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Discusses principles of equality and justice in order to justify affirmative action and clarify its need. Posits that in both the USA and South Africa, issues of segregation and discrimination are not new and both countries have had the opportunity to address their past policies by way of affirmative action programmes. Looks at what determined the denouncement of the affirmative action in the USA and why the answer to this question may have a great impact on South Africa’s attempt to improve its own affirmative action programmes. Concludes that, although 30 years of affirmative action was deemed unconstitutional, how can South Africa derive and make use of the knowledge gained to help in stopping reverse discrimination.

Action Research (AR) is presented as an interpretive conceptual framework through which an understanding of management systems can be achieved. The proposed interpretive framework is briefly described and examined as a comparative management framework. The merit inherent in AR as an interpretive comparative management framework is illustrated through an initial comparative analysis of US and Japanese management practices.

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.

This study aims to compare two national dementia plans and analyse the approach of each state to the issue.

Comparative analysis, legal analysis, policy analysis

Although research is central to both plans, the practical implementation of the Russian and UK plans differs. The Russian action plan on dementia is advisory in nature and does not propose specific programmes for research funding. Two plans have different approach to the role of education and risk factors.

Lack of information on Russian regional strategies does not allow to compare regional differences between two countries.

This study illustrates several weak points in the UK and Russian dementia policies, which should be addressed to tackle the dementia problem in both countries.

When many people talk about strategy, they really mean positioning. However important positioning may be, strategists who overlook performance factors are ignoring a key ingredient of company strategy and a source of advantage over competitors.

Advocates of the role of city‐regions in economic development seek lessons from other countries to boost the case. But processes of lesson learning raise many challenges and the purpose of this paper, therefore, is to argue that it is necessary to shift from descriptive comparison to a better understanding and explanation of what works where.

The approach taken in the paper is to review recent debates about the design of comparative studies and suggests a range of comparative questions.

The paper draws on insights from the ESRC Research Seminar and other papers in this issue and helps clarify some of the issues that may be involved in developing a better comparative understanding of the emergence and impacts of new “experimental”, time‐limited regional institutions.

The paper argues for more rigorous comparative research.

Questions are raised about current lesson learning concerning the governance of city regions.

The paper contributes to new debates about the potential of comparative study.

Action in international marketing is usually preceded by research. Most international marketing research reports are built on a skeleton of currently available international socio‐economic, demographic and social indicators. The author in this paper argues that the currently available indicators used by marketing analysts have in many cases little comparative value and are in many cases inadequate for, or irrelevant to, the requirements of marketing. He uses in illustration the needs of a specific project that had as its objective the prediction of the different levels of retail distribution in Western Europe. The limitations of available international indicators are analysed. Preferable alternatives are proposed. Some of these require original research: others the restructuring of existing data. It is also urged that it is a basic pre‐requisite that international marketing analysis be made at the level of the sub‐national region — not at national level. The formation of a specifically‐oriented Marketing Indicators Working Party is proposed.

Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an understanding of how social ties and resource dependencies among firms affect market structure and the resulting behavior of firms within it. Evidence is furnished that supports the assumptions of the perspective and provides a basis for specifying propositions about the effect of network structure on organizational survival. I conclude by discussing the perspective's implications for organizational theory and economic sociology.

The purpose of this paper was to determine to what extent Hong Kong’s experience proves (or disproves) theories from corporate governance in the areas of family ownership, concentration, self-dealing in Hong, executive compensation and other issues. This paper – written in the comparative corporate governance tradition – uses data from Hong Kong to discuss wider trends and issues in the corporate governance literature.

The authors use the comparative corporate governance approach – exposing a range of corporate governance theories to the light of Hong Kong data. The authors purposely avoid over-theorising – leaving the data to speak for themselves for other researchers interested in such theorising.

The authors find that Hong Kong presents corporate challenges that are unique among upper-income jurisdictions – in terms of potentially harmful (shareholder value diminishing) family relationships, shareholder concentration and self-dealing by insiders. The authors also show that excessive executive compensation, accounting and audit weaknesses do not pose the same kinds of problems they do in other countries. The authors provide numerous comments on theoretical papers throughout the presentation in this paper.

The authors chose a relatively unused research approach that eschews theory building – instead, the authors use data from a range of sectors to build an overall picture of corporate governance in Hong Kong. The authors subsequently affirm or critique the theories of others in this paper.

The original analysis conducted by the authors provided 22 recommendations for revising listing rules for Hong Kong’s stock exchange. Others – particularly Asian officials – should consider Hong Kong’s experience when revising their own corporate governance listing rules and regulations.

This paper offers new and original insights in four directions. First, the authors use the empiricist’s method – presenting data from a wide range of corporate governance areas to comment on and critique existing studies. Second, the authors provide a system-wide view of corporate governance – showing how different parts of corporate governance rules work together using concrete data. Third, the authors provide a new study in the comparative corporate governance tradition – another brick in the wall that is “normal scientific progress”. Fourth, the authors pose tentative resolutions to highly debated questions in corporate governance for the specific time and place of Hong Kong in the early 2010s.

This article is a marginally shortened version of Supplement No. 15 to Women in Europe. The European Community answers a series of 50 questions relating to women and employment.