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Recent years have seen a profusion of new models for strategic analysis. Their common purpose is to guide decision as to which business/product areas to focus on, which to downplay, and define the strategies consequent upon such decision.

Companies facing disaster and needing turnaround have included the biggest and best names. This article looks at the four major criteria an organisation must satisfy to achieve successful turnarounds.

Suggests that the theory and practice of new models for strategic analysis of business/product areas are based on a set of premisses. Looks at four strategic models: the Boston Consulting Group matrix, the General Electric “business screen”, Michael Porter's structural approach; and the evolutionary stages. Asks if these can be applied with equal rigour in countries other than the USA. Remarks that these strategies can only be applied elsewhere in a modified form owing to the difference in business systems and the culture of which such a system is an expression.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss exploratory research into the perceptions of British Muslims towards Islamist ideological messaging to contribute to the general debate on “radicalisation”.

Four focus groups were undertaken with a mixture of Bangladeshi and Pakistani British Muslims who were shown a selection of Islamist propaganda media clips, garnered from the internet.

The paper proposess that Islamist communications focus on eliciting change in emotional states, specifically inducing the paratelic‐excitement mode, by focusing around a meta‐narrative of Muslims as a unitary grouping self‐defined as victim to Western aggression. It concludes that British Muslim respondents were unsympathetic to the Islamist ideological messaging contained in the sample of propaganda clips.

The paper provides an insight into how British Muslims might respond to Islamist communications, indicating that, while most are not susceptible to inducement of paratelic‐excitement, others are likely to be, dependent on which genre of clip is used, the messages contained therein, and who that clip is targeted at.

The annexation of business promotion methods by candidates has revolutionised political advocacy in America, with electronic technology making the traditions of democratic campaigning anachronistic. The consequence of political marketing is a re‐defined democracy in which politicians are more symbolic but less powerful than heretofore, and the principal catalyst of change is television advertising.

The use of direct mail in American political campaigns is examined. Direct mail has the capacity to attract and retain the loyalty of targeted groups, more so than other mediums. The planning of a direct mail campaign and deficiencies in current direct mail strategies are also examined.

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.

Re‐affirms the validity of Michael Porter’s contribution to the discourse on competitive advantage, but suggests that his theory is weakened by its neglect of cultural factors and historical antecedents. Offers further amplification to his comments on the role of government, and reviews modern critics of Porter. Finally, summarizes succinctly the advice he would give to modern governments.

The purpose of this paper is to reply to Andrew V. Abela's “Marketing and consumption: a response to O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy”: European Journal of Marketing. The article challenges a number of alleged claims in their paper “Marketing, the consumer society and hedonism”, and the authors' response seeks to present a systematic and, hopefully, intellectually coherent answer to Abela's critique.

The paper proceeds via discussion, argument and conceptual analysis. The three key areas of critique, which focus on the notion that these authors are somehow desensitized to the ethical significance of materialism and marketing's role in its causation, are examined in succession.

There can be no finality in this discussion, only further debate; nevertheless we believe we substantiate our claim that marketing alone does not “cause” materialism but that it is an inalienable fact of human nature. The first claim attributed to us was that the harms of materialism had not been demonstrated empirically. This misrepresents what we said and nowhere in the paper did we make such a claim. The second alleged claim is that we said it is unlikely that marketing causes materialism. Much here depends on how Abela is interpreting cause, since we do not deny marketing contributes by facilitating materialism but reject the idea that it is a necessary or sufficient condition for materialism. The third claim is that we see no alternatives to the current system that are consistent with human freedom. This paper acknowledges this charge, but questions whether strong consumer materialism is a major problem and maintains in any case that the alternative suggested by Abela is neither feasible nor viable.

This stands as part of the larger fields of marketing ethics, macromarketing and, more broadly, the “politics of consumption” (which would include such areas as globalisation); the merit/demerit of marketing as a transformative social force, and whether it is materialising peoples and cultures, is high on any future marketing research agenda. This article contributes to that debate.

If the ills of society are successfully attributed to the agency of marketing – and “materialism” is a convenient shorthand for these ills – then we invite legislative and other forms of retribution. It is important therefore that alternative perspectives get a hearing.

This topic is ultimately about the ethical status – and by extension social value – of marketing itself. By rigorous conceptual analysis and theoretic and literary support, these authors create a credible, though by no means uncritical, alibi for marketing.

Describes an empirical study which aimed to compare the marketing practices used by high‐tech and low‐tech companies in the UK, and to attempt to explain any significant differences. Concludes that there is increasing awareness of the salience of marketing by UK high technology companies, though they are still not as market oriented as low‐tech ones. Suggests that broadly speaking results replicate earlier findings in US high technology firms, with the critical difference that the British companies rate both the possession of the latest technology and price competition less seriously than the American organizations.