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Q‐analysis is a methodology for investigating a wide range of structural phenomena. Structures are defined in terms of relations between members of sets and their salient features are revealed using techniques of algebraic topology. However, the basic method can be mastered by non‐mathematicians. Q‐analysis has been applied to problems as diverse as discovering the rules for the diagnosis of a rare disease and the study of tactics in a football match. Other applications include some of interest to librarians and information scientists. In bibliometrics, Q‐analysis has proved capable of emulating techniques such as bibliographic coupling, co‐citation analysis and co‐word analysis. It has also been used to produce a classification scheme for television programmes based on different principles from most bibliographic classifications. This paper introduces the basic ideas of Q‐analysis. Applications relevant to librarianship and information science are reviewed and present limitations of the approach described. New theoretical advances including some in other fields such as planning and design theory and artificial intelligence may lead to a still more powerful method of investigating structure.

The Fifth British Commonwealth and Empire Lecture will be held on Thursday, September 15, 1949, at 6 p.m. at the Institution of Civil Engineers, Great George Street, Westminster, S.W.1. The lecture will be given by Mr E. H. Atkin, F.R.Ae.S., Chief Designer, Airframe Division, A. V. Roc (Canada) Ltd., on ‘Inter‐City Transport Development on the Commonwealth Routes’.

Wage Structures and Wage Comparisons “Fair pay” is generally regarded as one of the main objectives of wage and salary administration in organisations. It is also becoming more widely appreciated that government incomes policies are unlikely to succeed until they can alter the anomalies and distortions which exist between the wages of different occupations or sectors of employment. If organisations or governments are to move in the direction of fairer pay then they must understand wage structures and the wage comparisons which such structures give rise to. The purpose of this paper is to describe a set of methods for aiding this task. Without methods of analysing complex wage structures, organisations and governments lack the capability of moving in the direction of fairer pay. This paper is therefore about the establishment of a capability for policy making, and the concluding section will briefly suggest how policy might be improved with the aid of this capability.

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.

The method I propose to discuss in this paper is one based on ideas of structure (essentially a geometrical notion): How we are to define it (make it precise) and how we are to discern and use it in any study of organisations or institutions (such as the modern industrial/commercial corporations). These ideas will lead us away from simple linear or stochastic modelling — although the latter ideas can be viewed as special cases of this more general approach — and will provide us with an analytical tool (computer based) which amounts to a new scientific methodology. This methodology is particularly relevant to those fields of study often referred to as the “soft sciences”: for example, such areas as social science, politics, industrial relations, community studies, planning, organisational analysis, and so on. By comparison, the “hard” sciences (such as the varied branches of physics and chemistry, their spin‐offs into engineering, astronomy, and some aspects of biology etc.) appear at first sight to be described by a mathematical language which gives them an exactness and predictability which is now beyond dispute; and when the precision sometimes seems to get lost then the mathematicians have provided us with a theory of probability which we use to generate a statistical approach to the subject. This “precision” is actually based on the “measurement” of phenomena in terms of the real number system — a technique which was summarised by an oft quoted remark of Kelvin's, to the effect that data are what can be measured (represented by a real number).

Competition will affect the structure of an industry and the structure will, in turn, affect the behaviour of the firms involved. Two of the most important characteristics of the online information industry are the diversity of hosts and the range of databases offered by each one. The latter is a significant factor in searchers' choices of databases and consequently encourages hosts to compete by acquiring additional databases. This type of non‐price competition plays a key role as it is difficult to make accurate comparisons of the costs of using different hosts. Parallels are drawn with other industries in which competition is, or was, expressed chiefly in the form of capacity. The structure of one sector of the online information industry was investigated by applying Q‐analysis to data on medical databases and hosts. Changes over a three‐year period are identified and are interpreted using concepts derived from ecological niche theory. Finally, the question of what would constitute an optimum structure is considered and it is argued on the basis of an economic theory originally propounded by H. Hotelling that free competition would be unlikely to produce optimal results.

THE following list of contracts placed 1 y the Air Ministry during July has been extracted from the August issue of The Ministry of Labour Gazette:—

One of the neglected roles of experiment is the creation of phenomena which then become the centrepiece of theory. The belief that seminal experiments in architectural design must now be reclassified to represent genuine paradigms of “created phenomena” is discussed. The remedy suggested is their analysis, critical evaluation and scrutiny of seminal texts to open the way for the development of topological approaches to design and extension of cybernetics into the field of architecture and construction.

In the real world, an occurrence of an event is often affected by a large number of potential factors. The purpose of this paper is to identify causal factors hidden in the data and discover the underlying causality from the observed data.

This paper suggests an integration of system dynamics and association mining for identifying causality between attributes in a cultural analysis. The framework gives an improved description of the target cultural system represented by a database; it can also improve strategy selection and other forms of decision making. Such a combination extracts important dynamic causality.

Complicated cultural issues can be identified and managed through a causal relation network. This type of causal relation is very common in daily life. For example, “an increase in productivity in a factory might cause an increase in pollution in the environment” and “the increasing pollution will cause a decreasing level of human health and welfare”.

This paper presents a methodological framework for studying, understanding and managing cultural differences in a marketing environment. This framework provides a foundation for characterizing the causality representations and relations distributed among members of cultural groups.

This framework is being developed as an approach to improve the management of a dynamic environment, such as an international marketing environment, where participants (marketers, sales manager, etc.) are asked to communicate, bargain, analyse and collaborate with other participants who have a different cultural background or understanding. The knowledge employed can be extracted from data gathered from previous cases, from which the models can be developed.

Following a distinction between verbal dialogue and socioaffective dialogue, this chapter shows how psychosocial organization is generated by the socioaffective aspects of communication. Verbal dialogue (based on language and symbols), is shown to fit with Shannon's (1949) concept of information, reduction in uncertainty, and socioaffective dialogue (based on the arousal and regulation of affective energy) to fit with Gabor's (1946) concept, minimum of uncertainty. An empirically-based theory of communication (Bradley & Pribram, 1997, 1998), that applies Gabor's concept, views the interaction between affective energy and social control as an information processing system. When optimally organized as socioaffective dialogue, the interaction gathers and communicates holographic-like descriptions of endogenous organization throughout a social unit to in-form (give shape to) collective organization. However, both verbal and socioaffective aspects of interaction are required for optimal communication-the former processes the cognitive elements, while the latter processes the configural aspects of social life.