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Advises on development of political acumen in employee development: limitations of analytical approach; politics as an art; categories of ideologies; top management checks and balances on power and self‐interest; impact of functional interests; role and limitations of personnel function; how to analyse and chart political reality in an organisation.

The process of action learning‐based training of managers in the field staff of the UK division of the Prudential Assurance Company is described, covering its introduction, acceptance and subsequent evolution. The programme undertaken is assessed, including examples of success and failure. The role of managers as set advisers is discussed and it is established that action learning could make a significant contribution to the development of section and district managers.

Attention was called in the March number of this Journal to the promotion of a Bill for the reconstitution of the Local Government Board, and the opinion was expressed that the renovated Department should contain among its staff “experts of the first rank in all the branches of science from which the knowledge essential for efficient administration can be drawn.”

Argues that the subject matter involved in the process of knowledge transfer needs also to be an integral part of the discourse and that this consideration is of particular relevance within the business school community of higher education. Further argues that the development of the subject matter taught is in danger of becoming irrelevant to the needs of the customers purported to be served and, hence, at best marginalised and at worst excluded, from the discourse of education. States that the trend in management teaching and research to increased specialism and self‐referential legitimation is ultimately self‐defeating because the needs of the customers involved are changing from specialisation to generalisation. Concludes that, consequently, academics in the management metadiscipline are in fact legitimating their own irrelevance and marginalisation and that the discourse of teaching management subjects needs to include not just academics, and their needs and desires, but also those of their customers.

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of mobile phone usage on sales and profit as the indicator of business performance, to analyse the facilitating roles of mobile phones and factors affecting farmers' decision to use the mobile phone in agribusiness activities.

Intensive farming was selected in this study due to its higher profitability than other crops. Data were compiled from field surveys of 1,040 farmer households in vegetable production regions of Indonesia. This study employed structural equation modelling, identifying mediating variables and quantifying multiple endogenous variables' direct and indirect effects in simultaneous regression equations.

The results indicate that mobile phone usage enabled farmers to increase sales, obtain market information, acquire improved agronomic technology, access credit and contact customers. The device enhanced profit through mediations of high sales, reasonable prices and access to credit and market information. The personal attributes of farmers determined the adoption of mobile phones to support agribusiness activities.

This study paid attention to the use of mobile phones, which was considered an integral technology of information and communication. Other components, such as personal computers and other Internet-based devices, need further study.

As the rate of mobile phone use was still low, farmers should be encouraged to utilise the device. Socialisation and specially designed training workshops on agribusiness information systems using mobile phones are of the best ways.

Using structural equation modelling enables to analyse of multi-dependent variables in one model. Farm-level data provide a real situation, and policy implications should address the right target. The subject of this investigation is a semi-subsistence farm household that lacked access to information and communication technology.

Bearings are critical components used to support loads and facilitate motion for rotating and sliding parts of the machinery. Bearing malfunctions can cause catastrophic failures. Hence, failure analysis and endeavors to improve bearing performance are essential discussions for worldwide designers, manufacturers and end users of vital machinery. This study aims to investigate a type of roller bearing from the railway industry with premature failures. The task arises because locomotives’ maintenance and service life quality are vital to railway operations while providing transportation services for the nation. To assist in maintaining the designated locomotives, the present study scrutinizes the causes of failure of heavy-duty roller bearings from locomotive bogie axleboxes.

It is intended to inspect this bearing service life and statistically scrutinize its design parameters to reveal the failures’ shortcomings and origins. The significant measures include examinations of their failures’ primary and vital factors by comparing them with a real-life service history of 16 roller bearings of the same type. The bearings come from the axleboxes of a locomotive bogie with an axle load of 20 tons. The bearing loads are estimated using the EN13104 standard document and confirmed by the finite element method using ABAQUS engineering software. To validate the finite element modeling results, the bearings’ stress analysis is performed using the Hertzian contact theory that demonstrated perfect conformity. The said methods are also used to search for the areas susceptible to failures in these bearings. With the inclusion and exploitation of the bearing maintenance conditions and the logbook recordings of the locomotives for the past seven years, the critical cause for this type of bearing’s failures is surveyed and discussed.

With the inclusion and exploitation of the bearing maintenance conditions and the logbook recordings of the locomotives for the past seven years, the critical cause for this type of bearing’s failures is surveyed and discussed. As a crucial result, it is found that deprived maintenance and inadequate lubrication are the root causes of the loss of the selected bearings.

For the designated locomotives, the origins of the heavy-duty roller bearing failures and its design shortcomings are revealed by examining and comparing them with a real-life service history of many of the same types of bearings. The novelty of the research is in using the combination of the methods mentioned above and its decent outcome.