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The purpose of this study is to explore the risk factors that employers consider when assessing an employee’s business travel (BT) assignment and the risk treatment, crisis response and recovery strategies they use to discharge their BT duty of care.

An exploratory approach is taken with in-depth interviews of 21 executives, travel managers and insurance brokers involved with the management of BT in four international hotel groups. In all, 12 follow-up interviews were conducted to assess the possible COVID-19 impact on BT risk management processes.

Employers assess BT assignments considering the travel’s characteristics, including the destination’s risk profile against seven types of risks (health, political, transport, natural, crime, technology and kidnap), length of stay, travel mode and activities undertaken in the destination as well as the traveler’s profile which includes diversity and travel experience. Accordingly, they develop a range of duty of care strategies for BT risk treatment, crisis response and recovery.

BT practitioners can use the proposed framework to develop risk assessment methodologies based on more accurate destination and traveler profiles and pursue targeted risk treatment strategies and insurance policies. The proposed duty of care approach can be used as a blueprint for organizations to design and manage BT policies.

BT risk is an under-researched area. The extant research looks predominantly at travel risks and their assessment taking the traveler’s perspective. This study looks at business travel risk and explores it from an employer’s risk management perspective offering a BT risk assessment framework and a BT duty of care plan.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of employee representation systems in the USA from the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 up to the events in 2015 at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The study begins with the strike at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation which led to the deaths of several women and children. In the aftermath of Ludlow, John D. Rockefeller, Jr, visited the mines in 1915 and persuaded workers that an internal employee representation plan would serve their interests better than an outside trade union. Rockefeller’s influence shaped American industrial relations until the passage of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act in 1935, when company unions were outlawed. The ongoing decline of unions and collective bargaining has prompted academic speculation that a return to internal workplace committees might lead to a rejuvenated labor movement in the USA.

The study uses both archival materials and secondary sources to construct a narrative of one important element of industrial relations. It explains Wagner’s ban on company unions as a component of his economic agenda. Company unions provided a voice for a firm’s workers, but Wagner believed they were powerless to redistribute corporate wealth. The decline of American unions is so profound that they no longer serve an economic role in our capitalist system, but workers’ voice in the workplace remains an important consideration.

The key finding of this paper is that employee representation plans are not merely an industrial relations anachronism but continue to be relevant to today’s workplace. The paper compares an influential representation plan developed in 1914 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr, to current schemes of representation and argues that labor law should be modified to permit modern versions of the older “company unions”.

Works councils play a crucial role in European labor relations, and they could do so in America if labor laws were modified to permit it. An exposition of the deep historical context of representation helps to legitimate the concept. Future research into specific cases, including an international perspective, would add to an understanding of the benefits and costs of representation.

The originality of this paper is its combination of a historical event and a contemporary case study that brings together a theme present in managerial history for over a century. By emphasizing the aims of Rockefeller, Jr. in 1914 and the objectives of the Volkswagen Company in 2014 in establishing a participatory workplace, we gain a long-term framework through which to evaluate a particular managerial technique. The paper also suggests ways to bring our labor laws into conformance with the idea of employee representation.

A new ‘Z’ Blade Extruder Mixer with the benefits of electric drive joins the range of hydraulically driven ‘Z’ blade extruder mixers from Winkworth Machinery Ltd. The EMX machine is of robust construction, yet requires less floor space and offers cost savings in applications where the heavier duty features and automatic variable speed of the hydraulically driven machines are not required.

Sartorius Ltd of Belmont, Surrey have just announced four new products to add to their already impressive range of IKA equipment.

The Boulton Vibro Energy Fine Grinding Mill has a wide application in many industries but is of particular interest for the grinding of pigments, producing a rapid increase in the specific area by fine grinding particles to low micron sizes with a narrow band of particle size distribution.

THE catalogue, as a library appliance of importance, has had more attention devoted to it than, perhaps, any other method or factor of librarianship. Its construction, materials, rules for compilation and other aspects have all been considered at great length, and in every conceivable manner, so that little remains for exposition save some points in the policy of the catalogue, and its effects on progress and methods. In the early days of the municipal library movement, when methods were somewhat crude, and hedged round with restrictions of many kinds, the catalogue, even in the primitive form it then assumed, was the only key to the book‐wealth of a library, and as such its value was duly recognized. As time went on, and the vogue of the printed catalogue was consolidated, its importance as an appliance became more and more established, and when the first Newcastle catalogue appeared and received such an unusual amount of journalistic notice, the idea of the printed catalogue as the indispensable library tool was enormously enhanced from that time till quite recently. One undoubted result of this devotion to the catalogue has been to stereotype methods to a great extent, leading in the end to stagnation, and there are places even now where every department of the library is made to revolve round the catalogue. Whether it is altogether wise to subordinate everything in library work to the cult of the catalogue has been questioned by several librarians during the past few years, and it is because there is so much to be said against this policy that the following reflections are submitted.

Brian Rattican and Ron Jeffries — both with extensive experience in merchanting — recently joined Sanderson Merchanting as regional sales managers.

IN 1896 A. E. Housman was an erudite Professor of Latin at London University with a growing reputation both for his translations from the more obscure classical authors and for acrid criticism of scholars whose work failed to maintain his high standards. The same year his book of verse, A Shropshire Lad, was published, causing his name to be inextricably linked with Ludlow, the Wrekin, Wenlock Edge, Shrewsbury and the River Severn. Whilst the book was slow to gain popularity, it eventually attained the rare honour of being read by those who normally did not read poetry, its public undoubtedly widened when the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams put some of the poems to music in his famous song‐cycle ‘On Wenlock Edge’. The general public acclaim conferred on a somewhat reluctant Housman the title of ‘The Shropshire Poet’.