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Explains the option of employing a professional facilities management (FM) consultant with expertise in all relevant areas to audit current facilities policies, operations and attendant costs. Considers the procedure of the audit, which is said to be based on the business process reengineering (BPR) concept, and provides a bottom‐up evaluation of critical operating processes at work in a company. Suggests reasons for the growing popularity of FM over the past ten years, and provides an example of Tarmac FM as one of the new multidisciplinary FM companies.

December 6, 1971 Master and servant — Negligence — Noise — Deafness — Workman subjected to loud noise at work — Ear plugs providing inadequate protection — Ear muffs not supplied — No encouragement or persuasion to wear ear muffs — Whether negligence — Further loss of hearing resulting from continued negligence after statute‐barred period — Whether full damages recoverable.

Since I left full‐time education many years ago, it has often struck me that whenever I return to a learning situation, whether it is a formal course or a half‐day workshop, I immediately adopt the role of a student — or at least the role I was taught to adopt by my Yorkshire schoolmasters. I find myself seated behind a desk and waiting for my intellectual batteries to be recharged with knowledge. Expecting to be taught, I am always wrong‐footed by other students, who enter the room with a confident flourish and launch into an animated discussion or explanation of what they expect to get out of the day, and where they can contribute. Often the trainer responds to this approach, leaving me way behind and scrambling to catch up. As a result of a number of such experiences, it struck me that there may be other adult learners in a similar position who would enjoy an opportunity to explore some of the issues of adult learning, as a survival strategy for future use. Equally, there may be trainers who would wish to examine the adult learner more closely, to find out more about this peculiar animal and to develop strategies that are effective.

Possible limitations on the successful formal modeling of human expertise can only be identified if the evolving thought processes involved in acquiring expertise are understood. This paper presents a 5‐stage description of the human skill‐acquisition process, applies it to the skill of business management, and draws conclusions about potential uses and abuses of formal modeling.

Knowledge, as represented in the history of ideas and in studies of knowledge paradigms and bibliographical structures, appears coherent and rationalistic. By examining the work of the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, this view is discussed. Special attention is given, in any cultural or scientific interpretation of an age, to the need to get behind the dominant or hegemonistic body of institutionalized and documented knowledge. We need to investigate the assumptions and underlying influences on the ways in which discourse embody and shape meanings. What preconceptually underpins, we might ask, what people know as knowledge. Important links between language, truth and power are examined, and these are major concerns for Foucault. It is argued that Foucault's ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ insights into the nature of warranted knowledge are crucial for an understanding of the communication process and the knowledge‐organizing activities of information specialists.

April 20, 1971 Negligence — Duty of care — Manufacturer — Exposure to chemical containing carcinogen — Whether danger foreseeable.