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This paper aims to propose and present a decision-making support method for poorly structured problems in schools, using the example of one of the most important and difficult decisions that principals face: terminating a teacher's employment.

A literature review was conducted, along with observations and interviews with 30 experienced principals, in order to identify decisions made by Polish principals. In order to sort non-programmable decisions according to their importance and difficulty, data were collected from 377 principals. Opinions from two groups, consisting of 22 and 25 experts, respectively, were collected in order to identify and order a set of criteria for making a specified non-programmable decision.

The four following areas of school activities were distinguished: finances, teaching and care, internal processes, and development of organisation. Within these categories, 126 decisions made by principals were identified, 96 of which were non-programmable. One of the most difficult and important non-programmable decisions was related to the termination of a teacher's employment. In order to support decisions regarding a teacher's dismissal, 44 criteria with different importance levels were identified.

Principals can use the method proposed in this paper, as it increases the rationality and objectivity of making a dismissal decision. The method can also be adapted for other difficult non-programmable decisions.

The expert opinion method might be useful for solving poorly structured problems in the management of educational institutions. As far as it can be ascertained, no previous empirical studies have identified and ranked the most important and difficult non-programmable decisions facing principals.

A satisfactory manufacturing policy can be drawn up systematically—amendments can them be audited. There are five axioms to take into account, three unities to preserve and the five Ps characterising the production management function. These, with SWOT analyses, provide a matrix by which policy can be examined.

This study seeks to address the issue of managing buyer‐seller relationships. Specifically, a framework incorporating the constructs of information communication, sales technology, product knowledge, and customer satisfaction is proposed.

Empirical support was derived from salesperson survey data combined with customer‐reported satisfaction ratings. All 254 sales representatives of the women's health care division of a pharmaceutical company were surveyed for this research study.

The results suggest that managers can benefit by extending salesforce training to address not only technical knowledge but also communication skills. Providing technology with the potential to increase customer satisfaction through improved information communication would be beneficial as well.

The research suggests that managers should invest resources not only in providing salespeople with technical knowledge, but also in training them in effective communication skills. Further, the benefit has been shown, in terms of customer satisfaction, of providing technology to support communication between salespeople and customers.

The study uses the relationship marketing approach to explore the critical role of information communication construct in a buyer‐seller exchange process. Moreover, the inclusion of salesperson experience as a possible moderator of the links to this construct brings additional value.

In any country which relies heavily on manufacturing for a healthy economy, its production managers constitute a major asset. Yet a recent study has revealed that the qualifications and ambitions of production managers are lower than those of other managers in other functions. More disturbing still, is the low level of usage of operations management techniques and concepts in Britain. Indeed, if British manufacturing industry is to survive, let alone succeed, much needs to be done to improve the education, training and status of the production manager in the UK.

This paper describes the results of surveys which provide information on the relative status, qualifications, knowledge, practices and needs of production/operations managers within the UK. The qualifications and ambitions of production managers are shown to be lower than managers in other functions. A disturbing finding is the level of knowledge of established operations management techniques and concepts. Moreover, those who do have knowledge make low utilisation of it. Comparison of American and British‐owned companies indicates that production managers in the former make greater use of good management techniques. There is demonstrated a need for active career development to enable well qualified and ambitious recruits to enter the profession and progress to senior management positions.

The developing role of information is explored within modern business, and in particular the use of strategic information systems to gain competitive advantage. It is suggested that IT requires significant redesign of enterprises with regard to organisation, behaviour, direction and planning.

Aims to determine why, in this “critical case”, a single‐union agreement was implemented in a top‐down manner, affected only contractors and was unique. Reports on in‐depth interviews of a representative sample of 20 managers, contractors, trade union officials and industry body representatives to triangulate archival data supplied by the refinery. Environmental changes were similar for all UK refineries. The implementation of a single‐union agreement is the result of a number of these but, crucially, new appointments in the case study refinery served to break with tradition. Suggests, however, that management does not always perceive itself to be a powerful agency; rather, it seems to need to proceed carefully and rationally in order to establish its own legitimacy to its peer group and within its own executive group to maintain its credibility as professional. States that this was an uncertain and risky venture, especially for a bureaucratic major oil company sensitive to public opinion.

27 candidates sat the paper and 14 were successful. The primary cause of failure was undoubtedly due to concentration on the absorption of set procedures, to the exclusion of developing an understanding of the purpose of the techniques. A common feature of the answers was a lack of ability to express them concisely and cogently.

These indicate in general the need for examinees to comply with fundamental procedures on the lines indicated in Education & Training, April 1983. Specific comments for individual papers are set out below.

Any kind of production flow is obtained not from individual production organizations but from a more or less widespread Production Network of interconnected production modules located in different places and times. All of these modules are, consciously or not, necessarily connected, interacting and cooperating in a coordinated way to combine and arrange, step by step, the factors, materials, components, manpower, machines and equipment to obtain flows of products’ final goods, in particular’ and to sell these where there is a demand for them. The purpose of this paper is to determine, in logical and formal terms, the minimum conditions that bring about the formation of production networks and to discover the laws that explain their dynamics over time.

At the global level, the continuous and accelerated economic progress of mankind is witnessed. There is an increase in the quantity and quality of satisfied and yet to be satisfied needs, of attained and yet to be attained aspirations. The increase in productivity and in quality has become unstoppable and appears to guide the other variables in the system. It is natural to ask who produces and governs these phenomena. It does indeed seem there is a Ghost in the “Production” machine whose invisible hand produces growing levels of productivity and quality, increases the quality and quantity of satisfied needs and aspirations and reduces the burden of work, thus producing increasingly higher levels of progress in the entire economic system. This conceptual framework gives a simple answer: there is nothing metaphysical about this evolution towards unstoppable and irreversible progress, and it is produced by the spontaneous genesis and activity of selfish nodes and governed by the rules and laws of the production networks.

The author has identified ten “rules of selfish behavior” on the part of the nodes, whose application necessarily and inevitably produces three evolutionary dynamic processes “which refer to the network as an entity” which the author has called the “rules of the production networks” to emphasize their cogency: continual expansion, elasticity-resiliency and continual improvement in performance. The cognitive and creative processes that characterize the nodes do not allow us to predict the actual evolution of production networks; nevertheless, if it is assumed that nodes “consciously or not” follow the 10 “rules of selfish behavior”, then several typical trends, or behavioural schema, can be deduced which the author has called as the “laws of networks”, to highlight their apparent inevitability and cogency.

More than any other structure, Production Networks display Holland’s features and Arthur’s properties as their modules, viewed as autonomous entities with cognitive functions, represent a collectivity of agents that interact and exchange information with their environment to maintain over time their internal processes through adaptation, self-preservation, evolution and cognition, making individual and collective decisions as part of a network of micro behaviours.

This new conception of production through production networks, which takes into account the “rules” and “laws” regulating their behaviour, also sheds new light on the development of networks and their natural tendency to become globalized.

Although the concept of a network is becoming more popular in economic and business studies, it is yet to see an interpretation of production as deriving exclusively from the actions of increasingly larger networks. This paper presents an integrated view of production that does not discard the notion that production is carried out by organizations and companies but introduces the broader concept of the integration among organizations, which must be interpreted as nodes of a broader network that produces the flows of all the components needed to obtain the flow of a specific product. This represents an innovative view that will help us in understanding the difficulties policymakers encounter in governing production and controlling the basic variables that characterize it, specifically productivity, quality, quantity, prices and value. This perspective also allows to derive rules and laws for the behaviour of production networks that appear to be cogent and unvarying over time.