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THE serious and intractable housing problem persists to plague governments and embitter citizens. Why this is so can be gleaned from a few statistics.

Newly appointed as director of technology for the Aerospace & Defence group of Smiths Industries is Nigel Hughes, who joins the company from the Defence Research Agency. Mr. Hughes succeeds John Hollington, who retires at the end of September after 36 years service, a period which has seen a considerable enhancement in the company's reputation as a leader in technological development.

INDUSTRIALLY the two ‘in’ words today seem to be participation and consensus, the first leading to the second. How these can become a reality in modern business was discussed recently by the London Region of the Institute of Work Study Practitioners.

TO operate effectively in his environment a man should seek to appreciate the sources which created it. There are few better ways for the work study man, or others concerned with the efficient running of the industrial machine, to do so than by digesting Management Thinkers, published at 40p in the Pelican Library of Business and Management.

This study aims to focus on proposing and empirically validating a model that captures certain critical socio-psychological factors that nurture consumers' attitude towards affordable luxury brands in an emerging market context of India.

The data were collected via a cross-sectional questionnaire survey from 491 customers of different fashion accessory luxury products in India. The data were analyzed through structural equation modelling (SEM) using AMOS 23.0 SEM software.

The findings of this study reveal that conspicuousness, status consumption, brand name consciousness, need for uniqueness and hedonism positively affect consumer attitude towards affordable luxury, which consequently affects consumers' purchase intention. The findings further reveal that age acts as a moderator in driving consumers' neo-luxury consumption.

By uniting various socio-psychological factors with consumer attitude and purchase intention in a conceptual model, along with studying the moderating role of age, this study responds to the calls for further research regarding affordable luxury and offers a more granular understanding of specific consumer motivations that guide Indian consumers' affordable luxury consumption.

WHEN a business expert said recently that only one out of every three firms who had purchased and installed computers was satisfied that the acquisition had proved a financial success it might be astonishing. At the same time, it deserves careful consideration. Have two‐thirds of the firms who have put them in been virtually swindled by salesmen's guile?

PARLIAMENT passed the Equal Pay Act in 1970 and it comes into full force at the end of 1975. In the meantime a Government order could increase the pay of women to at least 90 per cent of men's by December 31st next year. Like other legislative forays into the industrial world in recent years, this Act, despite its deceptively simple title, bristles with problems and will greatly change the country's economic life.

Over the last 20 years we have witnessed the emergence of a large‐scale, world‐wide academic movement concerned with the management of services. This paper charts the role and impact of operations management on this movement and proposes that the current key focus for service academics should be with the application of frameworks and techniques. Also suggests that as the service movement has grown, with increasing overlap between the subjects of operations, marketing and HRM for example, there is a need to “return to roots”. Contends that service academics, in their bid to develop cross‐functional service management material, may have lost, or inadvertently ignored, the strength of their core disciplines. Re‐focusing on the traditional strengths of operations management, such as performance quality, design, and operational improvement, might help provide a greater rigour to the developing subject of service management. Discusses nine areas for service operations research and suggests specific research questions. The topics include linking operational performance to business drivers, performance measurement and operations improvement, service design, service technology, the design of internal networks and managing service capacity.

DEVALUATION is not a soft option, an easy escape route from our afflictions. Neither is it a source of pride to citizens of a land of whom a famous American wrote last century: ‘The strength of England lies in the omnipotence of her industry’. The reasons for it are complex and in part international in origin, but the stark fact is that events drove the country ineluctably towards a crisis from which devaluation was the only way out.