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Applying technology most effectively requires a business strategy. One of the main parts of the strategy of Control Data is to address major unmet needs of society by establishing profitable business opportunities in cooperation with the government and other sectors.

This paper discusses the lives and contributions of five key members of the Management History Division: Arthur G. Bedeian; Alfred A. Bolton; James C. Worthy (now deceased); Charles D. Wrege; and Daniel A. Wren. Each has proved himself a teacher and intellectual leader in matters of fundamental concern to management history.

Numerous business books have become popular (in terms of sales in the US) in the 1980s. Assuming that there is value in them for organisational managers, one issue to be addressed is how management development programmes can best incorporate these materials. The pros and cons of reading popular business books are summarised, a series of alternative pedagogical designs and the underlying assumptions they must adapt to are presented, a set of contingency factors for differentiating among the designs is proposed, and a set of operational suggestions to guide the use of these books is offered. A rough typology for classifying business books is suggested and guidelines are provided for discussion of the books.

Currently, only a small number of manuscripts dealing with management history are being submitted to journals, and few of those are being accepted for publication. What is needed to change this situation is more high‐quality research that is more interesting to a wider audience. The purpose of this paper is to offer some suggestions for overcoming current deficiencies.

The perspective of one editor about what is being done and what might be done in terms of publishing management history research is presented.

The unique perspective of an individual who is a past editor of a major management journal and current editor of an online journal each of which has published a variety of management history articles is presented.

The paper stresses that too few management history manuscripts submitted to journals are of high‐enough quality or sufficiently interesting to merit publication and that more good quality research that is interesting to a wider audience is needed. The paper offers suggestions to management history scholars as a means of changing this situation.

Job loss and long-term unemployment can have pervasive negative impacts on well-being. At its most extreme, unemployment is accompanied by feelings of shame, humiliation, insecurity, and worthlessness, as well as damage to cherished identities and narratives of self. Scholars have investigated how the unemployed attempt to repair these damaged identities, but little is known about how network members participate in the identity reconstruction process. Social support has been shown to ameliorate the negative psychological effects of unemployment, but studies have also found that the unemployed are reluctant to ask for assistance and often perceive network members as a source of stress rather than as a source of support. To understand why social support can be experienced both positively and negatively by the unemployed, we draw upon 84 in-depth qualitative interviews with men and women who experienced unemployment during the extended economic downturn associated with the Great Recession. We find that social support ameliorates unemployment when it bolsters identities important to recipients, and exacerbates unemployment when it undermines such identities. We also show how the unemployed respond to identity-threatening support: by avoiding it, rejecting it, or reframing it as reciprocity. Our analysis contributes new insights into the relationship between social support and identities, as well as a deeper understanding of the noneconomic costs of the slow economic recovery following the Great Recession.

Dealing with the subject of the artificial bleaching of flour, The Lancet observes that the public criterion of quality in respect of foods and beverages shows some interesting anomalies. Appreciation is often based, for example, on appearance, on how things look, and it is in this direction that conclusions often and obviously become illogical. In some instances the article demanded must be spotlessly white, while in others, if naturally white, it must be artificially coloured. The white loaf is a popular fancy, but white milk is suspected, and yet natural flour may be of a rich golden colour, while rich milk may have only a shade of brownish colour which is supposed to connote cream. The result is that in the one case flour is often deprived of its colour by a process of chemical bleaching, and that in the other an artificial colouring is added. Natural colour is objected to on the one hand, and on the other an artificial addition is demanded. It may be urged that both expedients are justifiable inasmuch as they meet a popular fancy, and that this counts in the enjoyment and even digestibility of the foods. If artificial means are employed to adjust the appearance of food to a popular standard, the proceeding can clearly only be allowed when it has been proved beyond all doubt that the products are not dietetically impaired or that they do not masquerade as something which they are not.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The statements which have recently been made in various quarters to the effect that Danish butter is losing its hold on the English market, that its quality is deteriorating, and that the sale is falling off, are not a little astonishing in face of the very strong and direct evidence to the contrary furnished by the official records. As an example of the kind of assertions here alluded to may be instanced an opinion expressed by a correspondent of the British Food Journal, who, in a letter printed in the March number, stated that “My own opinion is that the Danes are steadily losing their good name for quality, owing to not using preservatives and to their new fad of pasteurising… .”

The number of investigations and investigators of vitamines seems to be increasing in geometric proportion, yet the sum total of our knowledge accumulates but little. The reason for this interest may be found in the unusual though well‐deserved concern aroused by the new light thrown on the all‐important problem of nutrition. Research has been stimulated as never before, and it is to be feared that workers have plunged ahead with great enthusiasm for the broader aspects of the subject and with but insufficient attention to the finer technical points. There is urgent need for more intensive and less extensive research if we are to arrive at a final understanding of the nature of the vitamines and their rôle in nutrition. A brief survey of the facts and a consideration of the present status of the subject may not be out of place.

In discussing the subject of bread, or indeed any subject, one is of course confronted by the initial difficulty of definition. Nothing is harder than to define any concrete thing, no matter how common and well‐known it may be. This is not surprising when we remember that no one has ever succeeded in defining a definition. Perhaps the best attempt to do so is Pascal's, in the “Port Royal Logic,” and it is easy to drive a coach and six through the rules which he lays down for definitions to conform to. The only things that can be strictly defined are mathematical abstractions, such as a circle, which are formed on natural objects by pruning away their multitudinous properties till only two or three which can be expressed by a short and indisputable definition are left.