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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 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.

Increasingly public sector industrial relations have become the central concern of governments, practitioners and academics. The main purpose of this monograph is to review key developments in public sector industrial relations, particularly during the period of the Thatcher Government. The emphasis is on the public services, especially local government, the NHS and the civil service. In the first section we review trends in public sector employment (particularly in the light of Government policy to reduce it), wages (in a context of cash limits), and strikes and other forms of industrial action. In the second part we move from “outcomes” to consider recent developments in the structure, organisation and policy of the “actors” in public sector industrial relations. In particular, we examine union organisation, developments in personnel management, bargaining structure, wage determination machinery and procedures, dispute resolution and privatisation initiatives. Developments in these areas are set in the context of the traditional features which distinguish public sector industrial relations from other spheres. In many of the areas under consideration, trends and developments set in train by the post‐1979 Conservative Government are still in the process of being worked out. Overall public sector employment has fallen, but with considerable variation around the average. National wage disputes, with considerable numbers of working days lost, have characterised the public sector since 1979, but the frequency of industrial conflict should not be exaggerated. There are moves to decentralise union and management structures, but the consequences of this have yet to be realised. Pay, however, remains problematic for government, employing authorities and unions. Since 1981–2, public sector settlements have generally been below the rate of inflation, but above the cash limit. The ad hoc policy of determining public sector pay by a mixture of review bodies, measures of comparability and market forces has created an overall picture of confusion. Establishing a fair and rational system of public sector pay remains a key task for any future government.

The safety representative/committee regulations of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which became law in October 1978, have led to a substantial health and safety training programme being mounted by the TUC. In May 1977 a special TUC Conference on workplace health and safety discussed a variety of matters pertaining to this subject area. Among their most important decisions was one reaffirming that the emphasis of such training should be on TUC approved courses only, with the key functions of such training being to help identify health and safety issues in the workplace, find appropriate means and standards for dealing with health and safety problems and help establish an “infallible union workplace organisation” to ensure that the employers actually implemented safety measures. The TUC's target was that some 160,000 safety representatives would have undergone such training by 1980. In fact the TUC failed to attain this extremely ambitious target figure as is evidenced by the following figures:

Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Regulations which followed it gave trade union safety representatives the right to request management to establish a joint health and safety committee. While such committees have existed in Britain for a considerable number of years they have tended to be confined to large plants in the high and medium accident rate industries. One of the effects of the legislation has been to bring about a major increase in the number of committees, particularly among small firms and those in the traditionally low accident rate industries.

The safety officer is a person who has been around in industry for a not inconsiderable period of time, but about whom relatively little is known. Some indication of the historical nature of the safety officer function can be obtained by an examination of the aims and membership of the Institution of Industrial Safety Officers (now called the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health). This institution, which was formed in 1953, had a membership of some 2,000 at the time of the Robens Committee Report (1970–72) and aimed to raise safety officers' standards of professional competence, to exchange information and to develop accident prevention methods and techniques. Some further historical evidence is provided by a Factory Inspectorate Survey in 1968 which revealed that less than 25 per cent of plants with more than 50 employees had safety officers, with considerable inter‐industry variation being apparent—from less than ten per cent of plants in some industries to over 70 per cent in gas, electricity and water. The vast majority of these safety officers were part time.

In recent years a major theme in the organisational development and change literature has been the need to produce improved models of the change process. A major source of the need for such improved models is the long overdue recognition of the fact that, although pressures for change occur in both union and non‐union establishments, “OD has had little to say about the role of unions and the part they play in OD”. This particular deficiency is especially unsatisfactory in view of the many longstanding examples of union‐management problem solving structures and arrangements, most notably joint health and safety committees. Moreover, the unsatisfactory state of the organisational development and change literature with regard to the position and implications of the union role is likely to become even more acute as a number of commentators have pointed to such joint problem solving structures as being very much the wave of the future.

Government initiatives for involving employees in company affairs have turned towards attempting to forge deeper‐rooted links between employers and employees than those provided through contractual pay alone. These include three ways of encouraging share ownership.

In recent years a major theme in the organisational development literature has been the need to produce improved models of the change process. A major source of the need for such improved models is the fact that, although pressures for change occur in both union and non‐union establishments, “OD has had little to say about the role of unions and the part they play in OD”. This particular deficiency in the organisational development literature assumes significant problem proportions when one notes the existence of some theoretical argument and empirical evidence which suggest that existing organisational change models are inherently incapable of capturing the dynamics of union‐management interactions. According to Kochan and Dyer the specific reasons for this inherent weakness are as follows: