In late 1975, for the first time in the history of the National Health Service, junior hospital doctors in the United Kingdom took industrial action. Their pay and working conditions were basic issues, but the dispute was complex. The first part of this article describes these complexities – the significant events, and the grievances and their resolution. In the second part the dispute is analysed in terms of its causes, effects and implications, particularly for the medical profession. The ambivalence, confusion and ignorance about the new contract and the question of breaking government pay policy, problems of representation, and conflicts of interests within the profession are highlighted. It is suggested that the significant economic gains of the junior doctors were not achieved by industrial action.

During the 1970s a complex range of formal planning procedures were developed by central and local government and other public bodies. By the end of the decade there were well over twenty ‘public planning systems’ in operation, each with its own timetable, procedure and information demands. A number of allocation formulae were evolved to distribute cash and capital allocations between geographical areas, and various procedures to improve service coordination were also introduced. Together these innovations have had an important impact on the allocation of social service resources and the implementation of social policies. The first part of the article describes the growth of such planning activities, while the second part seeks to analyse their purposes both in terms of the official accounts and from a rather more critical perspective. It is possible to see these changes as attempts by government to come to terms with the problem of ‘overload’ – the tendency for demands on government for more and better services to outrun its and the economy's capacity to respond. They may be seen as more explicit and centralized rationing procedures which seek to combine a realistic appreciaation of budgetary constraints with responsiveness to varied individual and community needs. Critics see these procedures as attempts to contain public spending by insulating popular demands for improved services in increasingly technical and centralized procedures. The article ends by considering the impact of the new government's public expenditure policy.

Using voluntary blood donation as a case example, the study on which this article is based explored not only the extent, or breadth, of community involvement in social policy behaviours, but also the continuity, or depth, of this commitment. Demographic and motivational data were collected through a postal questionnaire returned by 1,784 persons who had voluntarily donated blood at least once in metropolitan Toronto between 1974 and 1978. An empirical distinction was also drawn between the ‘active’ and the ‘lapsed’ donor.

The study found that while certain sectors of society were probably disproportionately represented among those who chose to undertake voluntary social behaviours, the continuity of these actions could not be statistically associated with demographic or socio-economic variables. However, it did find that donors initially motivated by ‘external’ considerations such as convenience of location were more likely to lapse, while those for whom moral considerations and a sense of community were most important were more likely to continue as active donors.

The general conclusion suggests that manipulating the context may be useful to broaden the initial participatory base in voluntary actions, but to produce continuity in this involvement the challenge must be phrased in moral language.