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The support for local initiatives by large organisations has become substantially institutionalised in the UK through Business in the Community. How much further it will go, and how much it will be supported by government, is the subject of debate and conjecture. An overview of how large firms support small and medium enterprise development — the motivations and how they are changing — is provided. The problems in evaluation and a case study of Shell UK Ltd are provided, and future directions, possible shifts and influences are considered.

Sequel of no. 4/83, p. 24 Not many national associations hold conventions in countries other than their own. In Northwest Europe it is unlikely that any country is a net recipient of national conventions from elsewhere in Europe. In fact, there is likely to be some small ‘leakage’ of national association conventions to destinations in the Mediterranean or further afield. However, Northwest Europe (particularly the U.K. and Ireland) receives a small number of North American association conventions. Based on the available data this may amount to some 25 large conventions yearly.

There can be few who will regret the departure of 1966. As he makes his way towards that dim hall where the years are supposed to sit on their granite columns there will be few sighs at the parting. The year has been ‘a holy terror’ to almost everybody. Contraction has been its forte and uncertainty its foible. There have been severe restraints on enterprise, the crushing of many hopes and an air of apathy verging on despair. Future historians may well describe contemporary events as taking place ‘in the year of the Freeze’, much as it was once common to say ‘in the year of the French Revolution’.

THE several hundred members who heard the thought‐provoking addresses delivered at the Harrogate conference of the British Institute of Management recently must have returned stimulated by much that was said. At the outset the American Ambassador reminded them that the big business tended to suffer from a certain complacency because it thought that operating efficiency could allow it to ignore the whips and spurs of competition, although he did not advocate cutting up the leviathans to nourish a lot of little fish for the sake of seeing them fight. Indeed, he thought the growth of mass markets meant that the creation of business organisations commensurate with catering for them was inevitable.

Official and therefore reliable information which relates to the canning industry in France is unfortunately almost impossible to obtain at the moment of writing. This is the more regrettable, as it is to France that the world is indebted for the inception of an industry whose influence has been as profound as it is widespread. The French manufacturers, however, do not seem to have availed themselves as fully as they might have done of the possibilities, or complied with the requirements of the modern developments of the industry. For example, until quite recently we understand that a prejudice existed against foodstuffs which had been preserved in tins instead of in bottles or jars. This prejudice is in process of being overcome to what will be undoubtedly the great benefit of the industry. Tins of course have been and are being widely used at the present time in the “putting up” of sardines to mention only one well‐known item of the French canning trade, but they could be used more than they are for many other things. When tins are used standardization of the sizes of containers becomes easier, with attendant advantages in the matter of packing and transport. Again, leaving quality out of the question, such standardization is to the benefit of retailer and consumer, for the one knows the weight and bulk of what he sells and the other of what he buys, to say nothing of the saving effected in time, labour, and material in the factory itself. As an illustration, though it may be an extreme one, of the want of standardization in this respect, it has been stated that no less than thirty‐one different sized containers are in use by one firm which “puts up” foie gras! The disadvantage, especially in the export trade, of such lack of uniformity is too obvious to need comment. In the United States, with its enormous home and export trade in canned foodstuffs of all kinds, the necessity for standardization has long been recognised and acted upon. The system of trade and Government control over output is in this respect complete. In France, on the other hand, it would seem to be only beginning. The matter, however, is engaging the attention of “Agnon,” that is to say the Association Française pour normalization, which has already taken action with regard to certain products, namely, mushrooms, legumes, and sardines—and it has under consideration a project whereby the containers of other foods may be standardized in shape and bulk. There has hitherto been to a certain extent an absence of the full measure of co‐operation among French “packing houses” to use the American term, but the Conseil National et Inter‐fédéral de la Conserve—of which our contemporary, “La Conserverie Française,” is the official organ—is taking steps by a somewhat belated but fully justified campaign of propaganda to give the necessary information relating to every aspect of the canned and bottled foodstuffs prepared by French manufacturing houses.

In this paper, the authors introduce supply disruption ambiguity as the inability of a sourcing firm to attach probability point estimates to the occurrence of and to the magnitude of loss from supply disruptions. The authors drew on the “ambiguity in decision-making” literature to define this concept formally, connected it to relevant supply disruption information deficit, positioned it relative to supply chain risk assessment and hypothesized and tested its negative associations with both supply base ties and inventory turnover.

The authors analysed survey data from 171 North American manufacturers and archival data for a subset (88 publicly listed) of these manufacturers via Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation after ensuring that methodological concerns with survey research have been addressed. They used appropriate controls and employed the heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variable (HBIV) approach to ensure that inferences from our results are not unduly influenced by endogeneity.

Strong supply base ties decrease supply disruption ambiguity, which, in turn, increases inventory turnover. Moreover, strong supply base ties and data integration with the supply base have indirect and positive effects on inventory turnover. As sourcing firms strengthen ties and integrate data exchange with their supply base, their inventory turnover improves from access to information relevant to detect and diagnose supply disruptions effectively.

Research on supply disruption management has paid more attention to the “disruption recovery” stage than to the “disruption discovery” stage. In this paper, the authors add novel insights regarding the recognition and diagnosis aspects of the “disruption discovery” stage. These novel insights reveal how and why sourcing firms reduce their overall ambiguity associated with detecting and assessing losses from supply disruptions through establishing strong ties with their supply base and how and why reducing such ambiguity improves inventory turnover performance.

A rose by any other name doesn't smell as sweet. Or that's what the nearly 1,500 corporations that changed their names last year believe. According to research by Anspach Grossman Enterprise, an identity consultancy based in New York, more companies took on new monikers than any year since 1989.

The attraction of hindsight is that it makes life simple. When events are seen in retrospect, the blind alley need never have been taken, mistakes can evaporate and the messy chaos of uncertainty can be transformed into an intricate network of purposeful events. Not that this transformation is undesirable. This article, for example, which is the first in a series describing the results of over ten man‐years of training research and development, uses the hindsight of our research team to spare readers from a tedious catalogue of our errors and uncertainties. So we write about areas of success; for our failures and uncertainties are like everybody else's — depressing, time‐consuming and unspeakably tedious to hear about second‐hand.

I am pleased to be invited to contribute some reminiscences and observations of the last 50 years in aviation, for AIRCRAFT ENGINEERING'S Golden Jubilee edition, even though 1 cannot quite match its record, having only started in aviation in 1931. However, my father had been in aviation before me since 1908, and we lived just outside Brooklands, said by some to be the cradle of British aviation, all the days of my youth. I was keenly interested in aviation from as early as I can remember, so hope I may claim indulgence for those three “missing” years.

This article is written by Mr. Major at the invitation of the publishers of AIRCRAFT ENGINEERING as an introduction to the series that is being published during 1980, (as was said in the Comment in the January issue), on the important subject of Airworthiness. Mr. Major says “My comments are not intended to be an official expression of views of the Society of which I am President, and they are based on experience in civil air transport covering technical development, aircraft maintenance and ground operations and, in the aircraft manufacturing industry, covering structural and detail design, production and after‐sales liaison with military users. This fairly diverse experience and some of the events which have occurred in the course of acquiring it, have led me to the view that many (perhaps most) of the airworthiness shortcomings that occur are due to the ‘gulfs’ which develop between specializations, or to the lack of communication (in the widest sense — and both ways) between the elements contributing to ‘total’ airworthiness.”