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Even more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination toward a number of groups in employment settings in the United States, workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of contemporary theory and evidence on the nature, causes, and consequences of discrimination before synthesizing potential methods for its reduction. We note the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship and highlight meaningful future directions. In so doing, we hope to both inform and inspire organizational and scholarly efforts to understand and eliminate workplace discrimination.

The environment within which the pharmaceutical industry is operating is dynamic and highly competitive. Government cost‐ cutting in healthcare, the rise of generic drugs, increasing R&D costs and depreciating patent lives are having important effects upon the sector (Sharp 1991). Recent years have witnessed a wave of takeover, merger and restructuring. The need to discover, develop and market drugs rapidly is greater than ever before. Consequently, high performance is seen as vital both by analysts of the sector and by managers in the company which forms the subject of this paper. This is not unproblematic in a research‐ based industry, there may be conflicts between short‐term and long‐term objectives and there is no simple relationship between individual high performance and high performance as an organisation.

Co‐operation and libraries can hardly help being named together. Those types of organization which have been the chief sponsors of libraries, e.g. the college, the university, the learned society and the public corporation, all contain in themselves the idea of banding together for the good of a community.

OUR new volume opens in a grave moment in national history and it remains almost a marvel that libraries are Still not only able to persist, but even to expand their book‐work. Is it because of the truth in some admirable words of Charles Rupert Sanderson, in the Toronto Public Libraries Annual Report for 1941: “Whoever believes in democracy must believe in public libraries”? He goes on to say: “Unless any formal education period is to amount to little more than writing on the sand, it must be continued by a lifelong use of books—engendered in childhood, fostered in youth, and built into an adult habit.” Amongst the young people the need for books was never greater, and the difficulty of getting new books for them was never more marked. It is a time when older books should come into their own again. Another feature has been the desire for small collections of “lending books” in munition works, training centres, canteens, clubs and the innumerable other meeting places of men and women. The problem of the day is “time and again time.” There is none of it for travelling, even to libraries, although in the said centres men and women have often to Stand by for hours when they could, and would, read. Librarians have used the opportunity and may be called upon for more of these “dispersal” activities. Otherwise, with all our problems, of which as the writer on Letters on Our Affairs suggests, the greatest is books, although the staff problem is acute, our work flourishes so far as book‐use is concerned. Librarians have faith that a culture so based on books will outlast present cataclysms. People who can read can endure and people who endure can fight, both directly and indirectly, and keep on doing it.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how brand communities collectively react towards brand transgressions, an area where previous research has been scant.

This study adopts a netnographic approach in studying the reactions of one particular brand community and its reactions to a marketer-initiated brand transgression.

Building on coping theory, we find evidence of brand community coping, a temporally bounded process in which the community seeks to come to terms with and even overturn the transgression. Overall, we define the brand community coping process as unfolding through three overlapping and temporally bounded stages of (1) making the problem communal, (2) exploring the problem’s meaning, and (3) co-creating responses.

Studies of consumer coping particularly in cases of brand transgressions have predominantly adopted an individualistic approach to coping, or have treated communities as coping resources for individual consumers. This study is the first study to truly look at brand communities’ collective coping endeavors. We also offer managerial implications by questioning the overtly positive tone of brand co-creation literature and underline potential threats to marketers when consumers decide to use their co-creative practices to punish the marketer.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system solutions are currently in high demand by both manufacturing and service organisations because they provide a tightly integrated solution to an organisation's information system needs. During the last decade, ERP systems have received a significant amount of attention from researchers and practitioners from a variety of functional disciplines. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the research literature (1990‐2003) concerning ERP systems is presented. The literature is further classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed. Following a comprehensive review of the literature, proposals for future research are formulated to identify topics where fruitful opportunities exist.

We are informed that at a recent meeting of representatives of some important learned societies a resolution was adopted by an overwhelming majority that Public Libraries should have no connection with the custody of Local Records.

The Government's Merchandise Marks Bill had an uneventful passage through the House of Lords and has been formally read a first time in the House of Commons. The main purpose of the Bill is to give greater protection to honest traders against less scrupulous competitors. With this object, the main provision of the Bill extends the definition of “trade description” so as to include statements as to “the quality, fitness for purpose, strength, accuracy, performance or behaviour of any goods.” In addition, the existing prohibition of false trade descriptions is extended to misleading descriptions, including any trade description which, although true in itself is calculated to be misunderstood or to create a false impression. It is hoped that the amendments will achieve also two other aims, namely, greater protection to the public generally and to the shopping public in particular, and better protection to the good name of British craftsmanship throughout the world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how research teams serve as building blocks for collaboration at a field level, and how these building blocks are assembled by a network of interacting organizations. The field setting is a medical sciences consortium in Australia established to encourage collaborative and entrepreneurial research among government, industry, research centers and university units. This consortium is examined as a case study. The analysis demonstrates how collaboration evolved at three interacting levels: research team, organization and interorganizational field.

The main findings are: (1) Intellectual property (IP) acts as the key orienting agent in this field to align the behavior of various stakeholders and leverage collaborative and entrepreneurial activity. (2) Tensions between the different ways that the commercial and public sector actors value IP serve to structure the interfaces among the consortium, the member organizations and the research teams. (3) The consortium is a key infrastructural element in the creation of collaborative capital in the Australian biotechnology field studied. The main contribution of the study is to highlight the nature of collaborative capital at a field level and begin to explore its implications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between business strategies and the adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) in Taiwan's communications industry. This sector has experienced astounding growth in production over the past three years.

Data are collected from 100 organizations through face‐to‐face interviews. A discriminant analysis is used to test the hypotheses pertaining to the ERP adoption decision.

The results show that a number of identified variables among the key internal and external descriptors of the firm's business strategies are the chief factors that determine whether ERP is adopted or not. Another variable, organization size, is also important, indicating that companies of different size approach the adoption of ERP differently. These variables correctly classify 78 percent of the decisions made with respect to the adoption of ERP.

This is the first empirical research study that examines the relationship between a firm's business strategy and the adoption of ERP in the rapidly expanding communications industry in Taiwan. With an increased understanding and better insight into this relationship, it should be possible for managers to be more proactive in their planning of the future adoption of an ERP system.