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Changes in the macroeconomy, combined with changes in bank lending practices, have created a more difficult financing environment for small businesses in the UK in the 1990s. Notes increasing encouragement for small businesses to seek venture capital as an alternative, but points out evidence both of a lack of venture capital for firms seeking less than £500,000 and a belief that small firms are unwilling to seek venture capital. Challenges these views and points out the advantages to the banks of an informal venture capital market. Considers ways for banks to encourage such activity.

There is a significant gap in understanding with regards to the role of cultural context in family business research. This paper aims to address this by exploring the critical and pervasive influence of culture in shaping the entrepreneurial behaviours of family businesses based in Saudi Arabia.

The authors adopt a qualitative interpretive case study approach, which draws upon interviews with the incumbents and successors of ten Saudi Arabian family firms.

The authors’ empirical evidence reveals the importance of family ties and culture on the entrepreneurial behaviour of family firms in general, and the influence of “Islamic capital” on the intergenerational transfer of family legacy in particular.

The authors provide critical insights on how Islamic capital motivates Saudi family firms to maintain harmony, avoid disputes and create a legacy for future generations by engaging in entrepreneurial behaviours.

Larostate 520, a cost‐effective antistat providing superior lubricity, humectancy and electrical conductivity is now available from Jordan Chemical Company, here.

The purpose of this paper was to ask librarian Rachel Mulvihill (Head of Teaching and Engagement) and colleagues at University of Central Florida libraries about the Foundations of Excellence Transfer Initiative, an extensive, university-wide self-study program examining their transfer student needs for success and retention. University librarians participated in Foundational Dimensions groups in the first year of the program and with action groups in the second year.

This is an interview.

Participation in campus-wide initiatives to reach transfer students improved the libraries’ image in the university system, strengthened inter-department connections and supported the success of transfer students. Developing personal connections with transfer students and understanding your school’s transfer population needs and dialogues with feeder school can help libraries better support their student populations.

The integration of library staff into a system-wide transfer-student assessment program is rare, if not unique.

Concern about the equity gap in the UK has existed for more than 60 years. Despite various government measures and institutional responses (e.g. the development of a venture capital industry) an equity gap still persists. Current debate has recognized the role of the informal venture capital market as a source of risk capital for SMEs. Argues that this market is both inefficient and underdeveloped, due largely to information deficiencies which hinder contact between potential investors and entrepreneurs seeking finance. Against this background, identifies the role of business angel networks (BANs) as a key means of stimulating the flow of informational venture capital in the UK. In particular, a government scheme to provide pump‐priming assistance to establish five local BAN demonstration projects is shown to have achieved impressive results. However, with the recent emergence of a number of private sector BANs, the continued role of government is now being questioned. Further demonstrates that public sector BANs, operating on a local scale, are filling a different market niche from that of private sector BANs, which operate predominantly on a national scale. Concludes that the top priority for policy is to ensure that all parts of the UK are served by local BANs. An appropriate way forward might be to build on experimental networking arrangements between local, public sector BANs and national, privately operated BANs.

Colin Stewart Minerals Ltd of Wharton Lodge Mills, Nat Lane, Winsford, Cheshire and Richard Baker Harrison Ltd of 238 City Road, London EC1, have established Baker Sillavan Barytes Ltd as a jointly owned company to handle their sales of white micronised and conventionally ground barytes. Outstanding in the product range will be the Rutenia barytes produced by Societé Couleurs & Zincique of Paris, for which the company is the exclusive UK distributor.

The papers collected in this volume celebrate the 40th anniversary of “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” – one of the most influential and sustained attempts to represent organizational decision-making processes in a way that accounts for generally recognized but hard to accept features of organizational life. In our overview of the volume we emphasize ways in which the garbage can model (GCM) differs from more generally accepted models of organizational decision making. We suggest that future progress in linking the GCM to specific empirical settings might be facilitated by attempts to model explicitly the interdependencies connecting participants, problems, solutions, and decision opportunities in organizations. We discuss examples of current work in which this strategy is followed in a way that is consistent with the original spirit of the model. We present the overall organization of the volume and discuss how the various chapters contribute to the further development of organizational research inspired by ideas contained in the original GCM and in some of its more recent variants and critiques.