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Conducting a consumer satisfaction survey can be fraught with difficulties. Although these difficulties are rarely discussed, they may bias the research by influencing the nature of the data which are finally reported in the survey results. Discusses problems and offers solutions regarding control and compliance, acknowledging objectors, “ownership” of the project, “ownership” of patients, professional rivalries, who should be assessed, how questions should be asked, how results should be reported and who should undertake the survey. Concludes with ten questions to ask oneself before conducting a customer or patient satisfaction survey for a health service.

The health services of many less‐developed countries continue to struggle. Donors also continue to contribute money, equipment and personnel in the hope of producing sustainable improvements in these health services. Despite this cumulative effort over many years, some health services in Africa have failed to make significant gains. Suggests that the giving of aid, through the provision of medical and other personnel, produces a potentially damaging double standard. In particular, the dramatic dichotomy in the renumerations of local and foreign doctors may have the unintended, but damaging, effect of demotivating local staff. In addition, reviews research which supports the notion that the higher‐paid foreign doctors may also experience a demotivation, through being focused on extrinsic rather than intrinsic aspects of their work. Discusses implications of this double demotivation – in local as well as foreign doctors – for the provision of medical personnel in less‐developed countries.

Deals with the Health Service manager′s problems of pruning staff in NHS Trust applications. Compares handling staff with a surgeon handling patients pre‐, during and post‐operations. Concludes that the Health Service manager must consider the key issues of communication, involvement, unambiguity and encouraging the free expression of dissent.

Contends that the quality of debriefing at the conclusion of a training exercise will determine whether participants are left feeling at a loose end, seeing the exercise as having little relevance to their jobs or thinking that they have been fortunate to have experienced an amount of “accelerated learning”, telescoped into a short time period, equivalent to what might have taken years of on‐the‐job experience to realize. Presents a five‐stage model for the use of exercises during training sessions, developed around the core activity of debriefing.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a measure of relationships and learning within the aid context.

The Aid Relationships Quality Scale (ARQS) was administered to 1,290 local and expatriate workers across six countries in three regions (Africa: Malawi, Uganda; Asia: India, China; Oceania: PNG, Solomon Islands), as part of a larger study exploring remuneration differences. Data were factor‐analysed and explored using correlations. Individual and organisational level variance was partialed out in the analyses.

The ARQS showed a stable factor structure and acceptable reliability for each subscale: “relationship with expatriates”, “relationship with locals”, and “learning from expatriates and locals”. Construct validity was examined using a modification of the Multitrait‐Multimethod Matrix. For the sample as a whole, and at the individual level, both relationships subscales were positively correlated with each other, job satisfaction, and “learning from expatriates and locals”. At the organisational level “relationship with expatriates” correlated positively with pay justice, and international mobility, and negatively with de‐motivation, pay comparison and self‐assessed ability. “Relationships with locals” correlated positively with self‐assessed ability, turnover, and job satisfaction, and negatively with pay justice. The convergent and discriminant correlation patterning is largely in line with theory and thus supports the construct validity of the scale.

Relationships between aid workers are integral to the success of development assistance initiatives. This research has developed a new and brief instrument for measuring one aspect of aid relationships – that between expatriate and local workers.

The advent of “consumerism” in the NHS puts an increased importance on finding out what consumers of health services think about the treatment which they receive. Describes a consumer satisfaction survey of mental health services. The focus is not on the outcome of the survey but on the difficulties encountered whilst conducting it. Because of the strategic value of consumer satisfaction information, only a small proportion of surveys undertaken are published and hence the difficulties of this kind of research are rarely discussed. Pays particular attention to the effect which clinicians′ resistance to the survey had on data collection. It is important for health service managers to be aware of the process of consumer satisfaction surveys, so that they may better judge the value of their outcome.

