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Examines efforts made to ensure the safety of operators in using robots. Looks at the use of simulation of robotic workcells, which in particular provides the benefit of allowing the user to develop and design workcells months before use. Details the method used and concludes that simulation can involve the safety engineer in processes at an early stage, before it is too costly to make necessary safety changes.

The flexibility of a robot system comes from its ability to be programmed. How the robot is programmed is a main concern of all robot users. A good mechanical arm can be underutilized if it is too difficult to program. The introduction of the Universal Robot Controller™ (URC) has made the possibility of a standard, easy to use, robot programming language a reality. The URC is an open‐architecture, PC‐based robot controller. It will work with virtually any robot and gives the user increased flexibility and capabilities over the standard OEM controllers. The URC uses Windows NT as its operating system. The URC is the ideal platform for a universal robot programming language, RobotScript. It allows one robot language to run all robots in a factory.

This editorial aims to review the contents of the special issue, situating it within appropriate historical context.

A close reading of the contents of the special issue is provided.

This special issue reveals the important contributions of a number of previously forgotten female pioneers in marketing, advertising and consumer research.

This introduction adds further historical detail about the structures and biases that have limited the opportunities available to female contributors to marketing theory, thought and practice.

The paper aims to explain why and how, in the USA, a very particular interpretation of economic liberalism, faring though different historical contexts, has generated, since the 1970s, a new kind of capitalism whose language, logic, legitimating paradigm and associated practices have become, thanks to “organic intellectuals” and active networks of power and influence, the “newspeak” and compass of chief executive officers from around the world, despite their always direst societal consequences.

Using history as a support to investigate the domestic and international relations contexts that bore financialized globalization, the paper is strongly located into political sociology. As such, and if we consider that political sociology is the “science of power”, the paper tries to identify precisely the networks of power and influence which transformed a specific interpretation of liberalism and business into a dominant paradigm and specific kind of capitalism, in the USA and the rest of the world. The approach helps to understand which sets of ideas and authors were deemed worth supporting by business and political networks of power and influence and how both sides drew on their reciprocal resources to transform their cosmogonies into dominant paradigms and real politics (corporate and States).

The paper provides a global but precise understanding of the complex processes that allowed some vested interests to impose their vision of economics and business on a domestic, then world, scale. It also questions the relevancy of that vision according to a presentation of the negative societal externalities the associated policies generated and according to the official investigations that have been conducted on the corporate and banking misdemeanors that it contributed to generate.

The paper illustrates a method of investigation that can be used to develop the “global view”, a prerequisite to making decisions in full knowledge of causes and consequences and thus a means to train future “globally responsible leaders”.

By revealing the hidden interests behind financialized globalization and the societal consequences of their power plays, the paper indirectly demonstrates the urgent need for an “alter‐economy” geared to meet the fundamental needs of societies and to preserve their natural environment in the long term.

The paper offers a different perspective on economics and business which is seldom presented in business schools where, owing to the discussed dominant ideology, politics is considered irrelevant to understand business and economics and where the latter are nearly always presented as vectors of good.

The attack on the institution of business is acelerating at a more furious pace. In this post‐Watergate era the momentum of the assault is being fuelled by the almost daily revelations of corporate misdeeds. America's growing anti‐business mood may culminate in more government controls being imposed on the economy and possibly the nationalisation of some industries. Clearly, the implications for the social, political, and economic system are most serious. The problem is compounded by the artist, especially the writers of fiction. Both current novelists and those of previous eras have presented a consistently negative image of the typical businessman. Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol paint portraits of very ugly businessmen. Indeed, that same portrait is replicated by virtually every artist to the present day.

Political correctness, also known as “PC,” has generated much discussion on both the Right and the Left. The greatest debate comes from college campuses. Political correctness derives from the principle that ethnic diversity, i.e., multiculturalism, can and should be preserved and protected. Ironically, the term originated in the Marxist era, when it was used to enforce conformity in the advancement of a particular Marxist view. The term became obsolete until it was revived in the 1980s (D'Souza, 1991).