Search results

In the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the ending of The Second World War, it is perhaps salutary to remind ourselves of its significance, and how frightful occupation policies were both conceived and operationalised by Nazi academics.

“Physicists would describe most of what happens in everyday life as ”noise“… (or) activity without information. A signal‐to‐ noise problem…consists of digging out genuine information from activity without content… The protagonists of studies in the humanities fail to appreciate the extent to which their problems are of a signal‐to‐noise kind… Instead of separating the noise — throwing it away as the physicists do — they spend their energies chasing every detail… Students of sociology might indeed be described as the ultimate students of noise, literally and figuratively” (HOYLE & HOYLE 1971).

It could be argued that sociology is part of the secular dogmata of industrialised systems. Its concerns are now almost entirely confined to theoretical analyses of the institutional and normative structures of modem societies. As a discipline, its interests are purportedly reformative as well as being disinterestedly academic. In the “trade”, there is a praise‐worthy emphasis on relevance and an increasing predisposition towards the practicalities of policy and decision‐making processes. It is absorbed by the problems that derive from industrialisation: the encroachments of the new technology and economic uncertainty; the expansion of the new colonialism and political instability; crime, terrorism and the anonymity of the urban situation ‐ in short, the mounting pressures of living in the contemporary world. All these provide sociology with its current, rather formidable, field of enquiry.

It is argued that the sexual revolution thesis lacks conviction. Changes in sexual attitudes and practices popularly thought to be “modern” are not “original” in any essential sense. The evidence for and theories about such changes and their nature are critically examined.

Successful conquerors, imperialists and sundry would‐be expansionists face a common problem: they take what they can get — but how do they keep what they take? Having wrested lands and possessions from others, how do they contrive to retain them? More particularly, how do they organise and govern territories which are inhospitable and often actively hostile? This is the central concern of this discussion. The range of possibilities that is open to occupying powers in their dealings with conquered peoples is limited. Whatever method or combination of methods is adopted will involve different attitudes to, and applications of, some form of relevant ideology which we may define as a set of beliefs in a preferred social order which enables adherents to interpret their past, explain their present and develop a vision of the future.

In Sociology, the term ‘value’ has come to denote shared cultural standards related to objects of need, attitude or desire. Sociologists have generally confined their attention to values as empirical variables in social life whose scientific importance is not so much dependent upon their validity and ‘correctness’ as upon the fact that they are believed to be true and correct by those who hold them. For the scientific observer, values only have relevance if there is an observable relationship between the actions of subjects (individuals, groups, etc.) and the objects of their concern. Therefore, it is the holding of values and its social manifestations which is, arguably, the primary concern of the sociologist. The question of their derivation and possible ‘ontic status’ has been left largely to the uncertain ministrations of the philosophers. The possible objective validity of values tends to be regarded as a problem which falls outside the realm of science, but the insistence that social science remains value‐free, has raised the question as to what extent such freedom is really possible, and to what extent extrinsic values must always intrude.

The central concern of this discussion is the relationship between belief and action. The underlying problem is how belief ‐ intellectualised as ideology ‐ affects or even determines social behaviour. As Talcott Parsons puts it, “While believing is not, ipso facto, doing, what one believes has much to do with what one does”(1).

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

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.

The saga of Market Basket took place over a period of months during which a significant upheaval occurred in the long-successful business. The turmoil drew in a broad range of stakeholders. In a rare chain of events, non-unionized workers and managers engineered a change in senior management of the company. Their willingness to sacrifice their livelihoods in support of one person exemplifies the impact that can be made by a single, authentic, leader. This case draws upon secondary sources which provide insight into broad panoply of business and organizational behavior issues. The primary focus of the case, however, is leadership.

This case was developed using secondary sources and court documents that reported on the events that precipitated the problems at Market Basket as well as the strike and aftermath.

Management principles, organizational behavior. All undergraduate class levels would be appropriate.

This case exemplifies these three major theories in a real-life situation: stakeholder theory, corporate culture theory, organizational commitment.