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In recent years, a number of what could be described as “educational rituals” have come under challenge in many New Zealand secondary schools. These rituals include school assemblies, the prefect system, and school uniforms. This article recounts a recent attempt on the part of a New Zealand secondary school to resolve a challenge to the tradition of compulsory school uniforms. The course of events contained many of the elements of participative decision making, and is none the less significant for having failed to bring about immediate change. The article also questions the validity of some assumptions which are implicit in much of the contemporary writing about educational decision making.

Discusses Shakespeare’s Chronicles and their links to organizational behaviour. Highlights lessons from history for those seeking to exercise power successfully and manage both individuals and groups.

The author considers the need for a survey of modern printed book collections, in the context of the embrittlement of book papers. The extent and severity of the problem have often not been quantified. A random sample of both monograph and periodical book‐stack areas of the British Library resulted in an estimated 2,486,000 issues being covered by the survey. Fold‐testing took place on all books supplied which were published in 1850 or after. The results from fold‐testing suggest that 327,842 books contain paper which would break on three double folds or less. Given the size of the problem and its immediacy, some practical choices available to librarians are discussed.

This paper aims to describe the history and current plans for the newspaper collections of the British Library.

The Library will create more access to its older collections, via mass digitisation of texts. The Library is seeking to work with UK newspaper publishers to secure the ingest of “born digital” newspapers, to present issues of recent newspapers to users in library reading rooms. Digitised newspapers will be taken into the Library's digital library storage system being developed for all types of digital materials that the Library is acquiring in growing quantities. There are plans to move the existing collections from Colindale to a new storage facility at its Boston Spa site, to ensure controlled environmental conditions for the original printed newspapers.

It was found that the British Library is investing in the future in order to improve access to a vital part of its collections.

This is one of the few published articles on how a national library deals with the massive task of providing access to newspapers.

This paper aims to gain an understanding of the nature and extent of the practice of “public relations” in history.

The paper uses an analysis of popular narratives (in particular rumour, legend and myth) to inform a detailed case study of Glastonbury abbey in the medieval period.

Glastonbury Abbey worked in partnership with the Crown to develop a detailed promotional campaign based on powerful narratives. As a consequence it was able to grow to become one of the wealthiest communities in the country. The Crown, meanwhile, consolidated its position by being able to engender a whole national “brand” around the mythical corpus.

Methodologically, using folklore and other popular narrative material is useful as to an extent it is outside official control, but also provides information about the story tellers and the audiences.

The research builds on Watson's recent work on St Swithun and Winchester, taking the ideas forward several hundred years (and finding many of the same patterns). It finds new developments in terms of co‐branding and brand revivals.

EVERY librarian in his inmost heart dislikes newspapers. He regards them as bad literature; attractors of undesirable readers; a drain upon the limited resources of the library; and a target against which the detractors of public libraries are constantly battering. From the standpoint of the librarian, newspapers are the most expensive and least productive articles stocked by a library, and their lavish provision is, perhaps, the most costly method of purchasing waste‐paper ever devised. Pressure of circumstances and local conditions combine, however, to muzzle the average librarian, and the consequence is that a perfectly honest and outspoken discussion of the newspaper question is very rarely seen. In these circumstances, an attempt to marshal the arguments for and against the newspaper, together with some account of a successful practical experiment at limitation, may prove interesting to readers of this magazine.

This chapter looks at how various scholars have attempted to structure the “infinite field” by defining the appropriate theory and methods. These efforts have centered on a conception of what it would take to make comparative education a “science,” and how one could achieve “objective knowledge.” While these concerns were important for comparative educationists throughout the nineteenth century, who mostly favored a historical approach, the debate became more heated and more urgent in the 1960s when a number of key players published competing positions. This coincided with a time when the claim to a basis in science was being used to introduce a range of new subjects to higher education and establish disciplines like sociology on a firm institutional footing. Subsequently some of the heat went out of the debate about theory and method. A number of possible causes can be identified, including (i) that it became apparent comparative education was not going to achieve disciplinary status on a par with sociology; (ii) de facto comparative educationists handed the palm to Bereday, and carried on doing comparative education as he had described it; and (iii) the appetite for global theorizing waned to be replaced by partial theories, many of them based on general concerns for social justice and drawing on a broadly Marxist definition of “science.” The chapter concludes with reflections on the fact that healthy debate about methodology and theory can drive the development of the field, and that in the absence of explicit debate there is the danger that certain assumptions, especially assumptions that do not recognize the importance of context, can come to dominate the field by stealth.

Discusses the papers in this issue in calculated style, with regard to social structure, human agency and social policy. Itemizes the papers one‐by‐one and gives their strength of argument or policy or an important argument in their favour.

Visiting schools or other educational establishments in foreign countries can be as much as a hazard as a help in understanding the educational system in other places. To provide a supporting framework to enhance the value of administrators travelling abroad, the author indicates some of the hazards that confront, educational visits and fact‐finding missions. Particular difficulties confronted include problems of context, bias, communication, sampling, interpretation and “culture shock”. The author recommends familiarity with recent works in comparative education and indicates some appropriate references.