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In the following the methods and materials of construction used in the manufacture of sulphuric acid are described, from the handling and storage of raw materials right through to the acid concentration stage. There is a wealth of information contained in the article, all based on the authors' own experience with the sulphuric acid manufacturing division of Fisons Ltd. at Immingham, near Grimsby.

We discuss how experimental analysis can be integrated into strategic human resources management (SHRM) research in Africa so as to develop theory and value principles to guide executives.

The model we propose – experiment-based SHRM – is predicated on the use of experimental approaches to demonstrate the value of SHRM and to derive principles that guide research and practice in Africa.

We illustrate how scholars can conduct experiments from an SHRM perspective.

We discuss the strengths and limitations of the model and suggest ways of maximizing its potential.

The technique is a resource for scholars of SHRM in Africa. They can use it to supplement other approaches for studying SHRM.

This chapter discusses a typology of experimental analysis. The lack of such a typology in the context of Africa makes it a valuable contribution. Thus, it fills a contextual gap in the SHRM research methodology literature. It can therefore help graduate students and junior faculty improve their research.

SEPTEMBER this year will be unique in the history of the librarian in England in that for the first time in nearly sixty years the annual conference of the Library Association has already become a memory only. There are those who profess to believe that the conference should be restored to the autumn months. It may be suggested on the other hand that the attendance at Margate lent no assistance to that point of view; indeed, the Margate conference was one of the most pleasant, one of the most successful, of which we have record. Nevertheless, if it can be proved that any large body of librarians was unable to be present owing to the change of month, it appears to us that the matter should be considered sympathetically. Although no one holds any longer the view that one week's attendance at a conference will teach more than many months' study in hermit‐like seclusion—the words and sentiments are those of James Duff Brown—because to‐day there is much more intimate communication between librarians than there was when that sentiment was expressed, there is enormous value, and the adjective is not an exaggeration, in one large meeting of librarians in body in the year. It is an event to which every young librarian looks forward as the privilege to be his when he reaches a high enough position in the service; attendance is a privilege that no librarian anywhere would forego. And this, in spite of the fact that there is usually a grumble because the day is so full of meetings that there is very little chance of such recreation as a seaside, or indeed any other, place visited, usually provides for the delegates.

PLASTICS. BRITAIN'S plastics industry has more than doubled its production during the last five years and now has an annual output of about 320,000 tons. An important stimulant to this growth has been the rapid post‐war expansion of the chemical industry and its concurrent demand for corrosion‐resistant equipment. The plastics industry has not yet produced the ideal plastic which is easy to apply and use and yet has all the durable qualities such as resistance to acids, alkalis, solvents, oxidising agents, etc. It has, however, produced a range of products, each of which has particular qualities which make it attractive to use for particular applications.

OUR correspondent revives the problem of fiction supply on a paying basis to readers in public libraries. The figures he gives of the sums that a charge of one penny per issue might realize in certain libraries if the number of books issued remains as last year are impressive; the sums are usefully substantial. He does not deal with objections obvious to librarians. We have recently been admonished for making any charge in connexion with our lendings, as we have shown in these pages, when we wrote that the law can be altered although new library legislation seems unlikely at present. The other quite practical difficulties are that one withdraws privileges from the public only at the risk of a clamour for their restoration. Then it is commonsense to argue that if the people desire to provide themselves with any kind of reading from public funds they have the right to do so. At present they appear to exercise that right, otherwise it seems unlikely that a large city would allow two millions of fiction to be circulated out of a total issue of three and a half millions. It cannot be contended that our local statesmen do not see the significance of these figures. There is the further question of the unsatisfactory nature of the terms non‐fiction as embracing everything that is not narrative imaginative prose, and fiction as embracing everything that is. The whole question, like the poor, is always with us, but it cannot conveniently be brushed aside.

The applications of multi-agent systems (MASs) are considered to be among the most promising paradigms for detailed investigations and reliable problem-solving methods, and MAS applications make it possible for researchers and practitioners to better understand complex systems. Although a number of prior studies have been conducted to address complex issues that arise from construction projects, few studies have summarised the applications and discussed the capacity of MASs from the perspective of construction management. To fill the gap, this paper provides a comprehensive literature review of MAS applications from the perspective of construction management.

Web of Science and Scopus are the most commonly used international databases in conducting the literature reviews. A total of 86 relevant papers published in SCI-Expanded, SSCI and Ei Compendex journals related to the application of MASs from the perspective of construction management are selected to be analysed and discussed in this paper.

Based on the 86 collected publications, the utilisations of MASs to support the management of the supply chain and the improvement of project performance are identified from the perspective of construction management, the characteristics and barriers of current MAS applications are analysed, a framework for developing agent-based models to address complex problems is proposed, and future research directions of MAS applications are discussed.

This review can serve as a useful reference for scholars to enhance their understanding of the current research and guide future research on MASs. The proposed framework can help build agent-based models to address complex problems in construction management.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature about the use of agent-based simulation (ABS) in the study of organizational behavior, decision making, and problem-solving. It aims at contributing to the consolidation of ABS as a field of applied research in management and organizational studies.

