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Describes a very simple quality project to improve access to information which is important to the company. Despite the simplicity of the project, it affected all staff and therefore had considerable impact, promoting the perception of quality as a fundamental part of all aspects of company life at any level. The project was undertaken three years into the quality programme and assisted greatly in renewing interest at a time when indifference might have set in. It encouraged a re‐examination of other aspects of long accepted practice and as such was a marketing achievement for the ongoing quality improvement programme.

From the 1970s onwards, studies of the dynamics involved in family food provisioning in Britain and the USA have provided consistent evidence of the centrality of husbands and male breadwinners to food decisions. Recent studies are beginning to show the significance of children or the “junior consumer” to household food decisions. This paper reports on focus groups conducted in Australia in the mid‐1990s that support the argument that children exert considerable influence over family diets. One obvious reason for this trend lies in the activities of food retailers and advertisers/marketers, who target their goods, services and messages to children. These marketplace actors are encouraging children to identify as consumers. A less obvious explanation, and the one explored in this paper, concerns changing parenting practices. Despite the double workload of many family food providers, children's demands are being responded to in unprecedented ways. Metaphorically, children are displacing male adults at the head of the table. The paper comments on the consequences of children's dominance over dietary practices.

OUR theme in general this month is the personality of the librarian. One may say that librarians have a habit of discussing the recruitment of the profession, its pay and other factors in the personnel. And it is natural that they should have, because after all it is their life. The librarian as a man rarely figures at any length or in any detail in the books or magazines that we usually read. Lately, it is true, Mr. L. Stanley Jast has been contributing to a contemporary, The Library Review, some admirable all‐too‐brief articles on his memories of personalities and doings mainly in connection with the Library Association thirty or more years since. It is a pity that Mr. Jast cannot be persuaded to give these reminiscences at much greater length, and although it is possible that their main appeal is to the born librarian, yet for those who read as they run, they possess many things of quite living interest. In short, the librarian is bound to be interested in the librarian himself; that is human nature.

“The nation’s diet” is a six‐year basic social science programme funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, consisting of 16 projects located in universities across England, Scotland and Wales. Explains the overall purpose of this multi‐disciplinary programme in social scientific terms as the examination of the processes affecting human food choice. The programme’s central concern ‐ “why do people eat what they do?” ‐ is amenable to study using a variety of social scientific research approaches, designs and techniques of data collection and analysis. Illustrates this methodological variety selectively in reporting a few of the programme’s early results from three of its projects. The findings confirm that people eat what they do for a multiplicity of reasons in addition to, and sometimes in conflict with, hunger, properties of the food itself or people’s own valuation of health and nutrition.

Offers a preliminary examination of the nature of food snobbery. However, any psychological evaluation of the concept of snobbery is eschewed in favour of discussion that locates professional food commentary in a market context. By understanding the narrow targeting of professional food commentary, it is simultaneously possible to illuminate the extent to which such commentary arises essentially as a function of journalistic rather than culinary or gastronomic values. In taking this approach, the intention is not to stereotype food journalism which, in some areas of commentary on food, exhibits a reflexive quality, but rather to emphasize that, contra relativist approaches to the study of taste (reflected in aphoristic expressions such as “each to his own taste”), journalistic commentary on food can be seen to be a phenomenon which, in fact, distorts public perceptions of the nature of food markets, especially in the context of dining out.

Although the current wave of globalization is the result of unprecedented scientific and technological advances, through history, movements of an international nature have been, to a large extent, about the spread of political and economic ideas across borders. “Geopolitical realism is based on the interests of the state”. Scientific and technological advances, together with the opening of markets to the free passage of goods, services and finance, has led to a huge growth in world trade. However, such positive developments have also their downside. The findings of the United Nations Human Development Programme Report highlight that global inequalities in income and living standards have reached grotesque proportions. Further, such disparities are linked to ever‐intensified environmental degradation and the extinction of some 11,046 species. Such circumstances have witnessed the growth of community‐based local currencies, the emergence of a social movement advocating corporate social reasonability (CSR) and a growing literature critical of the Anglo‐American corporate governance model, where shareholder wealth maximization is the driving force. Yet, the philosophy and practice of shareholder wealth maximization persists. This paper explores the effects of free‐market economics, globalization and western capitalist practices in terms of their consequences for the planet, people, profit and posterity (the four Ps). A case is made outlining the need for an advanced corporate governance model that integrates the four Ps. In so doing, the paper seeks inspiration from the ancient philosophy of Buddhism and, in conclusion, examines the role of the Business School in developing future, reflexive practitioners, equipped to effectively provide the necessary balance between shareholder expectations and stakeholder needs within a new paradigm of a balanced society.