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Because organisational management systems tend to grow organically over time, they are often at cross‐purposes with overall objectives, systems and cultures. This phenomenon is examined with particular attention paid to personnel management, motivation and reward systems.

Provides a re‐examination of the role of the “trainer” in relation to the importance of using delegate experiences as a vital part of the learning process. Using a number of personal experiences charts the author′s progress from being a presenter/supplier of information and theory to becoming a facilitator of learning and, at the same time, identifies five essentials to being effective in the role. Concludes by showing how facilitation can be of immense value in the OD role, particularly in the process of formulating policies, procedures and working practices.

Traditionally, training is seen as simply an activity to be undertaken when all other priorities have been satisfied. The process, still viewed by a majority as imparting knowledge and skills, has progressed slowly from being trainer‐centred to student‐centred. Now, in the 1990s, training must become self‐financing with its costs being recoverable by an identifiable increase in efficiency and quality. The means of achieving this objective is to use the problem‐centred approach in which pressing, company‐specific problems are resolved in a training context ready for immediate application in the workplace, and the necessary learning is achieved during the process.

Presents a composite case study covering four years’ work with a variety of companies across the industrial spectrum although mainly within the health‐care sector. Provides working definitions of both empowerment and corporate culture and sets down key essentials to success. Shows the relationship of annual strategic plan and the annual individual performance‐related appraisal processes in the achievement of company objectives. Establishes the importance of top to bottom involvement in empowerment and the outcomes to be attained.

Past research has shown that consumers believe there is a strong relationship between price and quality; they also believe there is a strong relationship between brand and quality. Therefore, when comparing similar pieces of apparel, items with a designer brand or a higher price are perceived, by most customers, to be of higher quality. The purpose of this study was to compare the pricing and quality of identical designer merchandise sold in department stores and manufacturers’ outlet stores. The researchers found no significant differences in the quality of apparel sold in the two retail formats; however, there was a significant difference in the price. The department store merchandise was 31 per cent higher in price than the outlet store merchandise.

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.

This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capitalist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ).

This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory – “embeddedness” and “the informal economy.” These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology’s engagement with (neoliberal) capitalism.

A process-oriented revision of Polanyi’s work on embeddedness and the “double movement” is proposed to help us situate EPZs within ongoing power struggles found throughout the history of capitalism. This helps us to challenge the notion of economic informality as supplied by Hart and others.

Scholars and policymakers have tended to see economic informality as a force from below, able to disrupt the legal-rational nature of capitalism as practiced from on high. Similarly, there is a view that a precapitalist embeddedness, a “human economy,” has many good things to offer. However, this paper shows that the practices of the state and multinational capitalism, in EPZs and elsewhere, exactly match the practices that are envisioned as the cure to the pitfalls of capitalism.

Setting aside the formal-informal distinction in favor of a process-oriented analysis of embeddedness allows us better to understand the shifting struggles among the state, capital, and labor.

THE luncheon given by the Lord Mayor, Sir Ralph Perring, to more than 700 guests at Guildhall on November 14, officially launched the country on National Productivity Year. Apart from representatives of the 120 local committees these were people from trade and employers' associations, trades unions, professional bodies and research organisations. It was, in effect, a token mobilisation of Britain's industrial might, because behind it stands a large army devoted to the task of increasing the country's output.