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The Academy of Wine service was founded in 1988 to raise the standard of education and skills in the service of wine in the hotel, restaurant and catering industry. In September 1991, the Academy launched its ‘Professional Wine Service Training Package’, which was specifically designed to satisfy waiters' wide‐ranging needs and time constraints. The programme provides a single, open and flexible learning package to develop trainees competence and thus help them secure a national vocational qualification (NVQ). Following extensive field trials, the success of the Traning Package is clear to see: volume sales and average spend per head rose substantially, with sales up +18% in participating Forte Hotels and +16% in participating independent hotels and the investment in training was recovered with an avarage 15 weeks. Additionally, the Academy of Wine Service has organised an annual programme of tutored tastings, produced a bi‐monthly newsletter, “Wine Line”, set up awards, scholarships and national competitions, and expanded its membership benefits. Five years on, The Academy of Wine Service is now recognised as the national education and training authority for professional wine service and is now being developed into The Academy of Food & Wine Service to provide a total training package for the entire industry by the beginning of 1994.

In the UK there are now more than three million people unemployed, leaving aside the Black Economy. In the EEC as a whole there are more than 12 million without work.

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.

This paper sets out to explore the proposition that building competences is more effective than privatisation and restructuring to improve performance in the Chinese chemical industry.

Case study research has been undertaken in the Chinese chemical industry. The two case companies provide representative data on the factors under investigation. The case investigations that are described were complemented by a survey, the results of which have been reported elsewhere.

Results obtained from the research show that privatisation of Chinese state‐owned enterprises is not always an effective strategy to improve performance. In the case study companies, the development of core competences was more effective in enhancing performance.

The research results are limited by the scope of the study, which was carried out in the Chinese chemical industry. They are also based on in‐depth case investigations in only two companies, but are supported by a large‐scale survey reported elsewhere. The results have implications for academic researchers interested in China's privatisation programme.

The research has practical implications for companies outside China that are considering collaborative operations with Chinese companies or investing in joint ventures. It also has implications for suppliers or customers of Chinese companies.

The paper is based on original case study investigations carried out in Chinese enterprises and is supported by a survey of representative companies in China's chemical sector. Value is derived from understanding the basis of improved performance in the companies studied.

‘In the schools, you have to go a long way to find something really lively in environmental studies,’ says Colin Ward. He should know. He is the education officer of the Town and Country Planning Association unit, and in this position was given his head to produce the kind of magazine to propagate environmental education that he thought fit. Together with his assistant editor Anthony Fyson, he is responsible for BEE, by far the liveliest publication in its field. BEE is the Bulletin of Environmental Education and it differs — in one respect particularly — from most other journals with the same concern.