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The use of public discipline by the FSA, usually accompanied by the imposition of a fine, has become familiar to readers of the financial press. To date the assumption has been that the use of publicity assists the FSA in achieving its objective of encouraging the development of a compliance culture. However, the time that many cases take to reach a conclusion can significantly weaken the impact upon other firms’ behaviour and could deter people from making investments. The FSA must ensure that its public discipline is proportionate to the offence and in order to have maximum effect should be delivered quickly.

This paper sets out some of the issues facing a firm in attempting to reduce the costs of compliance and concentrates on the operations performed by a firm's supervision teams and their interaction with the supervisors from the Financial Services Authority (FSA). It concentrates on those areas in which evidence suggests that the greatest opportunities for gain exist or where in fact firms permit the most significant inefficiencies to remain. The developments within compliance have been considerable over the last few years and while standards have risen so have the costs associated with demonstrating compliance with the relevant requirements. Firms must ensure that their supervision departments are operating efficiently and this means a return to basics. The compliance plan is an essential requirement but must be monitored and reviewed in order to ensure that targets are being achieved and resources concentrated upon the higher areas of risk. The greatest potential for additional cost has its origins in the visits undertaken by the inspectors from the FSA. Without careful planning, adequate resourcing and presentation of material it is very easy for the FSA to misconstrue the extent of a particular issue, or misunderstand the context in which the issue exists within the business. The opportunity for minimising additional costs arising from a routine visit from the FSA lies in the hands of the firm but many seemingly miss the warning signs. When things go wrong, firms often feel that they are at the mercy of the FSA. In fact there are a number of steps that a firm can take to either minimise the potential for escalation of an issue and to mitigate the costs even if a transfer to enforcement actually materialises.

The expectations of investors, regulators, and indeed management towards the compliance department are changing. For compliance to evolve, management must review its current operations and align its processes more closely with the desires and needs of the stakeholders. With regulators pushing firms to adopt a risk‐based approach to compliance, a greater degree of real‐time performance monitoring will be required. All of the stakeholders will desire more detailed reporting that an organization’s operations are being conducted in accordance with its regulatory and other obligations. The necessity to comply with a wider variety of controls suggests that an organization should adopt a common approach to the management of its obligations, which in turn may lead to a greater convergence among compliance, risk management, and corporate governance methodologies. The organization should ensure that all of those charged with development of control mechanisms are operating to a consistent standard and then separate the compliance function into three separate parts: (1) business as usual monitoring; (2) forward planning for new regulatory initiatives, products, markets, or client groups; and (3) education and embedding compliance within business units.

As the problems of living under stress grow, so methods for dealing with them proliferate. How effective are they? Leslie Kenton examines the claims of Transcendental Meditation which, despite its hippie‐induced esotericism, is attracting more and more recruits from the business world, while Chris Phillips spent an evening talking to executives who have taken a course in Relaxation for Living.

This paper aims to offer a critical biography of Joan Woodward, often considered the founder of contingency theory. This paper examines Woodward’s background to develop a more complete understanding of the factors that influenced her work.

This paper draws on insights gained from personal correspondence with two colleagues of Woodward, one who recruited her to the Imperial College where she conducted her most prominent work and one whom she recruited while at the college. In addition, Woodward’s original work, academic literature, published remembrances and a plethora of other secondary sources are reviewed.

By connecting these otherwise disparate sources of information, a more complete understanding of Woodward’s work and its context is provided. It is argued that Woodward’s education, training, brilliance, values, the relative weakness of British sociology and the need to improve the economy helped to make Woodward’s work both original and practical.

The originality of this work is to examine the work of Woodward through the lens of critical biography. Despite Woodward’s contributions, Woodward remains an underappreciated figure. The purpose is to provide her contribution against the backdrop of the British industrial and educational sphere.

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.

The purpose of this editorial is to review the significance of Roger Undy's book, Trade Union Merger Strategies: Purpose, Process and Performance, Oxford University Press, 2008.

The editorial outlines and evaluates the arguments put forward by Dr Undy to explain why trade union mergers take place. It also evaluates the book's analysis of the politics of trade union mergers.

As trade union membership has declined mergers have been prominent features in strategies of union revival. Yet, there is little empirical research into the effects of mergers on the unions actually merging or on their impact on the wider union movement. Dr Undy concludes that mergers do not provide a solution to the problem of falling membership and that transfers of engagements are often more successful than amalgamations.

The editorial offers insights into the process, performance and effects of trade union mergers.