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The monograph examines firstly the magnitude of demand for capital investment in individual items of distribution equipment—ships, aircraft and motor vehicles, It then concentrates on financing motor transport, examining the objectives of acquisition analysis and the relative importance of the company controlling its own fleet. Alternative methods of distributing the product are examined to show how transport involvement can be minimised according to the marketing strategy adopted. The monograph considers, in some detail, alternative approaches to commercial vehicle acquisition. The broad principles of the subject are discussed and three common methods presented—outright purchase, hire purchase and leasing. Worked examples are shown for each method, using discounted cash flow techniques and the net present costs of the alternatives compared. The final section of the paper examines the changing demand for capital in the company for transport from its launch as a one man operation through to the mature large organisation.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb054978. When citing the article, please cite: Rita Johnson, Peter Cooke, (1981), “Subjectivity and Bias in Job Evaluations”, Employee Relations, Vol. 3 Iss: 4, pp. 17 - 19.

The paper aims to offer an exploration of the Banking Act 1987 which was passed following the failure of Johnson Matthey Bankers (JMB) in 1984. This Act extended the role of auditors in banking supervision by removing traditional confidentiality constraints and created a new role of “reporting accountant”. The paper seeks to examine the origin and development of these new reporting roles. In addition, the paper considers the extent to which the findings of this historical investigation might contribute to current debates on the role of auditors in banking supervision.

The paper draws on official documents, personal accounts of individuals responsible for dealing with the JMB crisis, and semi‐structured interviews conducted with audit partners and banking supervisors who had direct experience of implementing the supervisory reforms instituted under the Banking Act 1987. Power's explanatory schema of controversy, closure and credibility is adopted as a framework for the analysis of documentary sources and interview data.

The failure of JMB generated sufficient controversy so as to require reform of the system of banking supervision. The paper shows that JMB was a controversy since it disturbed what went before and carried with it sufficient allies for change. To achieve closure of the controversy, agreement by key actors about changes to the nature of the role of auditors was required to ensure legitimacy for the reforms. Backstage work undertaken by the auditing profession and the Bank of England provided the necessary credibility to renormalise practice around the new supervisory arrangements.

The paper develops Power's schema which is then employed to analyse the emergence of the new role of reporting accountant and extended role for auditors in UK banking supervision. The paper provides empirical evidence on the processes of controversy, closure and credibility that help to ensure the legitimacy of accounting and auditing change.

For many years, the banking industry has required close supervision owing to its central yet delicate role in economic life. In a short time, the business has moved from a local, country‐based jurisdiction to a global arena, on a massive scale. This development has forced regulation to adopt an international perspective, to keep in step with the commercial developments. This paper analyses this move from local to global regulation of banking, finding that the efforts seem to be reactive rather than proactive. In addition, the regulatory endeavours have become enmeshed in international economic competition, and sophisticated regulatory arbitrage is being conducted on a global playing field. Thus, regulatory objectives and standards are being increasingly compromised or subverted. Paradoxically, just as the banking business is becoming increasingly risky and scandalous, regulation is becoming weaker, posing serious challenges to the future of the world economy and society.

The most significant recent reform in international bank regulation has been in the area of capital adequacy, first instigated by the BASLE Committee and formally introduced in 1988. These reforms have had, and continue to have, significant economic consequences. However, the concept of capital adequacy and its usefulness in bank regulation has attracted a significant amount of criticism from the academic community. This raises the question as to why it was that capital adequacy was adopted as a tool for international bank regulation, despite major concerns with its rationale and effectiveness. Although the topic of capital adequacy has attracted an increasing body of research, the reasons behind the adoption and implementation of capital adequacy by international bank regulators have remained unexamined in the literature. This paper investigates the rationale for capital adequacy, citing documentary and interview evidence surrounding the key decisions, and in the process traces the dynamics of international bank regulation. The principal finding is that regulatory reform was influenced by tradition, convenience and likely acceptability rather than by any serious considerations of regulatory objectives and potential effectiveness of the capital adequacy reforms. This corresponds to findings about the origin and dynamics of regulation in the political economy literature.

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.

Suggests that cultural anthropological analysis affords a neglected tool for new product design and product improvement and this helps to minimise complexity and improve market effectiveness. States there are three objectives herein: examines the type of market where economic data alone may not be enough to make a proper market evaluation; evaluates the sort of factors which might be germane to choosing alternative markets for the current product and skills available; and suggests how such a qualitative analysis may be quantified in terms of cost variances to complete the necessary analysis. Conclusions are that only a when a wider range of data is available can a comprehensive new market strategy be finalised.

Motor manufacturers have begun to change their way of thinking within their dealership networks; the new development of the provision of associated services by the manufacturers themselves is described within the framework of value‐added strategies for the marketing function. Services in the automotive industry are listed and their costs and benefits analysed. The implications of a value‐added strategy are discussed.

The costs of physical distribution, like the costs of production or marketing, consist of a number of elements whose prices are frequently determined independently and without apparent reference to each other. In the same way that production costs can be controlled by varying the inputs of capital, raw materials and labour according to their current cost relationships; or the efficiency of a marketing programme maximised through judicious adjustment of the marketing mix, so can the costs of physical distribution be minimised by scientific warehouse location, inventory control, transport mix analysis, containerisation and route planning. Widespread application of operational research techniques, industrial engineering and marketing research mean that the spectacular savings available in the past in marketing and production have been achieved.

Job evaluation is not an exact science. Yet notions of “comparability” and “differentials” seem to imply that a set of objective criteria exists which can provide the necessary and sufficient causes for ranking one job higher or lower than another. At the same time, it is commonly accepted that subjective and non‐rational factors enter into the evaluation of jobs. One example of such factors (of particular interest in the light of recent legislation) is that of sex bias.