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It is a familiar enough concept in the teaching of management that the business organisation is an open system, operating in an environment susceptible of analysis. The same logic can be applied to the business schools which thus teach. I accordingly have attempted to review in this article what have seemed to be the most critical pieces of public or environmental advices coming our way. Members of the advising environmental community have ranged from the National Economic Development Council and Lord Franks in the early sixties to Nancy Foy and the European Foundation for Management and Development in the late seventies. In between there have been a million suggestions by users, be they company management development advisers or programme participants. Finally, of course, there have been competitive activities by schools other than the one in which we find ourselves. They do not offer verbal advice; rather they demonstrate, should we care to observe carefully, how goals similar if not always identical to our own might be achieved. Accordingly, this discussion will not examine what we have done at Cranfield but only what I believe we can perceive other schools doing elsewhere.

According to Herbert Simon—the first and only Nobel prize winner in the area of management studies—the human mind cannot function on more than a few consciously considered informations at the same time. What this means is that our thinking, our decisions and action are in fact based on a few actively considered informations, which happen to be around. A large number of assumptions, convictions and impressions, which are unconsciously taken into account, are also determinant, although they remain unquestioned. There is nothing wrong with this. We could hardly function otherwise, especially when we have to act under pressure of time. But there is an obvious danger: the world seems to change more quickly than it used to (and this is an understatement), and the risk is that some of these unquestioned (because unconscious) assumptions on which we act are no longer true. Since human nature tends to avoid the threat of change we may persuade ourselves to select for conscious consideration only the “safe” informations, those which are not likely to change, however marginal they may be. This is what the French scholar Louis Armand called “Entrer dans I'avenir à reculons”.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

What's Going on at Buckingham? Is it rash or rational? Crazy or calculated? The decision to launch an entirely independent, new type of management school at university level may seem more than a shade imprudent, especially in today's uncertain economic climate. Yet the Management Centre from Buckingham (UMCB), to be launched shortly with senior staff from existing university schools and myself as Principal, is just such a venture. We will be going into business in the autumn with Professor Reg Revans as our President.