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Since the early 1970s, many studies have examined employers' recruitment practices and how they vary — over time, with the unemployment level and between labour markets, occupations and types of employer. Two recent articles in Personnel Review make a detailed account of the previous work unnecessary. In the first of these, the previous work is discussed and its findings evaluated against recent empirical evidence, and the second begins to relate this work (again in the light of recent findings) to the approaches to recruitment and selection found in personnel management textbooks.

The multi‐disciplinary activities of the Manpower Society in manpower planning, management, and utilisation make it a unique organisation in the UK and the objectives of the Society are more pertinent today than ever before. John Houston shows how they deserve to be better known by managers.

It has been claimed that Born Globals are incompatible with the Uppsala model, which is based on the firm having a maximum tolerable risk level. This assumption was used to explain observed incremental commitments, with further commitments being made as experiential learning reduces the level of risk faced. This study aims to show that adding a consideration of the role of expected value, including the effects of resource constraints, can reconcile the Born Global and internationalisation process literatures.

The theoretical arguments are supported by mathematical modelling of a firm pursuing expected value based on subjective beliefs.

While the effects of risk and expected value coincide when firms limit their downside risks by taking an incremental approach to commitments, other factors impacting on expected value can shift the balance of incentives towards earlier and more rapid internationalisation. For instance, some firms are specialised and have high costs of R&D, and so need to achieve early and rapid growth but face small home markets. While resource constraints can lead a firm to expand for some time in its home market before internationalising, the effect can be reversed in the case of the finance constraint for some firms.

The study shows how Born Global and internationalisation process literatures can be reconciled through a consideration of the effects of expected value on internationalisation decisions. It also provides a novel theoretical analysis of Born Globals.

The Essay on the Distribution of Wealth consists of a preface, 16 chapters divided into two parts (Part I, Preliminary, 4 chapters; Part II, Distribution of Wealth, 12 chapters) and a note on the union with Ireland. In the preface, Ramsay strikes a note of refreshing dissent from the growing complacency of the Ricardians who at this time were riding high on the prestige of Ricardo, the unstinting labours of James Mill, the popular treatise of McCulloch and the refined logic and fine zeal of De Quincey (while Mrs. Marcet had even invaded the finishing school). Although he fully recognises Ricardo's contributions to the science, Ramsay points out that ‘the subject is far from being exhausted’ and that in view of the incomplete and controversial state of the science, he has ‘been induced to combat some errors supported by high authority’ (Ramsay, 1836, p. vii).²

To identify factors that impede the absorption of management knowledge imported into transition countries, using Belarus as a case, in order to increase efficiency of knowledge transfer.

The findings are based on three sources: the extensive analysis of the academic literature; the results of a detailed survey and interviews; and personal observations and impressions gained by the authors during almost ten years of participation in technical assistance programmes for Belarus universities financed by the British Council.

The study reveals a combination of factors rooted in linguistics, culture, training and ambience that prevent knowledge transfer from fully achieving its objectives as a modernization tool insofar as knowledge gets distorted or missing during the transfer process.

The proposed solution is to intensify the knowledge transfer even further through increasing its interactive component by providing channels for direct interaction between educators in the newly independent states and the West.

This paper introduces new original data, provides an analysis of an important practical issue and offers a feasible solution to this issue.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how narrative discourses frames entrepreneurial knowledge – in the form of understandings and meanings – focusing the role of business support in stimulating black entrepreneurship. It reveals the assumptions and values associated with business support from the point of view of the providers – who themselves are categorized as “black”.

A collaborative narrative approach is adopted to locate knowledge of business support within the “life‐world” of black business support providers. The research was conducted at two levels: focus group and narrative interviews.

The paper highlights the ways in which dominant discourses guide as well as constrain the representation of black businesses. Low take‐up of business support is contested. Public‐funded business support programmes are perceived as unwholesome, unwieldy and inherently inadequate in meeting the strategic development needs of black businesses.

Focusing on actual engagement rather than content aspects of the business support policy framework reveals a need for more dialogic research to explore more deeply whether, and to what extent, alternative and new perspectives on supporting black businesses are needed.

The novelty of this paper lies in attempting to unravel the complex processes of business support provision in the context of black entrepreneurship by decoding the narrative discourses used by support providers who are themselves categorized as “black”. Such intrinsic examination of views and beliefs is relatively unique and provides an interesting platform for further research.

The advent of the computer in the academic library promises revolution in library objectives and economics, and the extent of the revolution will be as great in acquisitions as in other library areas. This paper will examine the probable effects of computerization in the foreseeable and distant futures and will establish academic and economic targets at which to aim to avoid an inefficient wandering forward. The first section of the paper will inquire into the characteristics of the new technology; the second will delineate academic objectives and new techniques for reaching those objectives; and the third will discuss the economic goals of acquisitions computerization.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how the current “crisis” in the UK pension system arose. I argue that it is a result of a combination of changes in government policy and basic instabilities always inherent in the financial system. Policy changes increased the vulnerability of the pension system to those instabilities. The background to these changes and also the frame of reference in terms of which the “crisis” itself is now phrased is broadly neoliberal. Its theoretical roots are in ideas of the efficiency of free markets. Its policy roots are expressed in a series of similar neoliberal policy tendencies in other capitalist states. I further argue that neoliberal solutions to the pension crisis simply offer more of the very matters that created the problems in the first place. Moreover, the very terms of debate, based in markets, financialisation of saving and individualisation of risk, disguise a more basic debate about providing a living retirement income for all. This is a debate that New Labour is simply not prepared to constructively engage with in any concrete fashion.

In recent years, the issue of human trafficking has become a key component of a growing number of corporate social responsibility initiatives, in which multinational corporations have furthered the pursuit of “market based solutions” to contemporary social concerns. This essay draws upon in-depth interviews with and ethnographic observations of corporate actors involved in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns to describe a new domain of sexual politics that feminist social theorists have barely begun to consider. Using trafficking as a case study, I argue that these new forms of sexual politics have served to bind together unlikely sets of social actors – including secular feminists, evangelical Christians, bipartisan state officials, and multinational corporations – who have historically subscribed to very different ideals about the beneficence of markets, criminal justice, and the role of the state.