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This paper aims to highlight myriad accomplishments of C. Bertrand Thompson, who is perhaps most well known as a scientific-management bibliographer and a Taylor disciple, in the belief that his contributions as a pioneer management theorist and consultant in Europe deserve to be more widely known and more deeply appreciated.

Archival, primary and secondary sources were used in the research.

Thompson was among the first to bring management consulting to Europe. He understood the importance of adapting scientific-management principles to meet the diverse needs of each client for whom he consulted. Thompson’s strong belief and value system remained constant throughout his life.

Understanding the needs of customers or clients and adapting systems to meet those needs is essential in achieving success as a consultant.

By drawing on rarely accessed published and unpublished materials, this paper discusses Thompson’s many contributions to management thought and practice, most of which previously have not been highlighted in the referent literature.

Various measurement models may be employed to obtain attitude or perception data. Some protocols employ a ‘gap measurement model’ to frame perceptions. One important benefit of using a gap measurement model is that tools such as LibQUAL??inherently incorporate a natural lie or random‐response scale. The present study investigates performance of scores on the scale for the 4407 LibQUAL??Phase One participants. This paper was presented at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Measuring Service Quality Symposium on the New Culture of Assessment: Measuring Service Quality, Washington, DC, 20‐21 October, 2000.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on John B. Thompson's “tripartite approach” for the analysis of mass media communication, highlighting how this methodological framework can help address some of the shortcomings apparent in extant studies on accounting which purport to analyse accounting “texts”.

By way of example, the paper develops a critique of an existing study in accounting that adopts a “textually‐oriented” approach to discourse analysis by Gallhofer, Haslam and Roper. This study, which is informed by Fairclough's version of critical discourse analysis (CDA), undertakes an analysis of the letters of submission of two business lobby groups regarding proposed takeovers legislation in New Zealand. A two‐stage strategy is developed: first, to review the extant literature which is critical of CDA, and second, to consider whether these criticisms apply to Gallhofer et al. Whilst acknowledging that Gallhofer et al.'s (2001) study is perhaps one of the more comprehensive in the accounting literature, the critique developed in the present paper nevertheless highlights a number of limitations. Based upon this critique, an alternative framework is proposed which allows for a more comprehensive analysis of accounting texts.

The critique of Gallhofer et al.'s study highlights what is arguably an overemphasis on the internal characteristics of text: this is referred to by Thompson as the “fallacy of internalism”. In other words, Gallhofer et al. draw inferences regarding the production of the letters of submission from the texts themselves, and make implicit assumptions about the likely effects of these texts without undertaking any formal analysis of their production or reception, or without paying sufficient attention to the social and historical context of their production or reception.

Drawing on Thompson's theory of mass communication and his explication of the hermeneutical conditions of social‐historical enquiry, the paper outlines a range of theoretical considerations which are pertinent to researchers interested in studying accounting texts. Moreover, building on these theoretical considerations, the paper delineates a coherent and flexible methodological framework, which, it is hoped, may guide accounting researchers in this area.

At a recent inquest upon the body of a woman who was alleged to have died as the result of taking certain drugs for an improper purpose, one of the witnesses described himself as “an analyst and manufacturing chemist,” but when asked by the coroner what qualifications he had, he replied : “I have no qualifications whatever. What I know I learned from my father, who was a well‐known ‘F.C.S.’” Comment on the “F.C.S.” is needless.

The aim of this research is to explore the relationship between destination supply-side factors, visitor demand-side factors and the role of local government authorities in supporting the drive tourism market with effective interventions. A mixed methods approach was used to gather qualitative data from 14 destination stakeholders, which informed the development of a survey of 397 drive tourists to the Atherton Tablelands, in the far north of Australia. The findings identified stakeholder concerns about fragmented regional promotions by different regional entities, weakened destination branding and infrastructure needs. Drive tourist surveys indicated that although the destination provides a competitive tourism experience, there were concerns about the availability of information. This research highlights the danger of destination disunity, and the theoretical and practical contributions of the learning destination concept to understanding the importance of destination-wide, stakeholder collaboration, although it may be difficult to implement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate communications related to climate change in both a voluntary and mandatory setting. Adopting a critical perspective, the paper examines how companies who participated in the voluntary UK Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS) and the UK Government’s mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme positioned themselves within the climate change debate. In particular, the analysis draws attention to how companies, through their communicative practice, helped to constitute and reproduce the structure of the field in which they operate.

A context-sensitive discursive analysis of 99 stand-alone reports produced by companies participating in the UK ETS and CRC over a nine-year period. The analysis is informed by Thompson’s (1990) depth-hermeneutic framework, which mediates the connection between linguistic strategies and the institutional field.

The analysis suggests that companies tended to adopt particular linguistic strategies in their communications related to climate change. For example, the strategy of “rationalisation” was employed in order to emphasise the organisational “opportunities” resulting from climate change; in this sense, companies sought to exploit climate crises in order to advance a doctrine that endorsed market-based solutions. A noteworthy finding was that in the mandatory CRC period, there was a notable shift towards the employment of the strategies that Thompson (1990) refers to as “differentiation” – whereby companies attempted to displace responsibility by presenting either government or suppliers as barriers to progress.

This paper explores how disclosure on climate change evolved while organisations participate in voluntary and compulsory climate change initiatives. In this respect, the analysis is informed by the social and political context in which the disclosure was produced.

The paper aims to shed light on how a group of feminist managers/leaders, in education and social studies departments, a notably under-explored and under-theorised group, “do power” in the increasingly corporatized education marketplace.

The research draws on the narratives of a small group of feminist women who hold authority positions at middle or senior levels. It draws on data from ethnographic interviews and participant observation carried out as part of an in-depth narrative inquiry (Andrews et al., 2008), carried out at three higher education institutions in the UK.

From a small sample such as this, any findings are necessarily tentative. Nonetheless, findings suggest that, whilst taking account of individual differences in styles, there has been a shift, over time, in the ways that the management role is approached by some feminist women. Analysis of the data also reveals that gendered expectations remain for those who carry the “feminist” label and asks whether these expectations are realistic.

The sample group is small which raises questions about what can and cannot be claimed. However, along with Maguire (2008), the author’s purpose is not with generalizability but seeks to explore issues and open up further areas of study.

This paper is an original empirical research which explores an under-researched group of women, namely, feminist managers and leaders who operate within the education marketplace. As they negotiate the challenges of working within the neoliberal academy, these women try, to varying degrees, to remain true to their feminist values and beliefs.

We identify methodological weaknesses in a paper by Skocpol, Abend-Wein, Howard, and Lehmann (1993) on the origins of mothers’ pensions in the American states in the early twentieth century. These include a sub-optimal and potentially biased strategy for assessing the impact of state characteristics on the time to adoption of pensions, as well as the use of a backward stepwise regression procedure for selecting independent variables. To determine whether Skocpol et al.’s conclusions remain valid, we recreated most of their dataset and used methods that are more appropriate for the analysis of duration data, including the Cox and complementary cloglog event history procedures. While we find support for several of their claims, our findings allow for a more straightforward interpretation of the role of explanatory variables, and the temporal dependence of the adoption process.

In this presentation I shall be concerned with only one aspect of information science and its relation with linguistics: namely document analysis (for a broader survey of ‘Linguistics and information science’, see the recent article published under that title by C. Montgomery (1972); also M. Kay and K. Sparck Jones (1971), and the report prepared for F.I.D. by the same authors, forthcoming; M. Coyaud (1972), in French, deals with many separate facets of the same subject).