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The purpose of this paper is to consider whether a move from self‐regulation in the form of the Banking Code to statutory regulation by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) of retail banking conduct of business is to be supported.

The paper begins by examining the nature of the self‐regulatory process and then considers its strengths and weaknesses in the context of the Banking Code. It then looks at the changes proposed by the FSA. Focusing in particular on the issue of enforcement, the paper contrasts the powers of the Banking Code Standards Board and the FSA.

The paper concludes that, while a move to statutory regulation is to be supported, there is concern about whether such a move will bring the benefits that might have been expected.

More attention needs to be paid to the ways that different forms of regulation operate in practice, with empirical research particularly valuable.

The paper adds to the (relatively brief ) literature on consumer protection in banking, and the even briefer body of research on self‐regulation.

Although in many respects, the Heart of England region can hardly be called “peripheral”, it nevertheless displays many of the features of out‐of‐the‐way rural destinations. Describes the outcomes of a research project into training provision for the small rural tourism business operator. It has identified that the training and support on offer to the rural operator tend to be parochial, fragmented and unco‐ordinated. The research was instigated by Birmingham College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies, a specialist in the provision of hospitality and tourism studies and ultimately aims at the development and implementation of a co‐ordinated training programme for this sector. By pointing up the poor quality of such provision in an essentially central location, the paper invites the questions: how much worse the situation must be in truly peripheral locations, and what action can be taken to improve the situation.

Focuses on Pacific Bell telecommunications company and its benchmarking process to measure customer satisfaction. Explains the company′s current process m eight steps performed in sequence m and the results obtained.

Three themes dominate Hunting Causes. The first is that cause is a plural concept. The methods and metaphysics of causation, Cartwright believes, are context dependent. Different causal accounts seem to be at odds with one another only because the same word means different things in different contexts. Every formal approach to causality uses a conceptual framework that is “thinner” than causal reality. She lists a bewildering variety of approaches to causation: probabilistic and Bayes-net accounts (of, for example, Patrick Suppes, Clive Granger, Wolfgang Spohn, Judea Pearl, and Clark Glymour), modularity accounts (Pearl, James Woodward, and Stephen LeRoy), invariance accounts (Woodward, David Hendry, and Kevin Hoover), natural experiments (Herbert Simon, James Hamilton, and Cartwright), causal process accounts (Wesley Salmon and Philip Dowe), efficacy accounts (Hoover), counterfactual accounts (David Lewis, Hendry, Paul Holland, and Donald Rubin), manipulationist accounts (Peter Menzies and Huw Price), and others. The lists of advocates of various accounts overlap. Nevertheless, she sometimes treats these accounts as if they were so different that it is not clear why they should be the subject of a single book. And she fails to explain what they have in common. If, as she apparently believes, they do not have a common essence, do they have a Wittgensteinian family resemblance? She fails to explore in any systematic way the complementarities among the different approaches – for example, between invariance accounts, Bayes-nets, and natural experiments – that frequently make their advocates allies rather than opponents.

This essay is a review of the recent literature on the methodology of economics, with a focus on three broad trends that have defined the core lines of research within the discipline during the last two decades. These trends are: (a) the philosophical analysis of economic modelling and economic explanation; (b) the epistemology of causal inference, evidence diversity and evidence-based policy and (c) the investigation of the methodological underpinnings and public policy implications of behavioural economics. The final output is inevitably not exhaustive, yet it aims at offering a fair taste of some of the most representative questions in the field on which many philosophers, methodologists and social scientists have recently been placing a great deal of intellectual effort. The topics and references compiled in this review should serve at least as safe introductions to some of the central research questions in the philosophy and methodology of economics.

Libraries have faced many periods of grim economic realities. These periods of hardship have forced libraries to strive for more efficient organizational structures. Many of these improved organizational structures have been the result of mergers and/or consolidations. This phenomenological study describes the lived experiences of the merger design team of a large and complex library organization.

Results indicated the experience of the participants touched upon each of Bolman and Deal’s (2008) four frames: political, human resources, structural, and symbolic. The merger design team’s effectiveness on task is congruent with the model of team effectiveness proposed by Hackman (2002). Lastly, the role of underlying assumptions, espoused values and beliefs, and artifacts that makes up the organization’s culture falls within the parameters set forth by Schein (2004).

This chapter aims to make sense of the growing research that examines the role of culture in mergers and acquisitions. We provide a detailed review of the many related but distinct constructs that have been introduced to the literature. While each construct has contributed to our understanding of the role of culture, the lack of connections made among constructs has limited the consolidation of contributions. The review shows what these constructs mean for mergers and acquisitions, what major findings have been discovered, and, most importantly, how constructs interrelate. Our discussion provides several opportunities to foster the needed consolidation of this research.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.