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The results of a survey of some 230 West German subsidiaries currently operating in Britain are analysed. The issues examined include the extent of non‐union status, the existence of a personnel manager, and the nature of employee involvement arrangements. A major finding is that fully three‐quarters of the respondents are non‐union organisations, with the size of the organisation being particularly influential in explaining this and other relationships.

A recent article by P.B. Beaumont focused attention on the problem of alcoholism in British industry. Beaumont discussed the need for organisations to have policies for dealing with employee alcoholism and he identified a number of factors likely to be associated with successful policies. The article was quite stimulating and, accordingly, I thought it would be instructive to describe what American organisations are doing with respect not only to employee alcoholism but also the problems of drug and other emotional difficulties affecting job performance. Specifically, this article is devoted to a more thorough description of american employee assistance programmes and a discussion of some of the factors that have been found important to their successful implementation. Hopefully this information could be helpful to British as well as other American firms that continue to grapple with these kinds of problems.

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.

Three sets of environmental conditions favour the personnel function: tight labour market conditions, substantial government intervention in the employment relationship through legislation, a sizeable increase in the proportion of the workforce that is unionised. The presence of the latter two in the 1970s is thought to be the basis of the gains made during that period. The extent to which these gains were considerabe relative to other management functions and enough to ensure a sufficiently entrenched position which could not be subsequently undermined or cut back remains open to question. The latter should be considered in any study specifically concerned with the supposed current decline of the personnel function.

During the current decade, trade union membership has dropped by about 25 per cent, primarily due to the decline in manufacturing establishments in major urban centres. At the same time, there has been a growth in the number of new firms starting up in business. Based on research in those Scottish New Towns, it is found that the proportion of firms which recognise unions is much lower than that for the UK as a whole. Trade unions, it is argued, need to adopt much stronger organising initiatives in such locations if they are to tap in to potential members in these firms.

The general opinion in Britain at present is that the unions are not facing significant changes in management attitudes towards the institution of unionism. This view has been devised from surveys of relatively large‐sized plants in the manufacturing sector, an area of traditionally high levels of unionisation. It is argued that researchers in the UK may be looking in the wrong place or for the wrong signs in drawing this conclusion. Researchers may have been looking for substantial changes in management‐union relations rather than less obvious changes in terms of the power of existing institutions or of sustained opposition to new recognition agreements. Material relating to voluntary conciliation claims for recognition between 1976 and 1985 is examined, which shows a halving in the number of claims. Three recent studies in new towns all point to the high percentage of non‐union firms. A fall in union density can occur due to external contingencies, even in the absence of explicit management strategies of opposition to union organisation.

In a recent article in this journal Geoffrey Stuttard argued that the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 which provide for union appointed safety representatives have important implications for extending industrial democracy. The essence of this line of argument is that the subject area of workplace health and safety, which has for so long been dominated by unilateral management decision making at the individual workplace and a framework of common and statute law that has taken a highly “paternalistic” attitude towards the issue of employee and union involvement, is to become at least an area of extensive joint discussion, and possible one of joint decision making.

The results are details of a survey into membership and recruitment of student nurses in training schools and hospitals into the main nursing unions – the RCN, COHSE and NUPE.

In recent years a major theme in the organisational development literature has been the need to produce improved models of the change process. A major source of the need for such improved models is the fact that, although pressures for change occur in both union and non‐union establishments, “OD has had little to say about the role of unions and the part they play in OD”. This particular deficiency in the organisational development literature assumes significant problem proportions when one notes the existence of some theoretical argument and empirical evidence which suggest that existing organisational change models are inherently incapable of capturing the dynamics of union‐management interactions. According to Kochan and Dyer the specific reasons for this inherent weakness are as follows: