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Using a sample of some 300 small independent businesses, drawn from Central London, the paper examines how entrepreneurial behaviour affects business performance. It is argued that small businesses motivated by a desire to grow in terms of sales and/or employees and to survive in a dynamic and competitive environment need to be innovative. However, to what extent they will innovate successfully depends on their capacity to plan ahead, their capacity to innovate and their willingness to take risk. It is shown that entrepreneurial businesses are characterised by these competencies that allow them to innovate and thus develop and grow successfully. Not surprisingly, not all small businesses are equipped with these three competencies owing to their diverse array of strengths and weaknesses arising from the diversity in the managerial motives and aspirations of entrepreneurship. These results highlight the importance of the capacity to innovate and the capacity to plan ahead as strong predictors of small businesses’ performance.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

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.

INTRODUCTION Companies operating in international markets have been told that innovation lies at the heart of success and that they should establish early warning systems to help them see the signals of change (Porter, 1990). At the global level, technological developments and competitive conditions have been seen as ‘increasing pressure on firms to co‐operate along and between value‐added chains’ (Dunning, 1993). However, does this apply only to multinational enterprises competing in world markets? In the early 1990s many small firms in London were also under pressure; they were often in industries characterized by significant technical changes, to which managers had responded by introducing technical developments into their own firms. They had often been severely constrained in their attempts to achieve their business objectives by difficult competitive conditions, notably the poor growth of market demand and the increasing intensity of competition. Of course, businesses everywhere have always faced changes in their competitive environments and it is the responsibility of management to make appropriate responses to these changes. However, firms vary in their ability to identify and understand the competitive environment and in their ability to mobilize and manage the resources needed for a successful response (Pettigrew and Whipp, 1993).

The UK Government started Employment Training (ET), a programme for unemployed people, in September 1988. It quickly became established as a major programme; in February 1992 there were 146,000 ET trainees in Britain. Thousands of employers are involved in ET by offering placement opportunities to trainees. Looks at the way British employers participate in ET and considers some ideas for improving the effectiveness of and pay‐off for carrying out training under the programme. Refers to a special survey of 301 London employers in the spring of 1992. This was carried out for the Central London Training and Enterprise Council (CENTEC). Provides evidence that employers participate in ET because of the possibility of recruiting ET trainees to the permanent workforce.

The competencies that need to be developed and deployed in coping with accelerating changes in the business environment have been the subject of much work dating back at least to the 1960s. Two broad themes are discernible in this work. On the one hand there are those who argue that the speed of change is so fast that organisations and managers who can respond almost instinctively and improvise responses quickly will do well. On the other, there are those who argue that more formalised systems of strategic development and control are needed to give organisations a competitive advantage. The results from an empirical study of some 267 organisations are used to shed some light on this debate. The evidence supports the idea that a growing organisation is associated with the existence of internal strategic systems that support the firm’s growth ambitions, allowing it to make not only “good” business decisions and to monitor how well the organisations is doing against its strategy, but to do so speedily.

While several countries have introduced strategic planning and management into the work of government and the civil service, there has been some international interest in the British Government's development of strategic management in the period from 1997 to 2007. This paper begins by setting out the characteristics of the development of strategic management, which included a phase of producing departmental strategic plans during 2003‐04. It shows that the government's strategic planning was politically owned. The plans were not formulated by civil servants and rubber stamped by ministers. An analysis of key planning documents for the National Health Service, including the one produced in 2004 as a strategic plan, shows that strategic thinking was emergent. The paper concludes with an observation on the limitations of ministerial‐led strategic planning in a government seeking to realise a state model of being strategic and enabling.

In the 1970s there was a growing realisation of a need to prepare young people for work. It was hoped by many that public policy initiatives in vocational preparation would enable Britain to catch up with the more systematic youth training practices of its European neighbours. Ironically, the development of vocational preparation has really been fostered by the employment crisis of the 1980s. As unemployment began to climb in the late 1970s and surged in the early 1980s, the scale of training measures, paid out of public funds, likewise expanded. The YTS programme is a product of these trends.

Through a survey of 200 employees working in five of the thirty establishments analysed in previous research about the microeconomic effects of reducing the working time (Cahier 25), the consequences on employees of such a reduction can be assessed; and relevant attitudes and aspirations better known.