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WE HAVE reviewed books on networking, that in many people's opinion was a vision of the distant future. Now it is coming closer, indeed it can be said to be here.

Common ownership on the Scott‐Bader model is probably the aspect of employee participation that is least understood and least talked‐about. In part this is due to the fact that it has been, in the past, mainly confined to small firms: only the John Lewis Partnership, with over 23000 employee‐members, a sales income of £440m per annum and more than 80 supermarket and department stores outlets, can claim to be in the big league.

Traditionally, marketing in financial services had been a largely tactical activity, concerned primarily with the advertising and selling of existing products. With the growth in environmental turbulence which characterized the 1980s the notion of marketing as a strategic activity became increasingly important. The 1980s were, in many senses, an era of expansion and diversification. However, many organizations over‐stretched themselves in this period and the 1990s has seen many organizations looking to refocus on core businesses.

The current state of the financial services industry worldwide and recent literature on the subject are reviewed. Four major trends are identified and discussed: (1) the trend towards financial conglomeration; (2) globalisation; (3) information technology in bank marketing; and (4) new approaches to financial services marketing. These trends will affect the marketing of banks and other financial services in the 1990s. Areas for further research are also highlighted.

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.

Consumer protection was an important motivating factor behind the introduction of polarization in the Financial Services Act. Despite the potential benefits to the consumer of using independent financial advice as a source of information and a medium for the purchase of financial services, the majority of consumers appear to attach little value to the status of a financial adviser per se and instead attach importance to the image and reputation of particular suppliers. Reports a survey by in‐depth interviews of 140 consumers in the East Midlands, UK, that confirms the relatively low level of interest in independent financial advice, with the groups most likely to use such advisers being identified as the younger consumers from higher social class groupings who do not regularly collect product information from alternative sources such as newspapers and television.

The strategic importance of distribution for financial services was reflected in and reinforced by the provisions of the Financial Services Act. Through requirements relating to polarization, best advice and commission disclosure, the Financial Services Act sought to create a regulatory framework which would provide the level of investor protection which was appropriate in a market characterized by a high level of information asymmetry and a heavy dependence on commission‐based selling. In practice the desired level of investor protection has failed to materialize, and this can be attributed not so much to a failure of the principles within the Financial Services Act as to a failure in the way in which those principles have been implemented.

To succeed in an industry an organization must select a mode of strategic behaviour which matches the levels of environmental turbulence, and develop a resource capability which complements the chosen mode. Investigates UK building societies and identifies three distinct modes of strategic behaviour. One group of societies are reactive and driven by their environment. A second group are pre‐emptive and seek to anticipate future events and prepare for them while the third group exhibit the most aggressive stance; not only do they seek to identify future scenarios, they actually work to bring these about. The groups are compared across a range of marketing and strategy variables to establish the extent to which these approaches are supportive of the selected mode of behaviour. Clear differences are apparent between the reactive and proactive groups although, surprisingly, few differences of substance are evident between the two proactive groups.

Examines an attempt to specify an approach more consumer‐ than product‐based and, by doing so, aims to discuss models' roles and buyers' needs. Includes research methodology including brand testing and gives results and interpretations using tables to further simplify these. Concludes by summarizing the experimental work involved and goes on to state that the earlier specified criteria is worthy of further investigation with a view to develop a fully operational STM model.