of particular interest centre on the need to clarify at an early stage which retail skills were applicable and acceptable. Interesting results include the early practical environmental improvements which resulted from the first courses.

The Youth Training Scheme is a bold experiment in providing the bridge from school to work. It contains many innovations such as the managing agent concept. No pilot project this: in its scale it is, for an experiment, breath‐taking. And it has been mounted against severe time pressures. Over a full one per cent of the Government's income has gone into it. If it succeeds it will become an important new and permanent feature of national life: if it fails the MSC will sink with it and someone will have to pick up the bits and put something else in its place without undue delay. As it proceeds unpredicted pitfalls and weaknesses appear — as they are sure to do. The stage has just been reached when analysts are beginning to feel confident in identifying these weaknesses. It is important to maintain a public dialogue on the strengths and weaknesses of the system so that, if adaptations are needed or a major overhaul of the system undertaken, these can be brought about quickly.

This paper reports on the evaluation of a scheme to promote service user involvement in the care delivered by a mental health trust. A case study methodology was employed to describe the particularity of the scheme in context as experienced by service users and staff involved in its delivery. Mixed methods of semi‐structured interviews and focus groups created the opportunity for all stakeholders to engage in action research through a mutual learning process about the scheme in operation with a view to making changes to improve and develop it in the future. The qualitative data collected was content analysed and grouped according to key themes, which included the benefits of the scheme, the conditions for it to work successfully, suggested changes, limitations of the scheme, and service user involvement generally in a hospital setting. The role of service users as both paid scheme co‐ordinators and volunteer representatives highlights the contribution that people who use mental health services can play in influencing service delivery when employed in relevant and appropriate roles within a mental health organisation.

In the previous two articles, we explained the background, the steps in design and testing, and discussed in detail the components of the Staff Appraisal Training package and how it is being used in the Civil Service. In this, the last article, we go on to describe the lessons we learned during the life of this fascinating project and to make suggestions about how the material can be used by organisations outside the Civil Service.

Background Ministers have set the end of 1986 as a deadline for the introduction of a new Staff Appraisal system into the non‐industrial Civil Service. Nearly 600,000 people are affected by this change. The new arrangements, which many departments have already begun to feel the effects of, result from the work of the Reporting System Working Party and the Review of Personnel Work. This was an attempt to pull together the experiences of departments in operating the systems and to try to remedy some of the problem areas identified. These problems included.

In the first of this series of three articles, we explained the background to the changes in the Civil Service Staff Appraisal System, and the design we adopted for the training package. In addition, the results of the developmental testing of the package were discussed. The article ended at the point where we described how the results of the developmental testing affected the final package.

In the late 1970s, the much beloved tradition of Asilomar began. But then, of course, it was not even located at Asilomar. Rather it was a much smaller event that was held at Pajaro Dunes. Nonetheless, it featured what ultimately became the traditional blend of informal sessions that mixed students and faculty from around the University. The most memorable conference of that time featured working papers by Jeff Pfeffer and Jerry Salancik, John Meyer and Brian Rowan, and Mike Hannan and John Freeman. Each of these pairs of authors presented fledgling work that would go on to become keystone statements for three highly influential theories: resource dependence (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), “new” institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), and population ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977).