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For better understanding the connections between the Viennese circles in which Menger was involved, it is necessary to make some remarks on the Viennese context where they developed. Since the end of the 19th century up to the interwar period, Vienna was a very lively city from a cultural point of view, the birthplace of modernism (Janik & Toulmin, 1973). In the age of the late Habsburg monarchy as well as in the post-First War ‘Red Vienna’, the intellectual, scientific and artistic life of the Austrian capital was so fervent that those years are recalled by historians as the Viennese Enlightenment, the gay apocalypse and the golden autumn: ‘two generations were enough to cover the whole period. The economist Carl Menger (1841–1920) shaped the beginning, and his son, the mathematician Karl Menger (1902–1985), witnessed the end’ (Golland & Sigmund, 2000, p. 34). After the First World War, from an economic point of view, a high inflation overwhelmed the country; while from a political point of view, ‘the new Austria was fragmented and labyrinthine’ (Leonard, 1998, p. 6): the Christian socialists were the conservative part of the society, but one third of citizens supported the new social-democratic party, which had the majority in Vienna.

Republic Electric is faced with the need to engage in a systematic process of evaluating vendors for its just-in-time manufacturing. The case gives students the opportunity to think through the process for vendor selection in the context of real-world constraints for a specific organization, to become acquainted with the Delphi technique for developing consensus, to gain hands-on experience with linear averaging, to engage in calculations of value indexes, and to recognize the marketing implications of effectively evaluating vendors. A key takeaway for students is the fact that vendor selection decisions are multifaceted and will vary among organizations depending on each organization’s particular strategic needs, operational constraints, and human judgment.

The case is based upon a consulting assignment with the company that is represented by Republic Electric. The experience was gained first-hand by one of the authors.

This case is targeted at undergraduate students in marketing, materials management, supply chain management, and purchasing, but can work well in a variety of business courses in which supply chains or the development of evaluation tools is studied, to include graduate classes.

The concept of vendor assessment is well developed in the literature and represents a pragmatic, but often neglected, step in the practice of choosing suppliers.

Steve Holder had already worked with Matsapha College for ten years as the organization matured its macadamia orchard to the point of yielding sufficient proceeds to assist in the support of the colleges educational endeavors in Swaziland. Now Matsapha College was entertaining the possibility of launching a separate entity, Kumnandzi Macadamia Importers, to be a stateside distributor of both Matsapha's macadamia nuts and that of other growers in the region, with the prospect of producing additional revenue to help sponsor education. The Board of Matsapha College is interested in the idea of having the College prosper from added macadamia sales, but members have mixed opinions about the direction and form this growth should take. Before any major decisions are made, Steve learns that the organization should do some self-reflection and decide what Kumnandzi Macadamia Importers is all about before proceeding. Specifically, the Matsapha College Board of Directors needs to articulate its vision for the proposed new entity, as well as craft the entity's mission statement and value proposition.

The case was based upon extensive interviews with the President of the organization being described.

This case is targeted to both undergraduate and graduate students in Strategic Management, but may include Marketing Principles, Marketing Management, Strategic Marketing, and Entrepreneurship, especially if the course includes the task of building a business plan or marketing plan that incorporates vision and mission statements as well as a customer value proposition.

Rick Jamison, as Project Manager for the highly profitable Mega-Yacht division of Thorsby-Wando Marine Refit, Inc., has been assigned the task of revamping the supplier evaluation and selection tool used by the company in view of the evolution of the business from a small boat storage and repair facility into a full-service large boat and mega-yacht repair and refit facility. Rick gleans ideas from a colleague at another facility in preparation for re-crafting the current supplier evaluation tool. Rick becomes acquainted with how the Delphi method could be used to achieve consensus among members of the buying center to arrive at key factors and their proportionate weights for use in the supplier evaluation tool.

The case is based upon interviews with the company that is represented by Thorsby-Wando Marine Refit, Inc.

This case is targeted primarily at undergraduate students in purchasing, materials management and supply chain management courses. The case works best when it is employed in connection with a discussion of the major methods for evaluating vendors.

To most minds libraries exist at the periphery of debates over education and educational reform. However, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how, in 1910, the Melbourne Public Library (now the State Library of Victoria) was central, rather than peripheral, to a conflict which focussed on the role of the library in education and how the library and its collection could best be organised to meet this purpose. It will be argued that libraries and the way they are organised act as indices of the dominant views about education and can be seen as social and educational artefacts. As artefacts they encapsulate community beliefs about how learning could best occur at a given time and what knowledge was esteemed, made available and to whom.

To illustrate this point of view and illuminate the broader issues, this paper will use a particular set of events and a particular group of protagonists in Australian history as a case study.

This case study illuminates conflicting ideas about the place of libraries and the organisation of their collections in early twentieth‐century society and demonstrates how these ideas continued to have an impact on the place of libraries in educational reform agendas in Australia in the following decades.

The argument reported as “the disaffection in the library” was both philosophical and practical and illuminated ongoing debates surrounding the place of the library in education. The outcome influenced the shape and place of libraries in Australia and demonstrates broader concerns at work in Federation Australia.

The paper casts a new light on the relationship between libraries and education and the place of libraries in the educational process. The network of influence in Federation Australia and the impact of this on the development of institutions and professions in Australia is also examined.

Paul Heyer is to be commended for producing a very informative book on Harold Innis’ history of communications. It pulls together the communications elements in Innis’ wide-ranging works, and presents the result in an account that an otherwise uninformed reader can digest. The book is unique. Donald Creighton's biography of Innis is about the man, primarily, and only secondarily about his contribution to economic history (Creighton, 1957). Indeed, it is more about Creighton's own interpretation of Canadian history than about much that Innis had to say. My own intellectual biography of Innis (Neill, 1972) is a labored presentation that fails in at least one respect in which Heyer has not failed so badly. Heyer's Harold Innis is a neat, readable presentation of something Innis had to say. Of course, Heyer has been limited by his commission. In a contribution to a series of books on “Key Thinkers in Critical Media Studies,” Innis’ broad interest in many aspects of economic activity and his obsessive concern with the state of economics itself had to be relegated, more or less, to comments in passing. Still, it is Heyer who notes that Innis’ book of essays, Political economy in the modern state (Innis, 1946) “is pivotal” in his thought, though not given much attention by his interpreters, among whom I must include myself.

F H AYRES, in his article: ‘The case against Marc’ (Library Association Record, 73(7) July 1971, 130–131, 142) examines the problems facing a library wishing to use the Marc tapes at local level.