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In the early 1980s Tesco had provisionally agreed plans with the property developer, Provincial Properties Wales, to build a new store in Barry. Michael Hepker, the owner of Ravensbury Investments, was keen to buy into the project and persuaded Johnson Matthey Bankers (JMB) to lend him the capital to purchase Provincial Properties. JMB were to have the store as security for the loan. Unfortunately, planning permission for the building was refused, but, if accusations subsequently made in the House of Commons are to be believed, this fact was never disclosed to JMB. The bank never thought to check on the progress of the building work, so it remained blissfully unaware that its loan was unsecured. At the same time, JMB was lending ever increasing amounts to another client, who was later convicted of fraud in New York in October 1994. Together these two concentrated exposures exhausted JMB's capital base, so that when repayments started to dry up the bank faced collapse. The Bank of England (the Bank), as lender of last resort and UK supervisor of the banking industry, became concerned because JMB was regarded as playing a key role in maintaining the UK's central position in the international gold bullion market. The Bank feared a run on gold deposits which might have spread to the ordinary and unconnected deposit‐taking industry and perhaps led to a currency crisis. The markets were already edgy after the collapse of Continental Illinois National Bank in the USA, which had prompted a run on the dollar, and so the Bank believed it might have been difficult to persuade the markets that JMB's problems were confined to its lending business only. As a result of the JMB debacle, Barry never got its Tesco's and the Bank of England found itself obliged to rescue JMB using money from the government and City institutions.

This Food Standards Committee Report has been with us long enough to have received careful appraisal at the hand of the most interested parties — food law enforcement agencies and the meat trade. The purposes of the review was to consider the need for specific controls over the composition and descriptive labelling of minced meat products, but the main factor was the fat content, particularly the maximum suggested by the Associaton of Public Analysts, viz., a one‐quarter (25%) of the total product. For some years now, the courts have been asked to accept 25% fat as the maximum, based on a series of national surveys; above that level, the product was to be considered as not of the substance or quality demanded by the purchaser; a contention which has been upheld on appeal to the Divisional Court.

Consecration is the process by which producers in creative fields become canonized as “greats.” However, is this the end of the story? Research on consecration focuses on the drivers of consecration but pays little attention to the post-consecration period. Furthermore, the research ignores the dynamics of consecration. To address these gaps, we examine the changing fortunes of a consecrated artist – the musician Phil Collins. We identify the ways in which three actors (fans, critics, and peers) assemble for consecration, disassemble for deconsecration, and reassemble for reconsecration. Examining the changing public image and commercial fortunes of Collins as a solo artist between 1980 and 2020, we identify an N-shaped process of rise-fall-rise that we call the Phil Collins Effect. This effect offers a new way of thinking about how cultural producers gain, lose and regain status in their fields.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the existing project management literature by conceptualizing the influence of personality and cognitive traits on project managers’ risk-taking behaviour.

The paper is based on an in-depth analysis of the existing literature to develop framework for conceptualizing risk propensity in project management.

The results indicate that the Big Five personality traits cannot capture risk propensity in risk-taking behaviour on their own. Cognitive traits are indispensable components in risk propensity.

The paper examines the association between risk propensity theories and personality traits. The paper framed project managers’ personality traits that can impact their tendency to take risky decisions, that is risk propensity.

This paper expands literature by increasing our understanding of personality and cognitive traits in risk propensity.

Africa is the only continent none of whose states have joined the conventions against international bribery and very few African countries have national laws attempting to fill the gap. South Africa has taken promising steps internally and now should accept a leadership role in the development of transnational law against corruption. Meanwhile, the Internet and other new technologies are developing as parallel, mostly non‐governmental tools against corruption. Unlike transnational and most national laws, their impact has already been clearly visible in Africa and they offer at least the possibility of substantial interference with corruption in the short to medium term.

Focusing on the early development of the three major forms of local advertising employed by independent department stores across the USA – newspapers, radio, and television – this paper examines continuity in the industry's commercial use of new technologies.

The research draws on different types of primary sources, including department store financial records and correspondence, retailing trade literature, industry publications, newspaper advertisements, and radio advertisement transcripts.

The local and regional markets of the independent department store, and to some extent, department store chains, required local advertising, something best served by newspapers in the period under study. While many retailers embrace the commercial potential of radio and television as they appear in the 1920s and late 1930s, respectively, others are reluctant to divert their advertising budget away from newspapers. Trade writers for the department store industry and radio and television reveal tension between the National Retail Dry Goods Association, with its progressive orientation and professionalizing goals, and the more traditional merchants these experts are trying to modernize. The paper also suggests, perhaps as a subject for future research, that as radio and television lost their local orientation and became increasingly commercialized and national, independent department store advertising would not have been able to compete with department store chains.

Although much has been written about national advertising, cultural, and business historians have conducted little research on local advertising, the type typically employed by independent department stores. This paper provides an introduction to the three major advertising formats most often used by independent department stores as each medium first emerged as a potential selling tool.

It will be a momentous year, even if prophecies are not fulfilled in the sense in which they are so recklessly made. Threats of terrors at Christmas, especially for London, did not materialize. There are some readers who whisper that they do not believe in a Second Front at all. And so on: jade Rumour lies as earnestly today as ever in her unwholesome history. But much must happen before we can again utter the wish with which we begin. Our business, in addition to our imperative war duties, is to carry to conclusions of value the post‐war policies we have received from the Library Association. We have more than that to do. Some of our libraries, even those that have not suffered from direct bombing, are in a state which in peace conditions we should say was deplorable.

The substitution of an imitation of some kind for the article actually asked for or desired by the purchaser is a particularly mean form of deception which is practised nowadays to an almost incredible extent. It is astonishing and mournful that so many persons should be concerned in the deliberate initiation, fostering, and carrying on of so shameful a system, and that others are to be found who in speech and print seem willing to lend to it either their countenance or condonation. One must suppose that there exists a form of moral obliquity or distortion—at first accentuated and ultimately rendered incurable by the acquirement and contemplation of illegitimate gains—which makes the sufferer incapable of grasping the fact that the proceedings in question are utterly degrading and iniquitous. However this may be, the circumstances are such that a strong endeavour ought to be made to get the public to appreciate them, and to expose and, as far as may be possible, to punish those who are guilty, at any rate of the worst types of fraudulent dealing referred to. The Daily Mail and, in a lesser but important degree, the Daily News, have rendered excellent service by directing attention to the matter. The articles which have been published up to the present in these newspapers have been reprinted in pamphlet form under the title of “ The Fraud of the Label,” and a study of this brief but telling exposé may be strongly recommended to all and sundry. A most appropriate quotation from Sir WALTER SCOTT'S “Kenilworth ” appears on the title page: “ Some … plainly admitted they had never seen it; others denied that such a drug existed … and most of them attempted to satisfy their customer by producing some substitute … which, they maintained, possessed in a superior degree the self‐same qualities.”