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LAST WEEK I was asked to go and buy two publications. This gave me a chance to visit GILLIAN CLEGG, librarian of the advertising trade paper ‘Campaign’. She had won the 1971 Sir Evelyn Wrench Travelling Fellowship and during her month in the us and Canada visited libraries providing business information particularly in publishing, advertising and marketing. Not a surprising choice for a girl who had previously worked for the advertising agencies J Walter Thompson and Lintas! I asked her about the visit.

Any historical survey of the way in which consumers have organized themselves into associations for their own mutual benefit and protection should really begin with the role played by the consumer co‐operative movement. But, as Jeremy Mitchell (former Head of Information at Consumers' Association and now Director of the Consumer Affairs Division at the Office of Fair Trading) has pointed out, the co‐operative movement was not really a consumer association at all: ‘The fact that the consumer, in a co‐operative society, is the formal owner of the means of distribution seems to have little significance in practical terms. By analogy, it can be compared with the consumer's formal ownership of the means of production in a nationalized industry, or the individual shareholder's formal ownership of a joint‐stock company.’

WATNEY and Powell Ltd, of 14 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1, are offering a comprehensive monitoring of Parliamentary papers according to client's briefs: price £400 per annum plus VAT. A similar service is offered on the European and Dublin parliament for £200 and £100 respectively.

WE ARE saturated with conferences, courses and seminars to the point at which over‐absorption has led to rejection. When one cannot see the wood for the trees the line of least resistance is not to attend anything.

I set out to find the people we have neglected and instead found what I think may be the beginnings of a long quiet revolution. A year ago I did not know how many developments and experiments were taking place in information fields that until recently have not been explored. The title of my paper was often a source of embarrassment as I talked to enthusiastic pioneers who did not consider their clients to be deprived. Nevertheless they were pioneers.

The Industrial Relations Research Unit of the Social Science Research Council was set up at the University of Warwick on 1st March 1970. Professor Hugh Clegg, Professor of Industrial Relations at Warwick was appointed to be Director, and Professor George Bain, Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), was appointed to be Deputy Director. The Unit's Advisory Committee, consisting of four representatives of the Social Science Research Council, three from the University of Warwick and three assessors, one each from the Trades Union Congress, the Confederation of British Industry and the Department of Employment, gave final approval to the proposed programme of research in June 1970, the majority of the staff appointments being made to take effect from 1st October.

Whatever debates may have taken place in the past in the courts and elsewhere on the status of trade unions, current legislation provides that a “… trade union … is not a body corporate …” and “…shall not be treated as if it were a body corporate…” For practical reasons however, a trade union is, inter alia, “… capable of making contracts …” which includes the entering into a collective agreement.

This research aims to explore the professional identity of supervisors and their perceptions of stress in doctoral learning supervision. The research determines ways of developing strategies of resilience and well-being to overcome stress, leading to positive outcomes for supervisors and students.

Research is in two parts: first, rescrutinising previous work, and second, new interviews with international and UK supervisors gathering evidence of doctoral supervisor stress, in relation to professional identity, and discovering resilience and well-being strategies.

Supervisor professional identity and well-being are aligned with research progress, and effective supervision. Stress and well-being/resilience strategies emerged across three dimensions, namely, personal, learning and institutional, related to emotional, professional and intellectual issues, affecting identity and well-being. Problematic relationships, change in supervision arrangements, loss of students and lack of student progress cause stress. Balances between responsibility and autonomy; uncomfortable conflicts arising from personality clashes; and the nature of the research work, burnout and lack of time for their own work, all cause supervisor stress. Developing community support, handling guilt and a sense of underachievement and self-management practices help maintain well-being.

Only experienced supervisors (each with four doctoral students completed) were interviewed. The research relies on interview responses.

Sharing information can lead to informed, positive action minimising stress and isolation; development of personal coping strategies and institutional support enhance the supervisory experience for supervisors and students.

The research contributes new knowledge concerning doctoral supervisor experience, identity and well-being, offering research-based information and ideas on a hitherto under-researched focus: supervisor stress, well-being and resilience impacting on supervisors’ professional identity.

This volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the analysis of justification, evaluation and critique in organizations, as inspired by the foundational ideas of French Pragmatist Sociology’s economies of worth (EW) framework. In this introduction, we begin by underlining the EW framework’s importance in sociology and social theory more generally and discuss its relative neglect within organizational theory, at least until now. We then present an overview of the framework’s intellectual roots, and for those who are new to this particular theoretical domain, offer a brief introduction to the theory’s main concepts and core assumptions. This we follow with an overview of the contributions included in this volume. We conclude by highlighting the EW framework’s important yet largely untapped potential for advancing our understanding of organizations more broadly. Collectively, the contributions in this volume help demonstrate the potential of the EW framework to (1) advance current understanding of organizational processes by unpacking justification dynamics at the individual level of analysis, (2) refresh critical perspectives in organization theory by providing them with pragmatic foundations, (3) expand and develop the study of valuation and evaluation in organizations by reconsidering the notion of worth, and finally (4) push the boundaries of the framework itself by questioning and fine tuning some of its core assumptions. Taken as a whole, this volume not only carves a path for a deeper embedding of the EW approach into contemporary thinking about organizations, it also invites readers to refine and expand it by confronting it with a wider range of diverse empirical contexts of interest to organizational scholars.

It will be recalled that the last monograph treated the significance of the collective agreement in society. If solely a function in society, (though having a legal basis), were to be attributed to the collective agreement, this would mean that no rights or obligations whatsoever would be created between the parties to it. This is not so in practice. It is of course a fact that no legally enforceable rights and obligations normally accrue, and as already indicated, those are moral ones and are only enforceable in honour, i.e. a gentleman's agreement. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that the collective agreement has no juridical significance. Even agreements which are binding in honour only, as for example the kind of agreement found in Balfour v. Balfour, have a known juridical nature. Furthermore, though the collective agreement is only binding in honour, its incorporation into the individual contract of employment makes its terms legally enforceable even though recourse to the courts is seldom had. As a source of rights and obligations of considerable importance the collective agreement must therefore have some juridical significance and cannot remain entirely in the realms of society.