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In this keynote paper which Sir Daniel Pettit presented to the National Conference at the Centre for Physical Distribution Management in 1978, he reviews the dramatic changes which have affected economies and business management over the last 20 years. But his attitude is that of a man who sees opportunities in the problems. He is particularly clear about the role that Physical Distribution Management can make for itself in the midst of this transformation. PDM is one of the unexplored areas where technology and innovative thinking can make great leaps into a successful future.

European parcels network plan A plan to develop a Europe‐wide network for the collection and delivery of parcels and other small freight is currently being worked out by National Carriers Limited, one of the parcel carrying companies within Britain's State‐owned National Freight Corporation.

Freightliners operate some 190 trains and some 700 road vehicles daily. They operate 25 terminals and the number of containers carried has gone up from 391,000 in 1969 to 640,000 in 1974; the budgeted figure for 1975 is 730,000. Freightliner trains can run at 75 mph, which means they can be fitted in on fast passenger lines; there is capacity for additional business. This is a summary of a paper read at the recent National Conference of the Centre for PDM.

“With mounting costs of distribution and the need for distributors to reduce journeys and increase drop sizes … the position of the small shop within inner areas is becoming ever more precarious.” It was in reference to this text that John Harvey was invited to speak to this year's PTRC Summer Annual Meeting at Warwick University. His approach, necessarily, is that of a physical distributor, and in this paper he sketches the development of UK physical supply systems into the retail trade and identifies the major factors of change. He then examines the retail delivery profiles of the different sub‐sectors within the total retailing system, before looking at current problems and emerging trends in retail delivery practice, and specifically relating these to the smaller outlet.

WAS IT ONLY the pure in heart (such as myself) who found the Great Christmas Holiday Shutdown the biggest bore of the year? Four days of actual Christmas lay‐off had me pining to be back at the office on the Wednesday morning, although most of Britain, including a number of academic libraries, reckoned it wasn't worth switching on the heating for only three days before the New Year holiday, and stayed in bed or sprawled in front of the telly for a grand total of 11 days.

In this chapter, I analyze the notion of corporate responsibility from the person-centric perspective. I offer a four-dimensional exposition in terms of which I examine the corporate moral personhood view. These four dimensions are explained and critiqued to arrive at a definition of moral responsibility and status appropriate to corporations. I suggest that a corporation cannot be construed as a person in the sense in which individuals are persons. Since a corporation cannot be an independently existing entity, it cannot have an independent moral personality of its own as individual persons have. Therefore, I argue that a reasonable construal of corporate moral personhood has to exploit a different point of view altogether. With this difference of standpoint, I develop what is called the institutional personhood view. I argue that corporations do acquire a sort of collective institutional moral personality.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Critical success factors (CSFs) have been widely used in the context of commercial supply chains. However, in the context of humanitarian aid (HA) this is a poorly addressed area and this paper therefore aims to set out the key areas for research.

This paper is based on a conceptual discussion of CSFs as applied to the HA sector. A detailed literature review is undertaken to identify CSFs in a commercial context and to consider their applicability to the HA sector.

CSFs have not previously been identified for the HA sector, an issue addressed in this paper.

The main constraint on this paper is that CSFs have not been previously considered in the literature as applied to HA. The relevance of CSFs will therefore need to be tested in the HA environment and qualitative research is needed to inform further work.

This paper informs the HA community of key areas of activity which have not been fully addressed and offers.

This paper contributes to the understanding of supply chain management in an HA context.

Rawls, most visibly in A Theory of Justice, made numerous references to various topics in economics, and footnoted a significant number of economists. This paper will argue that Rawls made use of the ideal theory of markets as a reference point and as an analytical tool. In their ideal form, markets represent attributes Rawls intended to describe his system, and in their real-world guise embody certain sorts of striving – for instance, after power – that were central to Rawls’s justification of the original position. Markets also serve in Theory as a benchmark against which political forms can be criticized. Additionally, markets in Theory are approved of as allocative and wealth-producing mechanisms, but criticized for their final distributional results. The paper suggests that these assessments in Rawls likely originate in early essays by economist Frank Knight. Knight was, according to Pogge, the probable source for an early version of Rawls’s original position, and is footnoted in key spots in Theory. But the similarities between Knight’s reasoning and Rawls’s appear more significant still. Using Rawls’s extensively annotated copy of Knight’s Ethics of Competition, that supposition is explored.