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People with learning disabilities often have to cope with death, dying and bereavement without being fully informed of the circumstances and sometimes without being told that death is imminent or indeed has occurred. This paper explores the issues associated with death and dying from the perspective of people with learning disabilities, and considers proactive ways of working in this sensitive area.

Book Preview is a new publication, under the editorship of David Elliott, offering “thorough and uncompromising” verdicts on key books two to three months ahead of publication, reviewing about a hundred (half of them fiction) in each issue. The expertise of more than 50 reviewers has been assembled from amongst “book trade professionals” whose independence and impartiality of judgement might therefore be questionnable. Be that as it may it is unfortunate that reviewers' identities have not been disclosed and that reviews are unsigned. The publisher is Book Preview Ltd, 10 Barley Mow Passage, London W4 4PH, but J. Whitaker and Sons Ltd, 12 Dyott Street, London WC1A 1DF has taken on the marketing and distribution, a possible indication of reliability, but clearly the guide's success will depend to some extent on which publishers, and how many, co‐operate by sending review copies. It must be seen substantially to cover the market. The subscription cost for ten issues is £98 in the UK from either of the addresses quoted above. A specimen copy will be sent on request. The reviews in the copy I have seen run from 250 to 500 words and disclose the plots or content in much the same way as would a publisher's blurb. There is, however, addition of a definite opinion from someone who has read the book and is neither its author nor publisher. How far it is worth the subscription price to have this previewed opinion on a total of 1,000 books each year and its possible help in book selection is for each librarian to judge.

Examines the marketing problem of knowing what customers look for in a product. Claims that for some product groups, consumers may evaluate products and their characteristics differently from what is expected, and that consumers may distort or bias their evaluation of products in the marketplace. Reports on a study that suggests that consumers may distort their evaluations of products on the basis of beliefs about how certain product attributes should go together. Finally, offers implications and recommendations in terms of how marketers may address what is referred to as “systematic distortion” of products.

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system described in this article was developed for an application in a major high street bank requiring the high speed reading of cheque serial numbers.

The orderly extension of collective bargaining to cover health and safety, job design, product development and investment programmes is a goal shared by most unions. Some unions would prefer this to legislation on industrial democracy involving worker directors, although others see the two approaches as complementary. But attempts to “extend” collective bargaining have not been without their problems. The ambitious campaign for product diversification mounted by the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee is a good case in point.

The paper seeks to explore empirically the lived experience of trust in consumer brands and to develop a model focusing on functional and symbolic brands.

The paper presents an exploratory, grounded theory approach and the study conducted in‐depth interviews.

The findings reveal that when consumers are facing buying choices of functional brands that do not involve much risk and the price is low, familiarity is sufficient for their action. When risk and price levels increase, consumers seek a safe purchase choice regarding functional brands through confidence and dependability, while in the case of symbolic brands consumers have to trust the brand in order to make a purchase choice.

By exploring the concept of trust within the consumer domain and in particular in relation to functional and symbolic brands, this study offers insights into an area that has received noticeably limited research up to today. Furthermore the development of the psychosocial model of trust in brands offers opportunities to theoreticians for further research regarding the factors that influence trust in each stage, as well as ways to restore or transfer trust when needed.

The study presents a tool to marketing practitioners, which will assist them in building and preserving long‐term trusting customer relationships.

The value of our research lies in the development of a psychosocial model of trust in brands by drawing on both social theory and on the psychology of human relationships.

According to Whitman, Hayek’s conception of MI pertains just to the relationship of individual psychology and the social sciences, and is neutral on broader questions about reductionism in other scientific domains. Since hypotheses of group selection frequently concern organisms that are taken to be mindless (e.g. viruses and social insects), it is clear that they do not come into contact with MI thus construed. And even when group selection hypotheses make claims about human evolution, as do the hypotheses we discuss in Chapters 4 and 5 of Unto Others, there is, once again, a relationship of mutual irrelevance. The reason is that MI addresses what biologists call the question of proximate mechanism, whereas hypotheses about natural selection are part of the project of ultimate explanation (Mayr, 1961). An example used in Unto Others helps to illustrate this distinction. If one asks why sunflowers turn towards the sun, there are two ways in which this question might be understood. One might wish to understand how the machinery inside of each plant causes the plant to exhibit phototropism. Or one might want to understand the evolutionary processes that caused this behavior to evolve. Both types of understanding are important, and there is no conflict between them. By the same token, when a human society exhibits some property – e.g. the type of egalitarianism among adult males that Boehm (1999) argues is characteristic of nomadic hunter-gatherers – we might seek both a proximate and an ultimate explanation of that arrangement. MI constrains the former problem; it asserts that a group’s having that property must be understood in terms of the beliefs and desires of the individuals in the group (with properties of the physical environment brought in where necessary). But even if the question of proximate mechanism gets answered in the way that MI insists, the question is left open as to whether the group phenotype is the result of natural selection, and if it is, whether group selection was involved. MI says nothing about the form that an evolutionary explanation must take; it concerns proximate explanation only.

International trade is a prerequisite to national prosperity, but at present with floating and sometimes wildly fluctuating exchange rates, the exercise is fraught with danger. It is, therefore, important that in the matter of commodities trading everyone involved is fully aware of the many highly developed centres of information. To this end, there is a new directory/bibliography on the subject Commodities futures trading: a guide to information sources and computerised services by David Nicholas, Senior Lecturer at the School of Librarianship and Information Studies at The Polytechnic of North London. The pattern throughout the book is to describe a specific course and then give its full name and address at the end of the description.

This book by Rod Cowley — ALS: A Guide for Librarians and System Managers — plunges me into some perplexity. For what is the object of this series of which we seem to have here the first volume? According to the back cover, it is to help librarians or system managers — a frightful term. I do hope that the “managers” are also librarians and not upper echelon bureaucrats with their eyes firmly fixed on the statistics produced by computers. However, the book seeks to help them choose an automated system by examining the different products now available. A good move, for librarians wishing to automate their systems often have great difficulty in making a choice in the face of commercial‐cum‐technical engineers well versed in the techniques of salesmanship. Often there is a risky choice — that of one system rather than another based on hazardous rule of thumb and word of mouth. This indicates the potential value of a series which should enable us to form an opinion of different systems by an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. Rod Cowley is a former assistant librarian at Bromley Public Library which has an ALS system and former Secretary of the ALS Users Group. Today, he is UK Sales Manager of Automated Library Systems Ltd.