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Explains the need for a valid and reliable instrument for course managers to evaluate their product through customer feedback as part of the system of quality assurance. Examines the justification for viewing higher education as a service provision with the student body as the customer. Provides a short review of the existing tools for measuring student experience along with the rationale for testing a modified version of the SERVQUAL instrument. The instrument was completed by volunteers from three undergraduate degrees (n = 134) in class time just before the Christmas vacation. Analysis of the results revealed higher average perception scores than expectation scores on every dimension except tangibles. However, analysis also revealed rather lower reliability coefficients than achieved by Parasuraman or later replication studies. Factor analysis did not support the original five SERVQUAL dimensions in line with other replication studies. Considers the reasons for the low reliability score and the different factor structure. In particular, proposes the modified instrument’s lack of focus on a specific aspect of the complex service experience as a possible source of error. Recommends that the elements of service quality should be revisited and a higher education specific instrument for course managers should be constructed.

Explains the need for a valid and reliable instrument for course managers to evaluate their product through customer feedback as part of the system of quality assurance, and examines the justification for viewing higher education as a service provision with the student body as the customer. Provides a short review of the existing tools for measuring student experience, along with the rationale for testing a modified version of the SERVQUAL instrument. The instrument was completed by volunteers from three undergraduate degrees (n = 134) in class time just before the Christmas vacation. Analysis of the results revealed higher average perception scores than expectation scores on every dimension except tangibles. However, analysis also revealed rather lower reliability coefficients than those achieved by Parasuraman or later replication studies. Factor analysis did not support the original five SERVQUAL dimensions in line with other replication studies. Considers the reasons for the low reliability score and the different factor structure. In particular, proposes the modified instrument’s lack of focus on a specific aspect of the complex service experience as a possible source of error. Recommends that the elements of service quality should be revisited and a higher education‐specific instrument for course managers should be constructed.

IN order to be able to discriminate with certainty between butter and such margarine as is sold in England, it is necessary to carry out two or three elaborate and delicate chemical processes. But there has always been a craving by the public for some simple method of determining the genuineness of butter by means of which the necessary trouble could be dispensed with. It has been suggested that such easy detection would be possible if all margarine bought and sold in England were to be manufactured with some distinctive colouring added—light‐blue, for instance—or were to contain a small amount of phenolphthalein, so that the addition of a drop of a solution of caustic potash to a suspected sample would cause it to become pink if it were margarine, while nothing would occur if it were genuine butter. These methods, which have been put forward seriously, will be found on consideration to be unnecessary, and, indeed, absurd.

Undertaking research generates much information and raw data that the researcher is required firstly to use to define the research process adopted, secondly to interpret and ultimately to draw conclusions and recommendations. All of these tasks require the researcher to organise and record the information in a manner that will be comprehensible when the time for writing up comes round.

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.

Presents a review on implementing finite element methods on supercomputers, workstations and PCs and gives main trends in hardware and software developments. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on the subjects retrospectively to 1985 and approximately 1,100 references are listed.

Mr. Walter T. Cuthbert has been appointed works manager of Ciba‐Geigy's Industrial Chemicals Division and becomes a member of the Management Committee.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

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.

A considerable portion of Dr. G. S. BUCHANAN'S report on the work of the Inspectors of Foods of the Local Government Board during the year 1908–09 deals with work carried out in special relation to the Public Health (Regulations as to Food) Act, 1907. A large amount of the meat consumed in this country is imported from the continent of Europe, the United States, and the colonies, and it may almost be said that the fact of our having to rely on the foreign producer for so much of our meat supply accounts for some of it being derived from diseased animals, or being in other ways unwholesome, or bearing evidence of having been prepared under conditions in which the needful sanitary precautions have not been taken.