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The success or failure of a consultant's report is not determined by its ability to present data and solve problems but by its persuasiveness, its acceptability to the dominant organisational culture, its value for money as a performance and its ability to generate present and future agreement.

Arts sponsorship is very much a Cinderella sister of sports sponsorship. The amounts involved are vastly different, media exposure is much smaller and advertising opportunities are less. Major objectives of arts sponsors are promotion of the corporate image, enhancement of community relations, and, to a certain degree, the promotion of brand awareness. An in‐depth case study by Middlesex Business School of the Peterborough Festival of Country Music revealed four main types of sponsors. Sponsorship was identified as coming together in a field of flux rather than a strict matching. Characteristics of both the Company and Event were identified which were influential in determining the process of sponsorship. When identified, these characteristics enable an accurate picture of the sponsorship relationship to be drawn. With this in focus, wider issues of control and policy, social influences and ideology in relation to cultural issues may be considered.

In a previous article [I] I explored the consulting process from a social anthropological perspective, suggesting that there are significant parallels between the role of sorcerer amongst “primitives” and that of consultant amongst organisational man. The focus of that paper was on discussion of two case examples highlighting problems of entry and contracting. This article focuses on the production of the consultant's report. The report is presented as the centrepiece of the consultancy ritual, a reflexive account so constructed as to present and analyse data in a way which will partly interpret, partly “seed” interpretations and partly function as a performance which will engineer its own acceptance. Possibilities of future failure may also be anticipated. The efficacy of such reports is questioned by the presentation of data which, although crucial to understanding the situation, would not normally be available to a consultant seeking to intervene. The success or failure of a consultancy report is therefore seen not as a result of its effectiveness in presenting facts and solving problems, but in its persuasiveness as an account, its support of the deep structures of the organisation, its value for money as a performance and its ability to generate and sustain present and future agreement.

In this article I attempt a re‐conceptualisation of the process of organisational induction, borrowing concepts from discourse analysis, and Lévi‐Strauss's structuralism in particular. It is argued that previous treatments of induction have concentrated on the means by which “culture” is transmitted, and to a much lesser degree on how it is received. What is required is a treatment which recognises the creativity involved in both producing an organisational image and in interpreting it — that “culture” is created both by organisational authors and readers, inductors and inductees, managers and workers.

Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.

In the past little has been written on the subject of industrial sabotage. Even the broader consideration of “resistance” of which sabotage could be considered part has been little attempted outside the glamorous subject of strikes. Taylor and Walton adopt an approach derived from the social psychology of deviance, relying on verbal accounts, press reports or hearsay for their data. Their emphasis is on rendering the act meaningful. Brown adopts a perspective which extends their definition of sabotage from deliberate damage to the machine, product or work environment to include deliberate bad workmanship and the withholding of effort. Consequently, he views it as an additional mechanism for negotiating terms and condition of employment, and is concerned with its effectiveness as a strategy.

This paper describes some of the major elements of Marfleet Steel Company, a multidisciplinary case study which we developed with the help of Chris Dixon. The case attempted to address some of the educational problems which had arisen from our experiences with the group of students for whom it was first designed, but which we felt were typical problems of management education in general. The paper begins by discussing our own particular difficulties and their relation to the generalised problems of the education/experience gap; the common sense/education distinction; the importance of the unconscious in developing managerial “skills”; the need for integrating disparate disciplines; the difficulties of handling various and conflicting sources of information and the indispensability of action and involvement to successful learning. We go on to discuss our specific objectives and methodology in developing Marfleet, focusing on issues of verisimilitude, the provision and release of information and the importance of role‐playing to the “living case study”. We examine the running of the case, with formal inputs, monitoring the process and providing and organising feedback. Finally, we discuss the experiences of both staff and students on the case and suggest that the “living case study” method, though demanding for all participants, offers huge benefits in stimulating discovery and learning. It makes considerable advances in bridging the gap between the too often isolationist classroom case study or simulation and the organisationally problematic action‐learning project.

This article is the first of two which examine the difficulties experienced by the unqualified researcher or student who may be called upon to act as consultant in conventional or action‐research project work. The first article addresses the problems of entry; the second looks at the production of a credible and acceptable report. The thesis of both papers is that conceptual frameworks currently offered as an aid to understanding the consultancy process have concentrated on psychological and processual aspects of consultancy at the expense of the cultural. A social anthropological perspective, it is argued, can offer richer interpretations in areas where current theory is infertile. This first article addresses some of the problems of the student consultant in gaining entry and establishing a contractual basis for his activities. It begins with an examination of the cultural clashes between social scientists and managers, using current published research as examples, emphasising the effect of each on the other and the potential risk or threat involved for each. The consequences of attempts to control this work in an imbalanced situation are raised by the examination of a part of a consultancy project completed by the author, presented as a case example. The subsequent discussion of the case uses the concept of the consultant as sorcerer, allied to the dimension of apprenticeship, to analyse the case as a form of initiation rite. The conclusions drawn suggest that the content of consultancy, and even the dimensions of individual processes, may well be subordinate to the importance of “public opinion” in sustaining it as an activity. The second article will further examine this suggestion through the case example of the production of a consultancy report.

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 librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.