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The cordiality of the relationship between home owners and house developers is significant in the house building sector. This plays a key role in meeting needs, expectations and overall satisfaction. Home owners’ satisfactions are very often dependent on their encounters and experiences with the building organisations they deal with. The purpose of this paper is to explore home owners’ satisfaction to the quality of their new homes by investigating the relationships between them and their house developers when they take possession of their properties.

Two distinct lines of investigation were conducted, with the first utilising mail questionnaires administered to new home owners. The second involved interviews with house building developers. Both investigations cover five main regions in New Zealand. However, this study reports the mail questionnaire survey. The data analysis is based on 216 new home owners, and the results presented using descriptive and correlation analysis.

This research found that the higher the home owner’s satisfaction with the services provided by the developers, the better the relationship that could exist between them. In addition, the longer it takes for developers to rectify defects that are reported by home owners, the lesser the cordiality of their relationship with their developers. It is also evident from this study that home owners’ relationships with their house developers could be sensitive to the extent of defects in their homes. While it is apparent from this research that new home owners satisfaction level is high, some improvement opportunities exist, which the study highlights for continuous performance improvement. This will enable the residential construction sector to establish more aggressive and pro-active measures of monitoring to the satisfaction of home owners.

This research provides insight into significant factors that could influence the relationship between home owners and their house developers. The study provides information on changes required in the quality culture that could enable house developers do it once and do it right.

The originality of this research lies in the provision of a wealth of information on cordiality as a key determinant of home owners and house developers’ relationships. This will enable house developers to set realistic performance standards and focus efforts where they are most needed so that home owners derive satisfaction from the quality of service offered by them.

Before attempting to decide what are and what are not legitimate constituents of toilet and domestic soaps, it is necessary first to touch upon another question to which in some way it is more difficult to give a definite and satisfactory reply—namely, to what is the cleansing power of soap due? The answer to this depends a good deal upon the standpoint from which the matter is viewed. To the chemist the exact explanation is hardly yet entirely forthcoming, and he can at present only answer in a general way by saying that the chief value of a soap is owing to its power of dissolving or emulsifying fats; but why it does so is still more or less under discussion. It has been shown that a solution of a neutral soap when largely diluted with water is decomposed into free alkali, and a fatty acid which is precipitated.

By the time this issue of the British Food Journal reaches its readers, the Food and Drugs (Amendment) Bill is likely to have received Royal Assent. Since Parliament reassembled in mid‐October the House of Commons has been able to allot three days to the Committee stage of the Bill. The amendments made have not been of great importance. One amendment, moved on behalf of the Government, empowers the Minister to make regulations providing that food not of the proper composition may be treated as unfit for consumption and seized by Inspectors.

The latest information from the magazine chemist is extremely valuable. He has dealt with milk‐adulteration and how it is done. His advice, if followed, might, however, speedily bring the manipulating dealer before a magistrate, since the learned writer's recipe is to take a milk having a specific gravity of 1030, and skim it until the gravity is raised to 1036; then add 20 per cent. of water, so that the gravity may be reduced to 1030, and the thing is done. The advice to serve as “fresh from the cow,” preferably in a well‐battered milk‐measure, might perhaps have been added to this analytical gem.

SEPTEMBER is the month when, Summer being irrevocably over, our minds turn to library activities for the winter. At the time of writing the international situation is however so uncertain that few have the power to concentrate on schemes or on any work other than that of the moment. There is an immediate placidity which may be deceptive, and this is superficial even so far as libraries are concerned. In almost every town members of library staffs are pledged to the hilt to various forms of national service—A.R.P. being the main occupation of senior men and Territorial and other military services occupying the younger. We know of librarians who have been ear‐marked as food‐controllers, fuel controllers, zone controllers of communication centres and one, grimly enough, is to be registrar of civilian deaths. Then every town is doing something to preserve its library treasures, we hope. In this connexion the valuable little ninepenny pamphlet issued by the British Museum on libraries and museums in war should be studied. In most libraries the destruction of the stock would not be disastrous in any extreme way. We do not deny that it would be rather costly in labour and time to build it up again. There would, however, be great loss if all the Local Collections were to disappear and if the accession books and catalogues were destroyed.

To examine the effects of urbanization and industrial concentration on the propensity of firms to export, and to determine whether these aspects of geography affect smaller firms differently than larger ones.

Based on expectations from economic geography and organizational learning theories, logistic regression was used to assess the effects of firm size, urbanization and industrial concentration on the export choices of 43,707 manufacturing firms located in the Southeastern USA.

Results indicate that geography affects choices to export, and that these choices differ with firm size. The smallest manufacturers (fewer than 20 employees) were most likely to export from urban areas and in concentrated industrial sectors. Industry‐specific differences were also found.

