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As a rule, business books published today are backing off from lectures and theories, and are instead featuring more situation‐oriented illustrations of the basic concepts everyone already recognizes as right. What better place to get these anecdotes than from the horses' mouths? This batch gathers together the personal stories of top American business leaders, circa the late‐1990s, as told by themselves—with a little help from professional writers. The autobiographies represent hardcore, old‐fashioned industry (Lockheed), innovative industry (Nucor), service (Marriott), retail (Starbucks), and real estate/empire building (Trump).

This article explores the thought of St Augustine and its relevancy to acceptance or rejection of the social service state. It notes Augustine’s emphasis on the transitory nature of modernity and the primacy of the spiritual. It examines Augustine’s pessimistic scenario concerning the secular state and its accomplishments. It suggests that Augustinianism would be fare less receptive to the social state and its strengthening of secular power than the more optimistic and more “incarnational” Thomism.

The economic science is again in a crisis and a new solution prolegomena to any future study in economics, finance and other social sciences has just been published by the International Institute of Social Economics in care of the MCB University Press in England. The roots of the major financial and economic problems of our time lie in an open conflict between theory and practice. In the 1930s and before the conflict was between classical theory and given realities. In the 1990s the conflict appears between the now prevailing modern, Keynesian theory and the actual realities. In addition during the twentieth century a great argument developed between the two schools of thought, argument which is not yet settled. In one sentence, the prolegomena tried and was successful to solve the conflict between theory and practice and the big doctrinal dispute of the twentieth century. It was a struggle of research and observation over half a century between 1947 and 1997.

There is hardly any other field of knowledge where there is more conflict or controversy between ideas and solutions proposed by theoreticians and statesmen than in politics. To date, adequate methodological tools have not been developed which enable the truth or validity of the liberal or conservative approaches to be tested. A new research programme using a simultaneous equilibrium versus disequilibrium approach is proposed which has full application in politics as well as in economics and the social sciences. This research programme shows the organic relationship between society, state, economy, money and form of government, and thus leads to a methodological unification of all the social sciences, to a new principia politica.

Two claims are made about play that bears on managing change in organizations. First, play is a creative dynamic of human community; and in particular, it is the form taken by love at the boundary of fantasy and reality. Second, play is known, not by analysis via the mind and reason, but by intuition via the body and feeling. To manage change as play is to call upon the possibilities of adaptation and development that lie at the creative edge of love.

The arguments of the paper are not strictly rational (deductive) or empirical (inductive) but are based upon an “abductive” reading of the literatures on play and managing change.

Play is key in managing change. Play is the creative enlargement of love involved in healthy and effective adaptation and development.

Change in organizations is best taken in the spirit of love that is play. As change calls to love, the greatest changes call to the greatest love of the divine in which all things are possible.

The paper offers a novel theoretical integration of the research literatures on play and managing change. The paper offers a powerful argument for the humane foundations of play and change in love.

Presents an ISO 9000 standard work instruction for “fun”. Describes activities to maximize the likelihood of creation of a fun work environment. Suggests that fun is a critical factor of employee productivity. Mixes humorous observations with practical advice for management, employees, human resources, and other groups. Reveals that content was aggregated by careful observation of the best and worst in business environments. Concludes that fun and quality improvement are mutually reinforcing.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

In the second part of this report the action of nitrogen peroxide on flour is discussed at some length in an account of a series of researches that have been carried out by DR. MONIER‐WILLIAMS. His conclusions may be briefly stated as follows. The maximum bleaching effect is obtained when each kilogram of flour is treated with from 30 to 100 cubic centimetres of nitrogen peroxide. The bleaching effect becomes more pronounced after keeping for several days. The amount of nitrous acid or nitrites that are present in bleached flour corresponds to about 30 per cent. of the total nitrogen absorbed, the proportion of nitrites present remaining nearly constant after the lapse of several days in the more slightly bleached samples. After the lapse of a short time it is still possible to extract about 60 per cent. of the nitrogen absorbed by the flour by means of cold water, but after several days the nitrogen that can be extracted by this means decreases. This may perhaps be attributed to the “absorption” of nitrous acid by the glutenin and gliadin. In highly bleached flour (300 cubic centimetres of nitrogen peroxide per kilogram of flour) a considerable increase in the amounts of soluble proteins and soluble carbohydrates takes place. In highly bleached flour, after some time, about 6 or 7 per cent. of the nitrogen introduced as nitrogen by the nitrogen peroxide is absorbed by the oil, which acquires the characteristics of an oxidised oil. No evidence is forthcoming as to the formation of diazo compounds nor the production of free nitrogen. Bleaching was found to exercise an inhibitory action on the salivary digestion of flour.

This paper seeks to examine the social construction of the racialised, colonial subaltern accountant in the British imperial centre in the early twentieth century..

Primary sources are used to provide an historical analysis of the British accountancy arena in the 1920s, this being the period when “race thinking” first became explicit. Secondary histories of race and empire are used to contextualise this analysis by highlighting: the growth of “race thinking” in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries; and the American challenge to British imperial hegemony after the First World War.

This paper tracks the struggles of British accountants in the imperial centre in the 1920s to find a path between racialist attitudes in the imperial centre, their own included and countervailing discourses of non‐discrimination. For the Scottish chartered bodies, this involved the development of a de facto barrier to entry when a proposed de jure one aroused, surprisingly enough, the prospect of retaliation from American accountants.

Limitations in the primary sources preclude detailed examination of the attitudes of individuals or for all variations in the positions adopted by particular bodies.

The troubling thing about the demise of explicit race talk by the end of the 1920s is that de facto barriers to the entry of the racialised, subordinated Other remained in place.

This paper shows that the rise of race thinking in Britain did not leave British accountancy untouched; largely through the pressure it placed upon the identity of British accountants qua Britons and the consequential issue of inclusion/exclusion of non‐Britons.

In the animal world the presence of entropy necessitates contest. Among the non‐human mammals the contests are overwhelmingly inter‐specific. On the other hand the bulk of human contests are intra‐specific. They bring about a dissipation in human systems akin to that brought on by noise in natural systems (“human noise”). Just as the engineering of natural systems hinges on the successful understanding of noise and its filtration, so the successful administration of human systems must hinge on the understanding of human noise and its filtration. In this paper, after demarcating the concepts of communication, teleology, contest and inquiry and their stochastic foundations, we shall (1) show that post‐Weber administrative theory, unlike the more classical, is delinquent in its neglect of human noise, (2) list the lacunae in the prevailing theory, (3) explain the greater efficiency of the administration of warfare in contrast to that of more humane projects, (4) expound the Parkinson maxims on the human noise specific to a Weberian bureaucracy, (5) show how this together with widespread corruption results in ineffective government, and finally, (6) suggest how systems analysts might approach this problem.