Although substantial evidence is now accumulating that some African peoples readily accept advice and help about health from both modern medical and traditional sources, this has not yet happened with – what is arguably the major health problem in many parts of Africa – AIDS. We asked 175 of Malawi′s undergraduates what sources they judged to be credible with regard to information on preventing and clinically managing AIDS. While traditional healers were seen on average to be less credible than modern health professionals (doctors and nurses), there was no correspondence between credibility of traditional healers and modern health professionals. Thus a strong belief in the credibility of modern health professionals was not associated with low credibility ratings for traditional healers. Our findings provide further support for “tropical tolerance”, especially as regards a pluralistic (modern and traditional together) approach to the prevention of AIDS. Given the over‐stretched health services in Malawi and many other African countries, a pluralistic approach to AIDS prevention could be a credible and economic use of indigenous human resources.

Despite a growing body of findings that individualistic achievers incur punitive social costs in the workplaces of collectivistic and equalitarian cultures, little attention has so far been paid to measuring such motivational gravity in psychometrically appropriate ways. From egalitarian Australia, reports psychometric data from two organizational surveys, evaluating the 20‐item “Tall Poppy Scale” (TPS), a Likert instrument which measures attitudes towards high achievers in society, and the twin‐item “Motivational Gravity Scenario Scale” (MGSS), which focuses instead on behavioural intentions towards high achievers in one’s own workplace. In Study I, involving 80 employees of a retail chain, scores on the TPS were significantly and positively associated with social desirability effects on the Marlowe‐Crowne Scale, whereas the MGSS remained free of such confounding. In Study II, 47 employees of a major service organization rated the MGSS as significantly more satisfactory than did 49 university undergraduates, who preferred the TPS. Workplace scenarios may be more appropriate than the conventional Likert TPS for describing organizational cultures, but recommends the development of multiple‐item instruments for assessing individual differences in motivational gravity.

The third RMDP seminar on Shop Location Analysis was held at the end of June; it focussed as much on the business of finding the right site as on site evaluation. The most eagerly‐awaited presentation came from a representative of Marks & Spencer; as our writer says, “it is their revitalised attitude to merchandise which is directly responsible for their need to increase sales space.” M&S revealed that they need an extra 3 million sq ft of sales space for new and existing products. Other presentations came from Jeremy Smither of Hillier Parker and Dr David Thorpe of the John Lewis Partnership.

This paper aims to draw attention to the quiet, if inadvertent, disappearance of the front-line public librarian, as libraries make difficult organizational choices in the struggle to survive the relentless pressures to cut costs on one side while supporting a market ethos of customer service on the other.

Informed by the preliminary findings of a pan-Canadian study of labour in large urban public libraries and a review of professional and academic literatures dealing with contemporary service trends, four models/proposals [(1) participative, (2) community-led, (3) managerial/leadership and (4) digital inclusion] are critically reviewed with respect to their positioning of the front-line professional librarian.

The paper concludes with an argument in favor of one of these proposals because it supports the relevance of public librarians in service to their communities while remaining true to the democratic aspirations of this vital public service within our increasingly complex information societies.

The implication of this work is that by drawing our attention to the contradictions inherent within contemporary and popular library initiatives, the disconnect between formal education and professional practice is highlighted, thus providing a foundation for new empirical research into the changing nature of waged work (professional and non-professional) in public libraries.

Failure to situate the professional public librarian strategically and unambiguously within the rapidly evolving roles of the public library has implications for LIS educators, employers and, as significantly, current and future students.

Despite the high rates of connectivity among Western nations and the increasing sophistication of their populations, the digital divide persists among a growing urban and rural underclass. Building, maintaining and promoting a strong and accessible municipal information infrastructure, one could argue, is what public librarianship is all about.

This paper’s identification and critical review of the four dominant service models proposed for the present public library represents the first time that these literatures have been assembled together and critically interrogated for their implications for the work of public librarians. Given the importance of the question “what is the future role of the public library”, a critical analysis of the key contenders is a necessary exercise, as is shifting the subject of the conversation away from the customer and onto the professional public librarian.