Results from the Southeastern USA are consistent with findings from China, though caution should be used in generalizing from these findings. The findings suggest that both internal and external scale economies must be considered in order to understand the export success of small firms.

These findings suggest that factors external to the firm affect the learning and decision process of smaller firms in very different ways than larger firms. Small firms are more dependent on their geographic environments than larger firms, when engaging the global economy.

This is the first paper to examine the simultaneous effects of internal and external scale economies on the propensity of firms (and particularly small firms) to engage in export activities.

Although public‐private partnerships (PPPs) have been used internationally, the New Zealand Government has only recently started to consider using PPPs to deliver public assets and services. However, there is uncertainty about whether the New Zealand Government should actively enter into PPP arrangements. The government lacks a robust decision‐making tool for assisting with choosing alternative procurement methods. PPPs are seen as risky, but innovative procurement options, with obstacles to overcome before they use can become common place. Nervousness about the use of PPPs requires the New Zealand Government to have a thorough understanding of the drivers and obstacles, and also to understand the applicability of international PPP experience to New Zealand. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the drivers and obstacles for adopting PPPs in New Zealand and provide details on how these obstacles might be overcome by using innovative country‐specific solutions.

Semi‐structured interviews with senior industry players and round table discussions are the research methods used.

The research found that the drivers for PPP adoption include acceleration of infrastructure provision, better risk allocation, whole of life cost savings, improved quality of services, access additional revenue sources, benefits for local economic and social development, and improved project scrutiny. The results show that the drivers appear to be more than securing private financing for public infrastructure. Greater efficiency in the use of resources has been emphasised by New Zealand practitioners. With regard to the apparent obstacles, research showed these to be: political, social and legal risks, unfavourable economic and commercial conditions, high transaction costs and lengthy lead time, problems related to the public sector and problems with the private sector. Possible solutions to these obstacles are derived from national and international research and assessed for their applicability to New Zealand.

The paper presents discussion on the concerns expressed by the New Zealand industry about PPPs at strategic, institutional, and industry level. The identified obstacles and suggested solutions provide some initial guidance on how to proceed with PPP implementation in New Zealand. More research needs to be done to understand the various key facets identified here (e.g. tendering process, contractual arrangement, and risk allocation) and their wider effects. The research is based on interviews with a limited number of senior industry respondents, along with the general results of three industry round table discussions. Therefore, follow‐on interviews need to be conducted with private sector partners, sponsors and funding bodies, in order to gain a wider view of the issues under investigation.

The findings of the research are of assistance to decision makers in both the public and private sectors in New Zealand. By understanding the drivers and obstacles for PPP adoption, and posing solutions to these obstacles, the New Zealand construction industry might be in a better position to adopt PPP schemes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning, as well as the drivers, of innovation in theory and practice for gaining insight into the reasons why the diffusion of innovative technologies fails; even though they promise a superior performance compared to incumbent technologies. The paper describes an explorative study of the diffusion of domotics technologies in residential construction.

Innovation systems theory, which points to the “technological regime” in the actor network as a key element in the diffusion, acceptance, and application of new technologies was used to analyse the diffusion of domotics technologies in residential construction.

The results underscored the expected “bottlenecks” in the technological regime of the innovation system that curtailed the diffusion of domotics technologies in construction.

The novelty of the paper is in the approach of the research and the collected data on the technological regime amongst the stakeholders. These stakeholders were principally involved in development and implementation of the domotics technologies in residential construction; these observations provided useful insights into the diffusion of domotics technologies.

PROMPTLY UPON the ending of the seemingly interminable Christmas/New Year holiday—I just had to go back to work between the two, because another plate of cold‐turkey‐plus‐cold‐Xmas‐pud would have driven me insane—there landed upon my desk the first issue of the LAR vacancies supplement, a sheet of job advertisements which is to be issued fortnightly while publication of the Times literary supplement Is suspended, and may even be continued thereafter on a permanent basis if demand warrants.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse how different ways of organising transport and logistics activities in construction impact on efficiency. The paper scrutinises three particular transport and logistics configurations: the de-centralised coordinated configuration, the on-site coordinated configuration and the supply network coordinated configuration.

Three configurations are derived from the literature and from case studies. The efficiency of the three configurations is analysed on three levels of analysis: the construction site, the supply chain, and across supply chains and construction sites.

The paper concludes that there are possibilities to enhance efficiency on all three levels of analysis by widening the scope of coordination beyond the individual construction site.

The analysis points to efficiency potentials in applying the supply network coordinated configuration, although this configuration puts high demands on collaboration amongst the actors involved.

The paper provides illustration, and explanation, of the efficiency potentials involved in the three configurations.