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The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how computer simulation methods can be used to help management make quality‐related decisions on costs and expenditure that reduce failures and eliminate wastage and activities which do not add value to the business.

Rival quality costing models are reviewed and the benefits of simulating quality costs, considered.

Contrasting case studies are used to differentiate between macro‐ and micro‐ simulation approaches to quality costing.

The paper confirms the potential that quality cost simulation offers for achieving significant efficiency gains in quality planning applications.

Stakeholder thinking has contributed considerably to the organizational literature by demonstrating the significance of the environment in managing organizations. Stakeholders affect and are affected by organizations’ daily operations and decisions. They have varied and often conflicting interests, making it necessary for managers and organizations to know who they are as well as their attributes. Consequently, Mitchell et al. (1997) developed the stakeholder salience theory to help managers and organizations identify the power of certain stakeholders and their salience to the organization. With a few exceptions, the mainstream stakeholder salience theory is in many ways still largely static, short-term oriented, and firm-centered. The aim of this paper is to revisit certain conformist assumptions concerning the role of marginalized stakeholders, or “dormant” stakeholders, in stakeholder thinking. Overall, this chapter is a call to a new conceptualization of stakeholders that reintroduces stakeholder dynamics at the core of stakeholder thinking to overcome its restrictive shortcomings. We argue that managing stakeholder relationships is not simply meeting stakeholder demands but also involves taking into account the long-term dynamics of stakeholder interactions.

With the recent increasing relevance of sustainability, multinational enterprises are faced with divergent stakeholder demands and persistently shifting priorities. This study aims to examine stakeholders’ perceptions of the sustainability performance of a gold mining subsidiary in Ghana.

Using a purposive sampling technique, the authors interviewed managers and employees of the case enterprise, officials of regulatory institutions and host community members on their perceptions of the case enterprise’s sustainability performance. The authors triangulated the opinions expressed by these stakeholders with data from annual reports. The data were analysed through the lens of stakeholder theory.

The authors found that while members of the host community and the regulatory institutions were keenly interested in the case enterprise’s social and environmental activities, they perceived their performance as unimpressive, considering the economic benefits derived from the mining operations. On the contrary, the managers and employees of the case enterprise were satisfied with their environmental compliance and social intervention programmes, even though the company’s economic position had declined. The authors submit that the variations in the sustainability performance perceptions among the stakeholders are due to the lack of a deeper understanding of the other stakeholders’ expectations.

To equitably satisfy diverse stakeholder expectations, the study highlights the role of stakeholder collaborations in understanding the expectations of more salient stakeholder groups such as community members and employees, as well as the lesser salient groups such as academics. It also demonstrates the fluidity of sustainability and its benefits in designing a consensual sustainable management strategy. This implies that managers of the case mining enterprise make the necessary efforts to meet the diverse stakeholder needs while attaining their primary objective of creating wealth for shareholders.

Compared to advanced economies, studies on sustainability performance in emerging economies are limited. Nonetheless, these limited studies leave out stakeholder perceptions, focusing more on quantitative performance indicators. Using thematic and content analyses, the authors investigate stakeholder perceptions on the sustainability performance of a case mining subsidiary operating in Ghana. The study focused on Ghana because it is ranked with South Africa as the top two producers of gold in Africa. Nonetheless, unlike South Africa, Ghana faces more sustainability challenges from the mining sector due to weak institutions in enforcing sustainability standards.

The aim of this paper is to examine the nature of newspaper advertisements published in the Irish newspaper The Freeman's Journal. This is approached by examining the construction of a selection of printed advertisements, including the strategies used in each, which appeared in The Freeman's Journal between 1763 and 1924.

The central primary source used is The Freeman's Journal and the selected advertisements. A number of primary and secondary sources are employed in the analysis of the featured advertisements in respect to the format, language and marketing strategies used in each.

The case study finds that there were a number of constants in the advertisements examined, as well as a number of advertising strategies employed from the eighteenth century onward, that have more commonly been associated with the 1918 to 1939 interwar period. It also found that the use of illustrations did not solely depend on twentieth century printing advances, but that printing developments did much to expand and progress advertising in Ireland.

This case study explores a little researched area in Irish advertising history.

