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What is it about academia anyway? We profess to hate it, spend endless amounts of time complaining about it, and yet we in academia will do practically anything to stay. The pay may be low, job security elusive, and in the end, it's not the glamorous work we envisioned it would be. Yet, it still holds fascination and interest for us. This is an article about American academic fiction. By academic fiction, I mean novels whosemain characters are professors, college students, and those individuals associated with academia. These works reveal many truths about the higher education experience not readily available elsewhere. We learn about ourselves and the university community in which we work.

Sociology has a long and ambivalent relationship with the literary and aesthetic form. Commonsense readings of the novel assume its unproblematic structure as a linear narrative. Yet every novel alerts its readers to the constructed nature of social reality and identifies many of the effects of power, privilege, gender, class, desire, resistance, subversion and so on. As such a novel has the capacity to force a confrontation with fundamental, and Jameson (1981) would suggest, enduring human concerns. The novel can strip away a sense of familiarity with everyday habits, and in so doing, it can replicate the sociological process of denaturalization or defamiliarization, and allow the reader to see how ideas come to circulate, dominate and frame the ordinary world. Accordingly, David Lodge comes to the conclusion that “narrative is one of the fundamental human tools for making sense of the world.”

By examining a controversial and much debated novel like American Psycho around which a great deal of social commentary already exists, and by applying the arguments of Lodge, Jameson and others, we understand better how a work of art simultaneously functions as a deconstructive tool of the social. On this basis, when American Psycho generated a great deal of cultural anxiety in the cultural commentators of the day, it suggests that it had succeeded in denaturalizing the world, and in revealing the residual violence in an affluent, comfortable citizenry that was not expected to harbor such hostilities. American Psycho presented a disturbing “symptomatology of the times.” This capacity of the popular novel to inform on the zeitgeist makes an author such as Bret Easton Ellis a maven of our times whose products we should thus incorporate into the conceptual tool kit of any formal human studies.

Discusses the recently published draft standard from the Bank of England that covers most controversial banking regulatory areas. States that there may well be advantages in a fair value approach for banks but disclosure of fair values would probably be preferable. Looks at the S&L crisis in the USA and how legislation worked in its case. Elaborates on Denmark’s comprehensive fair value approach that suggests that adjustments in this system do increase earnings and value of capital volatility. Pinpoints bond market problems and liabilities valuation. Contends that there would be advantages in adopting disclosure of fair values.

Recent proposals to require all financial instruments to be measured at fair value are raising some pretty basic issues about bank accounting. The author, who headed up the UK end of the project to produce the new rules, argues whether, as bankers might suggest, they are overkill or whether they are a reasonable response to a serious problem. He argues that accounting rules around the world are moving steadily away from historical cost accounting and towards fair value accounting. The banks argue that their figures would become more volatile. The standard‐setters argue that, if reporting more realistically shows volatility, then so be it. But the proposals are the most comprehensive examination of the problem and he commends its study.

Reviews articles published during 1996 in the Hospitality Research Journal, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly and Florida International University Review. Identifies recent contributions to the literature in these North American‐based journals with reference to: people and organizations; service quality and customers; strategy and operations; food service; education; and eco‐tourism and legal issues.

This paper aims to examine how an innovative concept was introduced to a new market segment through varied marketing techniques.

Newspapers from 1958 were reviewed to assess the impact of a chocolate company advertising campaign targeting children. The paper examines the interpretation of the campaign message and the information contained in an album of collectable cards.

Parents leave the teaching role in the hands of companies when they do not clearly understand new technologies such as nuclear energy. Companies can take advantage of what governments introduce into the market to increase their sales.

The originality of the paper lies in the examination of collectable cards as a means of researching marketing history and contributes to the study of market segmentation, particularly in the case of children, focussing on nuclear energy.

The author notes the proposals put forward by the Joint Working Group of Standard Setters on Financial Instruments and sets out the arguments why the banking community is against the concept of measuring financial instruments under a fair value accounting system. He suggests that the proposals should be abandoned and that the accounting standard setters join with the banking industry to produce improvements in financial reporting.