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In “A Structural Analysis of the UK Grocery Retail Market”, Robert Duke used Michael E. Porter′s framework for the structural analysis of industries to analyse the UK grocery retail market. Since this article was published in 1989, many potentially significant changes and developments have happened in this market, making an update of Duke′s 1989 analysis of interest. Sources of even greater power over suppliers enjoyed by retailers can be traced to implementations of new technologies in grocery retailing, and to the growth of pan‐European concentrations of buying power, while the threat posed by price‐cutting new entrants will force incumbents to use more of this power. Competition in the market itself will be influenced by superstore saturation, the emergence of a “Big Three” of retailers, and by potentially significant new entrants, able to defeat the market′s barriers to entry. This will create a more complex competitive structure.

A number of competitive forces seem set to re‐shape the UK grocery retail market during the 1990s, such as superstore saturation, information technology, and the emergence of a dominant “Big Three” group of retailers. A factor likely to be of major significance is the entry of European retailers, such as Aldi and Netto. The UK market is particularly attractive to European limited line discounters because of its wide net margins, and because its price competitive low end is vulnerable, having been largely abondoned during the 1980s as many UK incumbents moved “up market”. These European discounters possess the specific skills and assets necessary to penetrate the UK market′s three main barriers to entry. European new entry is partly responsible for a renewal of interest in discount grocery retailing among UK incumbents, which, in combination with other competitive forces, will produce a more complex and subtle structure to the UK grocery retail market.

Markets are characterised by distinctive patterns of competition, sources of threat or opportunity and, indeed, various levels of profitability. The author considers how significant new entry to grocery retailing is unlikely to be due to sharp competition and increasing rarity of good supermarket/superstore sites. Furthermore, the buyers from the industry, the grocery shoppers, are not so much participants in the power struggles, as weapons in it.

The area of innovation and new product development is both one of the most important and one of the most uncertain in management decision making. What looked like good ideas on the drawing board often fail in the marketplace for seemingly arbitrary reasons, or simply due to bad luck. Many innovations fail because the relationship between the innovation and the consumer is ignored in the quest for state‐of‐the‐art technology. While innovation will always remain a risky undertaking, the application of consumer behaviour models, such as that proposed by E.M. Rogers, can increase the proportion of successful product launches.

Resistance is useless: the information society is sweeping the world, subverting official channels and rewriting the international relations rulebook. There’s nothing for governments to do but wait until the dust settles. In the meantime, maybe they will come to see that informed citizens are better than ignorant ones, and that openness and not secrecy is the key to world peace.

The purpose of this article is to report the results of a field experiment designed to assess the impact of human resource accounting (HRA) information on layoff decisions made by managers. The study is a partial replication and extension of studies by Tomassini and Oliver and Flamholtz. The findings of this study are similar to the earlier studies; human resource accounting information does make a difference in personnel layoff decisions and enables managers to increase their level of confidence regarding decisions of this sort.

THE enterprise of two London newspapers, the Tribune (for the second time) and the Daily Chronicle, in organizing exhibitions of books affords a convenient excuse for once again bringing forward proposals for a more permanent exhibition. On many occasions during the past twenty years the writer has made suggestions for the establishment of a central book bazaar, to which every kind of book‐buyer could resort in order to see and handle the latest literature on every subject. An experiment on wrong lines was made by the Library Bureau about fifteen years ago, but here, as in the exhibitions above mentioned, the arrangement was radically bad. Visiting the Daily Chronicle show in company with other librarians, and taking careful note of the planning, one was struck by the inutility of having the books arranged by publishers and not by subjects. Not one visitor in a hundred cares twopence whether books on electricity, biography, history, travel, or even fairy tales, are issued by Longmans, Heinemann, Macmillan, Dent or any other firm. What everyone wants to see is all the recent and latest books on definite subjects collected together in one place. The arrangements at the Chronicle and Tribune shows are just a jumble of old and new books placed in show‐cases by publishers' names, similar to the abortive exhibition held years ago in Bloomsbury Street. What the book‐buyer wants is not a miscellaneous assemblage of books of all periods, from 1877 to date, arranged in an artistic show‐case and placed in charge of a polite youth who only knows his own books—and not too much about them—but a properly classified and arranged collection of the newest books only, which could be expounded by a few experts versed in literature and bibliography. What is the use of salesmen in an exhibition where books are not sold outright? If these exhibitions were strictly limited to the newest books only, there would be much less need for salesmen to be retained as amateur detectives. Another decided blemish on such an exhibition is the absence of a general catalogue. Imagine any exhibition on business lines in which visitors are expected to cart away a load of catalogues issued separately by the various exhibitors and all on entirely different plans of arrangement! The British publisher in nearly everything he does is one of the most hopeless Conservatives in existence. He will not try anything which has not been done by his grandfather or someone even more remote, so that publishing methods remain crystallized almost on eighteenth century lines. The proposal about to be made is perhaps far too revolutionary for the careful consideration of present‐day publishers, but it is made in the sincere hope that it may one day be realized. It has been made before without any definite details, but its general lines have been discussed among librarians for years past.

The purpose of this study is to understand how printing parameters and subsequent annealing impacts porosity and crystallinity of 3D printed polylactic acid (PLA) and how these structural characteristics impact the printed material’s tensile strength in various build directions.

Two experimental studies were used, and samples with a flat vs upright print orientation were compared. The first experiment investigates a scan of printing parameters and annealing times and temperatures above the cold crystallization temperature (T_cc) for PLA. The second experiment investigates annealing above and below T_cc at multiple points over 12 h.

Annealing above T_cc does not significantly impact the porosity but it does increase crystallinity. The increase in crystallinity does not contribute to an increase in strength, suggesting that co-crystallization across the weld does not occur. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) images show that weld interfaces between printed fibers are still visible after annealing above T_cc, confirming the lack of co-crystallization. Annealing below T_cc does not significantly impact porosity or crystallinity. However, there is an increase in tensile strength. AFM images show that annealing below T_cc reduces thermal stresses that form at the interfaces during printing and slightly “heals” the as-printed interface resulting in an increase in tensile strength.

While annealing has been explored in the literature, it is unclear how it affects porosity, crystallinity and thermal stresses in fused filament fabrication PLA and how those factors contribute to mechanical properties. This study explains how co-crystallization across weld interfaces is necessary for crystallinity to increase strength and uses AFM as a technique to observe morphology at the weld.

It's been three years since my previous survey in RSR. Superb reference books in pop music have been appearing so frequently that I've been having trouble keeping up. Let's hope “next year's” survey will only be 12 months in the making and not 36.