We present a comprehensive literature review and critique of union decertification research, and develop a theoretical framework that should prove useful for future research. The framework incorporates three theoretical viewpoints from several research traditions: the expected utility, social‐political, and workplace voice perspectives. We provide suggestions for how each viewpoint can be modeled in future research. Additionally, although some previous decertification research was theoretically rich, the empirical findings across prior studies were ambiguous and inconsistent. We analyze the reasons for the ambiguous and inconsistent prior findings, and note how future research can avoid or minimize the empirical problems of the past.

Organizations are increasingly required to take up extended responsibilities for social and environmental outcomes, including in global value chains. To address these challenges, the organization must call upon stakeholders to engage, contribute, and innovate, and in turn, this requires the organization to have a stronger social basis for its relationships. An integrative model of global value chain management based on social cooperation shifts the focus from corporate reputation to value chain reputation, from a firm-centric view of corporate reputation to a multistakeholder conception of value chain reputation. This approach conceptualizes reputation as a dynamic and potentially vulnerable organizational feature which cannot always be managed by public relations but requires a more stable notion grounded in something more permanent in the organization’s character, history, and the quality of its relationships with stakeholders. We consider the prospects for attending to organizational integrity as a stabilizing force for its public reputation. Integrity may be adopted as a hypernorm for motivating stakeholders who share a concern for the organization’s reputation. Co-creating reputation depends upon a social bond of cooperation developed by stakeholders caring about the organization and in turn, the organization caring about its stakeholders. This socialized understanding of reputation-building is grounded in an ethic of care and manifested through joint purposes, boundary-crossing processes, collaboration practices, and a division of labor into which value chain members are integrated and brought into relation with one another. We propose a model of global value chain management that discusses organizational capabilities required for such an approach.

In the space of slums are many stakeholders; the extent to which their assistance contributes to slum administration is sparsely studied. The study aims to examine how external stakeholders contribute to slum administration within the Ghanaian context.

Using the stakeholder theory, the study used an exploratory qualitative design based on face-to-face, in-depth interviews among 21 respondents. Participants were purposively selected from stakeholder organisations and slum residents based on the stake in slums governance in Ghana.

The results indicate that stakeholders have contributed towards slums livelihoods in the general areas of housing, trading, skill development and capacity building. It shows that stakeholders’ contributions tend to enhance slums’ living conditions and affect local assemblies positively. The study finds that slum dwellers categorise stakeholders’ contributions as short-term relief and long-term solutions. Additionally, it emerged that in the areas of policy design, implementation and policy feedback, external stakeholders have supported the government in that regard.

The conclusion drawn from the study is limited to the four communities and the stakeholder organisations. However, communities with similar characteristics globally might benefit from the findings.

The study uncovers a context-specific role and assistance of external stakeholders in the domain of slums. This provides a guide to the government regarding key areas of stakeholder collaboration towards slum governance in the Ghanaian context. Theoretically, this study has contributed to new knowledge about stakeholders’ contribution to the overall governance of slums.

The study expands the frontiers of knowledge in the field of slum administration by focusing on external stakeholders. This study departs from previous studies, which have examined, in broader perspectives, stakeholders’ roles within the space of slums.

Failures may lead to ultimate success in both nature and business. Just as dynamic ecosystems depend on death to replace senescent organisms with vigorous growth, the termination of uneconomic activities is essential to wealth creation. This paper explores the benefits of failures, and uses aspects of the analogy between death and business failure to analyze how failures in business economize upon resources and lead to better firms and greater efficiencies. A distinguishing feature of our work is the analytic use of competitive markets to provide insights into the processes of success and failure. Recognizable patterns of business failures are discussed in an effort to provide entrepreneurs and managers with a basis for understanding and acting upon changing circumstances.

AN ESTEEMED correspondent points out that there are about two dozen library magazines of all sorts and sizes in circulation, whereas when he started his career there were no more than three. Our correspondent has himself had considerable editorial experience, and it may be that he is still in harness in that regard. One of his earliest efforts was in running the magazine of the old Library Assistants' Association, and it is not likely that that magazine has ever reached the same heights of excellence as it attained in his day. He observes that there are far too many library magazines now in circulation. We agree.

THE Newcastle school, like most others, was established after the second world war to provide full‐time education in librarianship as an alternative to the part‐time system which until 1946 was the only one available to the majority of librarians. At first most of the students were returning servicemen whose library careers had been interrupted by the war and they were followed by students direct from libraries, universities and schools. From a handful of students and one full‐time member of staff in the first year the school has grown steadily until there were 53 students and five staff during the session 1962–3 which was the last course held for the Registration Examination.