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I was appointed to the dual role of Principal Training Officer in the County of Avon's Department of Personnel Services and Associate Lecturer in the South West Regional Management Centre at Bristol Polytechnic in January 1975. I believe (and, what is more important, both these organisations also believe) that the concept of a training officer/lecturer joint appointment could be of great mutual benefit to both employers; this is particularly so at a time when most large concerns are wondering whether they are getting real value for money from training schemes, and this question is especially pertinent to management and supervisory training. It is with these areas which I am particularly involved in my day to day work.

The increasing interest in the setting up of management development activities in the public sector reflects the challenges which public authorities are experiencing at the moment. These result from financial pressures and public criticism on a scale unknown since the war and are therefore unfamiliar to the present generation of managers. This article examines the special nature of the management task in such authorities. It discusses how one particular part of a substantial public authority tries to equip its managers to cope with the challenges.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate current techniques in capital budget decision making in Canada, including real options, and to integrate the results with similar previous studies.

A mail survey was conducted, which included 88 large firms in Canada.

Trends towards sophisticated techniques have continued; however, even in large firms, 17 percent did not use discounted cash flow (DCF). Of those which did, the majority favoured net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR). Overall between one in ten to one in three were not correctly applying certain aspects of DCF. Only 8 percent used real options.

One limitation is that the survey does not indicate why managers continue using less advanced capital budgeting decision techniques. A second is that choice of population may bias results to large firms in Canada.

The main area for management focus is real options. Other areas for improvement are administrative procedures, using the weighted average cost of capital (WACC), adjusting the WACC for different projects or divisions, employing target or market values for weights, and not including interest expenses in project cash flows. A small proportion of managers also need to start using DCF.

The evaluation shows there still remains a theory‐practice gap in the detailed elements of DCF capital budgeting decision techniques, and in real options. Further, it is valuable to take stock of a concept that has been developed over a number of years. What this paper offers is a fine‐grained analysis of investment decision making, a synthesis and integration of several studies on DCF where new comparisons are made, advice to managers and thus opportunities to improve investment decision making.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the development of the SME sector in Australia, concentrating on a number of key areas: small business definitions and numbers; the role of government; the emergence of key industry groups; and the evolution of education, training and research services.

The study is a result of extensive literature reviews, desk research and the recollections of various participants in the field.

There have been major changes to the Australian small business sector over the last 40 years. In 1983-1984 there were an estimated 550,000 small firms, and by 2010 this had grown to almost two million. Government involvement in, and support for, SMEs was virtually non-existent before 1970. Following the delivery of the Wiltshire report (1971), however, both state and federal governments responded by developing specialist advisory services, funding programmes and other support tools. Virtually non-existent before the 1970s, several peak industry associations were formed between 1977 and the 1990s. At the same time, formal education and teaching in the area expanded in the 1970s and 1980s and is now widespread.

Development of the small business sector in Australia has often paralleled similar trends in other OECD nations. State and territory governments have often (but not always) been the principal drivers of policy change.

There has been no little, if any, prior documentation of the evolution of the small business sector in Australia in the last 40 years.

It is difficult to replicate evidence-informed models of psychosocial and assertive care interventions in non-research settings, and means to determine workforce capability for psychosocial therapies have not been readily available. The purpose of this paper is to describe and provide a rationale for the Therapy Capability Framework (TCF) which aims to enhance access to, and quality of, evidence-informed practice for consumers of mental health services (MHSs) by strengthening workforce capabilities and leadership for psychosocial therapies.

Guided by literature regarding the inadequacies and inconsistencies of evidence-informed practice provided by publicly-funded MHSs, this descriptive paper details the TCF and its application to enhance leadership and provision of evidence-informed psychosocial therapies within multi-disciplinary teams.

The TCF affords both individual and strategic workforce development opportunities. Applying the TCF as a service-wide workforce strategy may assist publicly-funded mental health leaders, and other speciality health services, establish a culture that values leadership, efficiency, and evidence-informed practice.

This paper introduces the TCF as an innovation to assist publicly-funded mental health leaders to transform standard case management roles to provide more evidence-informed psychosocial therapies. This may have clinical and cost-effective outcomes for public MHSs, the consumers, carers, and family members.

This study aims to examine the relationship between personal values and small and medium enterprise (SME) innovation in Minangkabau, a Muslim ethnic group in Indonesia.

A quantitative approach was used to survey 400 small business owners. Structural models were estimated using WarpPLS.

The study established that SME owners had mixed values. This highlights the context of entrepreneurship because it provides an understanding of the links between personal values and some innovation-related constructs.

The study made a little comparison of personal values in other Muslim societies. It is beneficial as a reference for future studies on comparisons between the Minangkabau and other ethnic Muslim groups.

Minangkabau small enterprise entrepreneurs need reflection on their values and business innovation because integrating these two aspects strengthens business identity.

The entrepreneurs may need to balance personal and socio-cultural values to implement both business innovation and social harmony successfully.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that takes into account the innovation concept. It examines personal values related to some concepts on innovation. It can partly be explained by the high level of religiosity in the Minangkabau ethnic group.

Given current dystopian perspectives on Africa's future, the purpose of this paper is to emphasise the need for recreative futures studies when designing development programmes for Sub‐Saharan Africa.

The paper draws on social systems thinking, causal layered analysis and integral futures, and contrasts the interpretative and transformative approaches to futures research.

Sub‐Saharan Africa reached a crossroad in its development. There are powerful forces that are pushing it back towards a low‐level equilibrium trap – making it easy to imagine a dystopian future as the most plausible one for the region. However, there are also a number of hopeful signs that suggest that committed interventions could turn the tide towards its sustainable development. Such interventions will have to dig deep into the collective consciousness of people and require systemic, multi‐faceted programmes for success.

This paper should be of interest to development planners who are searching for programme options outside of what is considered normal for development planning.

THE Reference Department of Paisley Central Library today occupies the room which was the original Public Library built in 1870 and opened to the public in April 1871. Since that date two extensions to the building have taken place. The first, in 1882, provided a separate room for both Reference and Lending libraries; the second, opened in 1938, provided a new Children's Department. Together with the original cost of the building, these extensions were entirely financed by Sir Peter Coats, James Coats of Auchendrane and Daniel Coats respectively. The people of Paisley indeed owe much to this one family, whose generosity was great. They not only provided the capital required but continued to donate many useful and often extremely valuable works of reference over the many years that followed. In 1975 Paisley Library was incorporated in the new Renfrew District library service.