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David Gordon was, at once, a highly creative economist with an enormous range of interests, while also uncompromising in maintaining rigorous research standards. He focused equally on hard-core academic research and pressing policy issues. He was also openly committed to the political left, with this commitment animating all his work. One distinctive feature of Gordon’s work was his keenness to dive into the most important topics engaging mainstream economists and to inject explicitly left political economy perspectives into these mainstream debates. This paper focuses on two important examples of Gordon’s contributions that examine front-and-center mainstream macroeconomics questions. The first is the relationship between aggregate saving and investment. The second is the development of the concept of the “natural rate of unemployment.” The evolution of mainstream research on these two questions played a critical role in overturning what had been, over the first two post-World War II decades, a prevailing Keynesian/social democratic consensus, at both the levels of analytic economics as well as economic policy. As the paper reviews, Gordon challenges the analytic findings and policy implications of these perspectives at their core. Gordon’s own basic premises and results are straightforward. He argues that, in fact, investment decisions, not saving rates, are the main driver of economic activity in capitalist economies and that operating capitalist economies at something akin to genuine full employment – that is, in the range of 2–3 percent official unemployment – is a realistic goal. As such, these papers by Gordon contribute significantly toward envisioning a post-neoliberal social structure of accumulation that is committed to the egalitarian principles that were central to Gordon’s life work.

Describes the key elements of total logistics systems and their cycle times for requisite service levels at least cost. Shows how these constructs originally emerged from military necessity but have more recently been driven for commercial and manufacturing advantage. Analyses the traditional logistics cycle in academic and professional publishing and then demonstrates how the application of a total logistics system approach with the emerging capabilities of electronics totally transforms the performance of the system, reducing cycle time by 75 per cent. Significantly re‐engineers the five key elements of logistics systems ‐ facilities, unitization, communications, inventory and transportation ‐ and rewrites the cost/benefit equation of service levels. Explores the opportunities for backward and forward integration by traditional librarians and publishers respectively in the re‐engineered total system.

Database marketing is scarcely comprehended by marketing professional practitioners as yet but its potential is becoming clear. It not only revolutionises the productivity of direct marketing but transforms the effectiveness of salesforce prospecting, marketing research and channel management. The evolution of database marketing at MCB University Press is described and analysed over the past 15 years. The intrapreneurial and behavioural dimensions of development and implementation are traced and guidance provided for those who accept that good computer systems grow from within rather than arrive from without the enterprise.

Too few programmes of management development seek to evaluate their hard ROI for the enterprise. Describes how action learning’s focus on company‐specific issues makes this more feasible. Reports on a four‐year impact analysis from MBA programmes showing that employing organizations benefited greatly and that the individual managers also gained a host of soft benefits. The endemic problems of action learning are also identified but the contribution of the Set (fellow members of a small learning cell) again stands out as most vital.

Proposes to attempt to explain why this situation of marketing as a significant specialism will change within the next few years. Discusses the three main items having a bearing on university education possibilities: The Crick Report; the White Paper of May 1966; and the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA). States a general indication of subjects taken in a business studies degree with marketing as a major specialism and recommends various universities for varying courses within this specialism. Summarises that for marketing in particular, the new system is ideally placed as long as some kind of authoritative and constructive brief can be given it by the exponents of the subject, for whose successors the degrees have been designed.

Discusses various aspects of market research in Eastern Europe, with special emphasis on the Hungarian experience under the New Economic Mechanism. Attempts to show how the manner in which various sources of information can and should be utilized. Highlights differences and similarities between methodology of marketing employed in the East and the West. Presents a cross‐section of case studies to illustrate market research carried out. Suggests that marketing research is an important function in Eastern Europe.

The corporate virtual university model outlined in this paper embraces the workplace learning paradigm, but not in an exclusive sense. It seeks to understand the roles of academic and professional institutions as external forces in developing rigorous models of virtual corporate universities that meet the learning needs of individuals and organizations. This approach is enhanced by our ability to support knowledge creation and disseminate knowledge using electronic communications infrastructure.

Not so much a function, more a way of thinking about the business, is one of Gordon Wills' descriptions of PDM. In a characteristically witty and informative talk recently at a seminar organised by the Centre for PDM, he adopted the role of devil's advocate and offered sharp criticisms of the typical ‘marketing man’, whose awareness of the distribution function is sadly limited. “The marketing man must seek information about responses to levels of service”, says Gordon Wills. “He can tell you all about responses to advertising or to prices — but what does he know about service levels?”. And he went on to ask: is 100% service level always justified in terms of the investment and distribution costs it entails? The accounting side of the business also came in for some criticism. In Gordon Wills' view, accountancy is the Achilles Heel of the physical distribution philsophy; accountants have not taken sufficient interest in the costs of distribution. Traditionally they have been more concerned with costs of production and of course more recently with marketing costs. Cost accounting in distribution, in his own phrase, is a nightmare and if any one factor is going to hold back the progress of the physical distribution concept in industry, it is this. Following is a condensed version of the paper Gordon Wills delivered at the seminar.

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 present paper sketches the way Gordon Pask has influenced our lives as human beings and intellectuals. The first part refers to some of our memories of Gordon Pask as a most remarkable person, a kind of mix between gentleman and Bohemian. The second part tries to overview how Gordon Pask and cybernetics in general inspired, on the one hand, our thinking on a category of poets and writers we label “absolute writers” and, on the other hand, the making of music and our thinking about making music. We have concentrated on these artistic aspects to show how many‐sided Gordon Pask’s influence on people really was.