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Three trends are shaping our personal and business lives: information is coming at us at an accelerating rate; jobs are changing faster and faster; and society, work and even leisure pursuits are becoming more complex. The accelerating pace of information means that the individual needs to know how to absorb information more rapidly. Faster change means that workers and the organisation they work for must learn to adapt training more quickly. Increased complexity of work means that the ability to analyse situations logically and to solve problems creatively are skills that everyone needs, and must be trained in the workplace and studied at home. In other words, the individuals and companies who can out‐learn, out‐think and out‐create their competitors will be the ones who thrive in the twenty‐first century.

This chapter tells the story of the initiation, development (over two decades) and collective contribution of the Copenhagen Forum since its foundation in 1996. This Forum comprises a grouping of teachers and directors of masters-level public administrative programmes (notably the MPA) from different academic institutions across Northern Europe. Each year a workshop is convened where a series of papers are presented by the participants, and from which this volume, and a number of other related publications, have been derived.

The chapter is essentially factual and descriptive in style; summarising the story of the Copenhagen Forum so far; doing so under the following five headings – ‘overview’, ‘origins’, ‘odyssey’, ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes’.

The chapter is particularly oriented towards teachers of public administration and by focusing on the pedagogical aspects of the public management programmes that they are responsible for delivering, provides insights, guidance and suggestions from experience to help them develop their practice.

The aim is to provide readers with an appreciation of the context from which the inspiration for this volume, and the individual contributions, derive. It is a context that has been all about a shared fascination with, and collective commitment to, the advancement of learning and development among practicing public managers.

The constantly evolving higher education (HE) sector is creating a need for new business models and tools for evaluating performance. In this paper, an overview of the importance-performance analysis (IPA) model and its applicability as a management tool for assessing student satisfaction in the HE sector is provided. The purpose of this paper is to apply IPA in a new and novel manner, undertaking analysis at three levels; the individual student, for individual attributes and at a construct or factor level which combines individual attributes that are correlated. A practical application is illustrated, assessing the gap between the importance placed on specific student satisfaction attributes and corresponding levels of student-perceived performance realised.

The “service product bundle” (Douglas et al., 2006) is refined based on focus group evaluation. Survey responses from 823 students studying across four Malaysian private universities are analysed using factor analysis and the IPA model utilised to identify importance-performance gaps and explore the implication of the iso-rating line as well as alternative cut-off zones.

Factor reduction of 33 original measurement items results in eight definable areas of service provision, which provides a refined and extended management tool of statistically reliable and valid constructs.

The research is undertaken in a private business school context in Malaysia. Further research could focus on other universities or countries, as well as faculties such as computing and engineering or explore other elements of education-based performance.

The research method and study outcomes can support HE managers to allocate resources more effectively and develop strategies to improve quality and increase student satisfaction.

Distinct from other IPA-based studies, analysis is undertaken at three levels; the individual participant, for individual items and at the factor level.

This narrative review explored the efficacy of school-based child sexual abuse prevention programmes between 1990 and 2002. There were 22 efficacy studies that met clear inclusion criteria. Results covered both methodological design and the range of outcome measures. Methodology was analysed through four dimensions (target population, prevention programme implementation, evaluation methodology and cost-effectiveness). Outcomes for children covered nine categories (knowledge, skills, emotion, perception of risk, touch discrimination, reported response to actual threat/abuse, disclosure, negative effects and maintenance of gains). The studies had many methodological limitations. Prevention programmes had a measure of effectiveness in increasing children ' s awareness of child sexual abuse as well as self-protective skills. Beyond minimal disclosure rates, there was no evidence to demonstrate that programmes protected children from intra-familial sexual abuse. For a small number of children prevention programmes produced minimal negative emotional effects. Recommendations for future research, policy and practice, include realistic outcomes for child participants and locating programmes within wider abuse prevention measures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of five alternative measures of service quality in the high education sector – service quality (SERVQUAL), importance‐weighted SERVQUAL, service performance (SERVPERF), importance‐weighted SERVPERF, and higher education performance (HEdPERF).

Data were collected by means of a structured questionnaire containing perception items enhanced from the SERVPERF and HEdPERF scales and expectation items from the SERVQUAL scale, modified to fit into the higher education (HE) sector. The first draft of the questionnaire was subject to a pilot testing through a focus group and an expert evaluation. Data were gathered from a sample of 360 students of a Portuguese University in Lisbon. Scales were compared in terms of unidimensionality, reliability, validity and explained variance.

It can be concluded that SERVPERF and HEdPERF present the best measurement capability, but it is not possible to identify which one is the best.

Since the study only examined the measurement capabilities of the five instruments at a single faculty, the collection of more data in other institutions is required in order to provide more general results.

The current results do make available some important insights into how the five alternative instruments of service quality in an HE context compare with one another.

The paper attempts to develop insights into comparative evaluations of five measuring instruments of service quality in an HE setting.

Human Resource Management in the literature has been considered a second‐ or third‐order strategy largely related to implementation. Argues that the process of strategy formulation and evaluation has not been correctly conceptualised. The evidence that HR issues are fundamental to business is compelling at the level of unit labour costs, but whether they are fundamental to the strategy process has remained highly questionable. The paper suggests that a favourable HR environment has to be established before the various strategic choices can be analysed. Empirical research in two UK oil and chemical companies provides evidence that the effect of HR issues on corporate strategy is understated. The assumption of a top‐down, linear model of strategy formulation, whether positionally‐ or resource‐based, is questioned and an alternative conception is discussed.