Search results

Industrial training in Great Britain has been analysed in an article in the previous issue of this journal. Here we would like to concentrate on the training of the individual and the Government's role in assisting this training over the period 1917 to 1973.

The term or title ‘social economics’ is by no means a new one, the American J. M. Clark, for example, used it as the title of a book published in 1936, and indeed there has been Hagenbuch's Cambridge Economics Handbook of that title first published in 1958. There does, however, appear to be an increasing recognition of the need for the development of a new approach to economic and social policy and problems that could, for the want of a better expression be termed socioeconomic in character. The evidence for this suggestion can be gathered from the very rapid growth of economic literature in the last few years dedicated to methodological problems and doubts about the wisdom of current trends, developments and values in the main discipline of economics. This increase of “anti‐economics” literature, of course provides only a negative rationale, but it can be seen to be in itself broadly reflective of certain fundamental changes in the nature of the social and economic parameters in contemporary advanced industrial society. Changes, it will be argued, that require a different and more integrated kind of social science approach to problems and policies than has hitherto been developed.

This article seeks to examine the role and effectiveness of retraining in British Government Skillcentres (formerly Government Training Centres) using case study material from a project based on the North Humberside local labour market. In the first section the background to the project and the methodology utilised are outlined. Secondly, we examine the characteristics of the Skillcentre trainees and their evaluations of the courses followed. Thirdly, we discuss the job search process and post‐training employment experience of these trainees. The fourth section concentrates on the demand side consideration of the responses and views of employers vis‐à‐vis Skillcentre trainees. Finally, we conclude that while such retraining programmes have met with some limited success there are certain important aspects which warrant further discussion.

This contribution seeks to examine the nature of registered unemployment in Britain amongst racial minority group workers as defined for the purposes of the Department of Employment's statistics, namely those born in the New Commonwealth Countries or whose parents were born there. Some preliminary analysis was published by the Department of Employment in 1975 and more recently by Shah. This paper seeks to up‐date and develop these findings further, with particular reference to the impact of the economic cycle upon the level and characteristics of racial minority group unemployment.

Much attention in the field of international marketing has recently been focused on the need for adaptation of strategies to new environments. One aspect of this is the extent to which products and promotion require adaptation for success in foreign markets. Writers have advanced various guidelines as to when products and promotion strategies should be standardised versus adapted. Most of the literature on this topic is in reference to the operations of U.S. firms overseas, and few broadly based empirical studies are available to substantiate the theorising. We are given many individual examples, mostly of foreign marketing failures, with too little systematic analysis.

In a seeming attempt to legitimate or otherwise dignify social economics (Économie sociale, etc.), “named” economists (Adam Smith, Karl Marx et al.) have been dubbed social economists and/or regarded as having made significant but unrecognised contributions thereto. Conspicuously absent from that roster of celebrities are Léon Walras, économiste social par excellence, et al., who have distinguished themselves in the mainstream but also have done social economy(ics) explicitly, i.e. by that designation. Included in that illustrious et al. list are François Quesnay, J.B. Say, Friedrich von Wieser and Knut Wicksell (inter alios). Their due recognition, as per the present essay, cannot help but measurably further legitimise/dignify social economics.

In her popular Development of Economic Analysis, Ingrid Rima writes early on of the “compatibility” of “emphasis on the state as an instrument to achieve socially optimal results…with what has come to be called social economics”. Subsequently (1978, p. 322; 1986, p. 396), she treats of J.M. Clark's “crucial” contribution to the development (1920s/1930s) of a new type of economics he describes as “social”. Similarly, George F. Rohrlich, in his 1970 introductory essay, “The Challenge of Social Economics”, wrote of “The emerging field of social economics”, and noted that “in the United States the term was used in the 1930s and occasionally thereafter”. More recently (1982), Samuel Cameron singles out Mark A. Lutz's 1980 USE contribution, e.g., for neglecting Charles Devas(op. cit., 1876–1907) “as a contributor to the founding of social economics”, while comparing Devas to “the modern social economist”.

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.

In my original efforts, I designated and depicted no less than nine “men” of economics. Essentially, I contended, as man has always tended to create God in his own image and likeness, so economists have fashioned man largely in their discipline's perceived nature and scope. These generic homines economici, that is, have thus been and perhaps cannot really be other than economists' “men”, and the study thereof provides accordingly a meaningful alternative approach to the history, nature and scope of economics itself.