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Highlights the increasing pressure research managers are feeling to improve quality and reduce costs of R&D and points out that some funding agencies are looking for quality standards to impose on laboratories to help guarantee data quality. Details the difficulties the US national laboratories have already experienced in dealing with nuclear quality standards, and the immense popularity of the ISO 9000 series of international standards, which threatens to inflict similar Angst on industrial laboratories. Describes how, consequently, the American National Standards Institute has chartered a writing group to prepare guidelines for quality systems for research.

Argues that total quality applications to research and development are in their infancy. Few laboratories have tried it, so there are few hard data. Questions whether the principles so successfully applied in the manufacturing environment work in the specialized realm of science?

The range of pressures which has impacted on local government in the 1980s has forced the emergence of dynamic and sophisticated forms of industrial relations at the workplace level. It is clear, however, that with conceptual tools forged to analyse developments in the private manufacturing sector, very few attempts have been made by academics, policy‐makers or commentators to discuss the structures and processes which have emerged. The character of the changes at authority level are considered using material from a survey of personnel officers in over a third of authorities in England and Wales and within the context of prevailing analytical and theoretical frameworks. It is argued that the distinctive development of the personnel function in local government has resulted in a managerial process which conforms to key features of the human resource management (HRM) model, in particular the devolution of personnel responsibilities to line managers and the integration of personnel concerns at the strategic level. However, other features of this model are less in evidence. The search for employee commitment and flexibility remains patchy and often appears as a practical response to labour market and competitive pressures. Furthermore, collectivist features of employee relations remain well entrenched with the continued encouragement of both union membership and involvement. This is not to deny change beyond the HRM model. Thus, it is clear that established joint machinery is becoming increasingly unable to deal with ongoing issues while the trade unions are gradually being forced into a consultative rather than a bargaining role.

The premise that the U.S. Supreme Court never veers too far off from the dominant national political coalition (Dahl, 1957) has become widely accepted among social scientists today. To fulfill that promise, however, the confirmation process for justices must serve as a plebiscite through which the public can ratify or reject future justices based on their views. Unfortunately, modern confirmation hearings have become an exercise in obfuscation, providing little meaningful dialogue on important issues. Because conservative Republican presidents have made the lion's share of appointments in recent times, social conservatives have most often benefited from a process that has severed the link between Supreme Court nominees and the polity they must serve.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

IT is fitting that a new series of this magazine should be introduced by some reflections on the whole question of book selection, both for the general public and libraries.

“GIVE a dog a bad name and hang him,” is an aphorism which has been accepted for many years. But, like many other household words, it is not always true. Even if it were, the dog to be operated upon would probably prefer a gala day at his Tyburn Tree to being executed in an obscure back yard.