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It would be hard to say when companies became concerned with appraising their managers' performance. It may be that it has always been a concern, but it has really only manifested itself in formal appraisal methods and systems over the past decade or so. (Doubtless having said that we will be inundated with letters proving that appraisal can be traced back to Plato's ‘Republic’ or the Bible.) However, despite the concern and the large amount of material written and spoken about appraisal, much of what takes place appears to have become an annual form‐filling ritual with little influence, either on the individuals or the organisation. Managers, who are frequently on the receiving end of this ritual, are hard put to identify the usefulness of appraisal, nor are they usually in a position to assess how well an appraisal fits the needs of their particular company. This article is an attempt to describe for managers a framework for examining the usefulness and appropriateness of an appraisal system. The analyses resulting from the framework should help managers to design an appraisal system better suited to the needs of their organisation.

In the first article in this series Pat Terry showed that current organisation theory is very much concerned with the organisation within its changing environment. The successful organisation is the one which is able to predict, sense and analyse the implications of changes in the environment and adapt its products, structures, systems and relationships to cope with these changes. Change and coping with it is then a theme of organisation theory and it is also an increasingly dominant thread in the field of training itself. Training can roughly be divided into two areas: • training people to do their current jobs better, including preparing people for their next jobs; • equipping people to manage/cope with change. Enough has already been written on the former and we propose in this article to concentrate on the latter. Before doing so, however, we wish to explore the dynamics of organisational change and the key importance of diagnosis in determining what kinds of change interventions, training and other, are necessary in order to create and maintain a healthy, adaptive and effective organisation.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Management Development seems to lend itself to interminable controversy, is it manager or management development? How does it differ from organisation development? What is the difference between training and development? While these questions excite discussion among trainers and personnel specialists, the results of the arguments do little to help managers understand what management development is supposed to achieve.

Conventional training attempts to develop human resources by changing employees as individuals: it focuses on the technical aspects of the task and it is applied to individuals in isolation. Very often individuals are withdrawn from the working group for this form of development. However, people only very rarely work in isolation: they work with others in groups. It was a great advance when trainers took in the behavioural aspect of management with a view to improving performance in groups. But groups do not work in isolation either: they interact with other groups within the organisation. What matters to performance is the behaviour of people in organisations. To some extent organisations have a corporate life of their own and exhibit their own forms of behaviour. The natural development, then, of behavioural studies of people in working groups is the study of man at work in organisations.

This case is a role-play exercise intended to give participants an opportunity to experience board meeting dynamics and logistics, determine how to scale a nonprofit for maximum impact, learn about governance best practices, and become generally familiar with nonprofit financial statements, dashboards, and new board member recruitment strategies. There is no right answer or correct outcome to the exercise; the value lies in participants' analysis of the situation, dialogue with one another, and post-meeting self-reflection.

This series of articles has developed a number of views on organisation behaviour and how current knowledge on the subject can be used to improve training and development in industrial organisations. The series has been an attempt to focus the reader's attention towards the critical need for us as trainers to understand why organisations are as they are and what causes them to behave as they do. Organisation behaviour as a subject is therefore about understanding, or attempting to understand, the complexity of the relationships that exist in the collectivity of people and things that we call ‘organisation’. To achieve full understanding is, I am afraid, as hopeless as expecting to understand why our fellow men (or women) behave as they do, for organisations like all living things change as we examine them. What the theories and hypotheses on organisation behaviour can do for us is give us some idea of organisational change and the links between these causes and their manifestations in terms of behaviour. This knowledge gives us a map, however fragmented, on which we can plot bearings to indicate the course our actions should follow if they are to influence and change the reality of the organisational situation.

In this article Peter Smith sets out to explain the approach to organisational analysis felt by him to be the most appropriate in the area of training. It suggests an approach to the process of change and development that has differed from previous techniques of management training in which the focus has shifted from the individual, micro level to the macro level of the organisation as a system interacting with its environment and a shift from prescription to prescription. Organisational analysis has been shown to be closely associated with a particular way of thinking and before the analyst can hope to begin work in an organisation he has to educate his clients in his own way of thinking and to move them away from their perceived need for prescriptive solutions to seemingly simple problems. Here the author has looked at a model of organisation which has proved effective as a means of understanding the organisation from the wider perspective required by the organisational analyst. The model as outlined has value both as a means of gaining information and as a tool for educating managers to view their organisation from the wider viewpoint. In accepting the managers' need for a more oriented way of looking at specific problems, he has suggested a means where by studying certain interfaces it is possible to look at the ‘smaller’ but equally important areas of the organisation, whilst still maintaining the organisation perspective. What the author has indicated here is a way of looking at the organisation that combines both theory and practice — a sociological approach that has been used successfully and can be used by the training adviser once he has been given the basic tools of analysis.

In May 1973 the Department of Employment published Manpower Paper number 7, ‘The Quality of Working Life’. This paper aroused considerable interest within the Chemical and Allied Products Industry Training Board, as its publication coincided with the completion of two years' work by a board working party on Organisation Development. Much of the work of this working party had impinged upon subjects which come under the heading of The Quality of Working Life. The board decided, therefore, to continue the working party so that it could examine the board's possible contribution to an improved quality of working life in the industry. To support the working party, the author, as part of a study tour in the USA, was asked to look at what was being done and said about the quality of working life in the USA. These are the impressions he gathered from a variety of people with different interests in the subject.

In the opening years of the 18th century, Englishmen stood on the verge of the greatest change to society the modern world has known. Already the foundations of the Industrial Revolution had been laid, the earliest “manufacturies” had been established, the harnessing of water power to machines was much improved and the first practical steam engine had been invented by Savery & Newcomen. Science and scientific knowledge, following the great traditions of English scientific thought, was flowering; the enclosures were making available the manpower to fodder the revolution and, above all, the great markets of the Americas and the Far East were opening to English manufactured goods. The stage was set for the development of the organisations which were to change the face of Britain and eventually the world.