The authors carried out a non-systematic search in literature published between 2000 and 2016, by using the keyword “agent-based” to search through Scopus’ business, management and accounting database. Additional search criteria were devised using the papers’ keywords and the categories defined by the divisions and interest groups of the Academy of Management. The authors found 181 articles for this survey.

The survey shows that ABS provides a robust and rigorous framework to elaborate descriptions, explanations, predictions and theories about organizations and their processes as well as develop tools that support strategic and operational decision making and problem-solving. The authors show that the areas that report the highest number of applications are operations and logistics (37 percent), marketing (17 percent) and organizational behavior (14 percent).

The paper illustrates the increasingly prominent role of ABS in fields such as organizational behavior, strategy, human resources, marketing and logistics. To-date, this is the most complete survey about ABS in all management areas.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the emergence of collaboration networks in entrepreneurial clusters as determined by the way entrepreneurs exchange knowledge and learn through business transactions needed to implement temporary supply chains in networks of co-located firms.

A socio-computational approach is adopted to model business transactions and supply chain formation in Marshallian industrial districts (IDs). An agent-based model is presented and used as a virtual lab to test the hypotheses between the firms’ behaviour and the emergence of structural properties at the system level.

The simulation findings and their validation based on the comparison with a real world cluster show that the topological properties of the emerging network are influenced by the learning strategies and decision-making criteria firms use when choosing partners. With reference to the specific case of Marshallian IDs it is shown that inertial learning based on history and past collaboration represents in the long term a major impediment for the emergence of hubs and of a network topology that is more conducive to innovation and growth.

The paper offers an alternative view of entrepreneurial learning (EL) as opposed to the dominant view in which learning occurs as a result of exceptional circumstances (e.g. failure). The results presented in this work show that adaptive, situated, and day-by-day learning has a profound impact on the performance of entrepreneurial clusters. These results are encouraging to motivate additional research in areas such as in modelling learning or in the application of the proposed approach to the analysis of other types of entrepreneurial ecosystems, such as start-up networks and makers’ communities.

Agent-based model can support policymakers in identifying situated factors that can be leveraged to produce changes at the macro-level through the identification of suitable incentives and social networks re-engineering.

The paper presents a novel perspective on EL and offers evidence that micro-learning strategies adopted and developed in routine business transactions do have an impact on firms’ performances (survival and growth) as well as on systemic performances related to the creation and diffusion of innovation in firms networks.

This article proposes a novel hybrid simulation model for understanding the complex tobacco use behavior.

The model is developed by embedding the concept of the multistage learning-based fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) into the agent-based model (ABM) in order to benefit from advantageous of each methodology. The ABM is used to represent individual level behaviors while the FCM is used as a decision support mechanism for individuals. In this study, socio-demographic characteristics of individuals, tobacco control policies, and social network effect are taken into account to reflect the current tobacco use system of Turkey. The effects of plain package and COVID-19 on tobacco use behaviors of individuals are also searched under different scenarios.

The findings indicate that the proposed model provides promising results for representing the mental models of agents. Besides, the scenario analyses help to observe the possible reactions of people to new conditions according to characteristics.

The proposed method combined ABM and FCM with a multi-stage learning phases for modeling a complex and dynamic social problem as close as real life. It is expected to contribute for both ABM and tobacco use literature.

The purpose of this study is to suggest an unusual method that may help researchers to examine from the real-time movements of consumers among stores located on any kind of shopping location. We assumed shopping behavior of individuals as a complicated network representing their interactions with multiple types of stores – brands. Shopping malls were chosen to test this alternative method. Closely located stores in these organizations give researchers a chance to investigate patterns of interactions of customers in relation to brands. Therefore, we decided to develop an unusual method to examine customers' behavior in these organizations.

This study suggests that circulation patterns of customers in a shopping location may provide valuable information to decision makers. The applicability of this technique was tested on 700 consumers visiting stores of a supper-regional shopping mall, located in Ankara, Turkey. Paths of the customers in a specific type of mall were determined, and their interactions with the stores were analyzed by using social network analysis techniques. The brands having key positions in the network were compared with the brand configuration of high- and low-performer malls serving to similar markets.

The results of the network analyses were used to understand whether this method could be beneficial for the ideal tenant mix problem of shopping malls. Findings suggest that the performance of malls depends on fitness to customer paths, and the malls, which didn't have the key brands at the initial stage, could not adapt themselves later. Findings of the case study verified that this technique might offer a solution to this well-known dilemma of the retailing sector and may have several implications.

These types of data are very valuable, especially for retailing research and the industry, because very critical knowledge such as traffic among retail stores, key central brands, ideal location of stores, consumption tendencies of different customer groups and symbiotic or competitive relations among retailers can be obtained. This method may also have broad implications in other fields of research such as location analysis, decision support systems and property management as well as marketing and retailing.