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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.

There can be no doubt that the particular political, economic and social conditions which pertain in a given society will substantially affect the nature of the managerial task, the way organisations are structured and the extent to which participation and consultation are used in work organisations. Within a single society such as Britain it is often difficult to fully understand the peculiarities of that society and the way they provide opportunities or constraints on managerial and organisational behaviour. Adopting a wider perspective and studying these phenomena in a variety of different national contexts can often make obvious such implications. On this basis a number of researchers in the Department of Business Administration and Accountancy at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology have carried out research on these phenomena in a variety of different countries. Although many of the individual projects have been located solely in individual countries, in combination they allow a broad comparative perspective to be utilised to aid in our understanding of such factors as the implications of decentralised decision‐making, implications of joint consultation and the efficacy of management development programmes. Research has now been carried out in a substantial number of developed and developing countries and is currently being extended to a range of others differing in terms of culture, economic and political conditions, ideological beliefs etc.

Managers are a very large and growing occupational group of substantial economic and social significance. Indeed, by 1978, Lindley estimated that there were as many as 2,146,000 managers in Britain, corresponding to no less than 8.7 per cent of all employed persons. Despite this, there has been surprisingly little systematic research on managers as an occupational group. However, this has not precluded a substantial amount of comment and speculation about managers and their roles in modern industrial Britain, particularly in the popular media. In a large number of cases, the tone of the argument suggests that managers are being increasingly constrained in their activities and that their “prerogative to manage” has been substantially undermined.

Until recently empirical research in organisational behaviour and personnel management had tended to be based, to a very large extent, on work situations in the United States and Britain. However, in recent years there has been a noticeable increase in studies reported in the literature carried out in other parts of the world. There has also been a quickening of interest in cross‐national comparisons of management and organisation. These trends have without doubt occurred partly as a response to the growing internationalisation of business and management. They have also stemmed partly from a desire to examine Anglo‐American management practice in a sharper relief, by adopting a wider, less culture‐bound, perspective.

The nature of organisational payment systems is likely to be a critical factor in the complex pattern of interactions which influence industrial relations and productivity in industrial companies. The systematic arrangement of rates of pay for employees is one major way in which organisational managements attempt to influence the behaviour of those employees both directly and indirectly. At the same time, particular arrangements reflect the outcome of political, social and economic processes in which all levels of employee, as well as many outside agencies, are frequently involved. Despite its undoubted importance there is not as much systematic research on the topic as one might expect. In particular, little empirical evidence is available linking the parameters of payment systems to other organisational characteristics. The present paper attempts to make a contribution towards filling those gaps in the literature. We report on the characteristics of payment systems and their prevalence in different sized organisations in 59 small companies in South Wales. It will be argued that the characteristics of payment systems will be related to different dimensions of organisational climate, and these relationships are examined empirically.

In general from the early 1960s onwards there was a marked acceleration of interest in employee participation and industrial democracy. Although this was by no means novel in conception, it was occasioned in this particular period not just by changing balances of power but also by a major adaptation in the climate of values in British industry and society. This quickening of attention culminated in the establishment of a Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, and although since that point there has been a period of retrenchment and a decline in overt enthusiasm for schemes of this type, this in no way invalidates the importance of the wide range of experiments which were instigated in the 1960s and 1970s nor suggests that political enthusiasm in this direction will not re‐emerge with renewed vigour in the later part of this century.

This paper involves an examination of public sector managers attitudes and reported behaviour, based on a longitudinal UK study, which broadly corresponds with the so‐called ‘Thatcher Years’. In Britain, the ‘Thatcherite critique’ of public enterprise has been fundamental in its consequences with ideological, economic and industrial relations components which are interrelated but which have had varying priorities attached to them at particular points in time. Above all, public ownership has been opposed because it has been seen to involve the government in economic functions which were considered properly to lie with individuals in the private sector. More specifically, too, public sector enterprises have been seen as inherently bureaucratic, as ‘crowding out’ enterprise, as being inefficient and costly and because of their monopolistic position (and consequent insulation from market and performance pressures) as being the seedbed of trade union power.

Change is the only certainty of the management function. Compares the managers of 1980 with those of 1990 from the viewpoint of gender, age, nature of employment, management salaries, managerial function and size of employer.

Most comparative research on organisational structure has tended to examine the relationships between very broad conceptualisations of general dimensions of both structures and of the environments in which organisations operate. Such an approach has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it has allowed the relatively rapid creation of a broad theory of organisations. This research has led to the formulation of the structural contingency model of organisations which suggests that to be effective an organisation must be structured in a way which is appropriate for its size, the operating technology it employs and the environment in which it operates. The disadvantage of the approach is that it has given little guidance to managers on such aspects of organisational design as the details of how to operate particular departments in order to deal effectively with relevant aspects of the organisation's environment.

Does the induction process used by companies have implications for the careers of individuals and the retention and development of manpower by those companies? This article, in considering the induction of graduates in industrial companies, argues that the new recruit may have conflicting needs and that his treatment may be affected by the need for departmental managers to meet operational criteria as well as develop staff. It describes one company's induction scheme designed to compromise between the conflicting needs of graduate recruits, and examines its implications for the graduates both in the first two to three months and in the first two years.