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Some superficial similarities between Australia and Canada are readily apparent: enormous countries, well endowed with resources, their relatively small populations derive in large part from European immigrants. As far as the structure and performance of their economies are concerned, both are relatively affluent, trade‐dependent countries with a long tradition of agricultural and extractive activity, a beleaguered manufacturing sector, anxieties about their abilities to exploit technological change and the most severe recession since the 1930s.

In arguing that the traditional mechanistic approach of economists to the production process, with its accompanying assumption of a maximising calculus, should make more room for qualitative workplace considerations, Keith Newton (“Some Socio‐Economic Perspectives on the Quality of Working Life”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 3, 1978, pp. 179–87) in effect, adds asocial aspect to the economics of the Quality of Working Life field. This is a welcome and important perspective.

This article describes, in non‐technical language, the results of recent research concerning the behaviour of some major components of unemployment. While the analysis is based on Canadian data it is felt that since high unemployment rates, controversy about their causes, and uncertainty about appropriate policy responses, are all common to a number of countries, our results may be of interest to a wider audience. Indeed, in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany unemployment rates in the 1970s appear to have been higher, on average, than those that prevailed in the preceding decade. There seems little doubt that sluggish growth in recent years has contributed significantly to high unemployment rates, but a variety of other causal factors have also been suggested.

While concern for the quality of working life (QWL) is by no means new it is nevertheless true that there has been an enormous amount of research, experimentation and commentary in this field in recent years. A particular confluence of forces—ever‐accelerating technological change; rapidly‐shifting attitudes, life‐styles, and social institutions; and the paradox in many countries of a customary prosperity threatened by doubts as to future economic performance—is at least in part responsible for the burgeoning interest in the field. But important also is its multidisciplinary nature, which has afforded to social scientists of varied orientations the opportunity to participate in a new intellectual growth industry.

If the Quality of Working Life (QWL) is to become a distinct “school” then, it is argued, it should possess all the attributes of a school, in particular, vocabulary, concepts and methodology. The very importance of problems in contemporary society would suggest that the realisation of these attributes is an urgent task. It is argued that what appears to be needed is an integrated theoretical framework, and to this end a socio‐economic systems approach serves as the main focus of this contribution.

The heavy commitment by many countries to training programmes as an integral component of manpower policies has prompted a considerable amount of research into these activities. In particular, the experience of Sweden, Great Britain, and the United States has furnished valuable information concerning the design, implementation, and performance of national training schemes. However, relatively little published evidence has emerged on the Canadian experience, despite the fact that Canada's training effort is large by international standards. The present article utilises Canadian data to address the question of the appropriate method of training. The analysis focuses upon the relative efficacy of two major types of federal government sponsored training carried out under the Canada Manpower Training Program: institutional (or “classroom”) training and on—the—job training (OJT).

The body of literature in the field now commonly known as the “quality of working life” (QWL) has grown steadily over a period in which the industrialised nations have increasingly come to question the role and status of human beings in the modern technological environment. In recent years concern with the nature of work, its impact upon people, and their attitudes towards it, seem to have sharpened. Investigation of, and experimentation with, the qualitative aspects of working life—its ability to confer self‐fulfilment directly, for example, as opposed to being a means of acquiring goods—has gained momentum under the influence of a unique set of economic, social, political and technological factors. The outpouring of books, reports and articles from a wide variety of sources has, not surprisingly, grown apace.

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.

The School of Economic Synthesis is not only a modern theoretical approach to economics, but it is also an active academic and social movement which aims at fostering a better economic society. Based on the socio‐economic interpretation of history and theory, Economic Synthesis seeks a realistic explanation of those factors and problems in modern society which can only be analysed and solved from a multi‐social (interdisciplinary) approach to the social sciences.