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Extract from the report made by Sundridge Park Management Centre and MORI, in making the 1993 British Quality of Management Awards. Looks at management capabilities and questions whether UK managers provide the leadership and competence necessary in today′s competitive climate.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the importance of corporate reputation to the management of contemporary organisations.

The approach takes the form of survey research and case studies. The paper is informed by corporate image and reputation research undertaken for major international corporations, governments and NGOs in the UK and in countries throughout the world dating back to the late 1960s.

The paper finds that corporate image is an important factor in the success or failure of virtually all major organisations; corporate reputation is the synthesis of many factors: the brand(s) image, the products (and/or services) class image(s), the brand user(s) image, the image of the country of perceived ownership of a corporation, and the corporate culture/personality; corporate reputations can be measured, and changes in corporate reputations can be tracked; and corporate responsibility is replacing corporate social responsibility as an increasingly important factor in how people regard the corporate reputation of organisations.

Policy makers should actively research and manage their corporate reputation. Familiarity breeds favourability, not contempt. All too often senior managers and their advisers (brand and corporate consultants, design consultants, advertising and public relations advisers, etc.), who have responsibility for the organisation's corporate reputation, muddle the distinctions between corporate reputation, corporate image, corporate identity, corporate personality, corporate culture, and other ways by which the elements of the corporate reputation are defined, and therefore used and measured.

The paper shares some of the lessons learned from 40 years' experience of MORI. The paper also marshals insights from the published output, lectures, and image‐modelling work.

Good and bad justifications for Assertion Training are examined, and it is emphasised that it is crucial trainees are selected by need, not status. AT must be treated as complementary to other training activities. The relationship of assertiveness and aggression is discussed. Effective AT concentrates on inner feelings. There are problems and possibilities in AT for women.

New educators may feel overwhelmed by the options available for engaging students through classroom participation. However, it may be helpful to recognize that participatory pedagogical systems often have constructivist roots. Adopting a constructivist perspective, our paper considers three meta-practices that encourage student participation: designing activities, leading others, and assessing peers. We explored the consequences of these meta-practices for important student outcomes, including content knowledge, engagement, self-efficacy, sense of community, and self-awareness. We found that different meta-practices were associated with different combinations of outcomes. This discovery demonstrates the benefit of studying meta- practices so as to reveal the nuanced effects that may arise from pedagogical choices. In addition, an understanding of meta-practices can help leadership educators to be more discerning and intentional in their course designs.

From whichever point of view we consider it, Edwards's Memoirs of Libraries is a remarkable work. Its two volumes provide a total of two thousand pages of text It is at once a history of libraries—and a history on a world scale—and a manual of library administration. It can, of course, be criticised on that score. Would it not have been better to have issued the history separately, in two still sizeable volumes, and to have presented the practical manual as a separate work? As published by Trubner in 1859 the manual occupies the second half of the second volume which itself consists of rather more than 1,100 pages. But to Edwards the history and the administration were by no means so clearly divisible. The practical chapter on book‐binding, for example, approaches the subject historically; prints a small selection of Roger Payne's bills; and is illustrated, inter alia, with lithographs of sixteenth century bindings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the scope of applications and benefits of sustainability accounting for the production and industrial use of biomass as an energy source and substitute for fossil‐fuel use. As environmental degradation and unacceptable social impacts not only increase from the production and use of fossil‐fuel based energy, but also from alternative energy sources, the monitoring, controlling and measuring of the (un‐)sustainability of alternative energy production and use emerges as an area in critical need of research.

The paper presents a review of the issues surrounding the accounting for the (un‐)sustainability of industrial biomass production and use, considering what biomass is, the current and forecast importance of industrial biomass, different approaches to its production, and the subsequent measurement and monitoring of its potential (un‐)sustainability.

The paper finds that it is insufficient to conclude in general terms, as is often done or assumed in policy documents and statements, that industrial production and use of biomass is sustainable (or unsustainable) and that accounting for biomass must recognise the broader ecological and social system of which the production and use form a part. A further finding of the paper is that from agricultural or industrial production of biomass through to consumption and industrial use of biomass, the accounting issues surrounding biomass production and use are essential to determining its (un‐)sustainability.

The paper provides an overview of the importance of and problems with the production of biomass for industrial use, and related sustainability issues. It discusses possibilities for and limitations of accounting to address these sustainability issues as well as the need for and the challenges in measuring the (un‐)sustainability of biomass production for industrial use and the accounting for sustainability improvements.

Anthropology was a late‐comer to the Caribbean and only after World War II did the study of Caribbean culture and societies become less exceptional. Early in this century when anthropology was first making itself over as an ethnographic science, anthropologists concentrated on tribal peoples. For most of the post‐Columbian era, the Caribbean region, with a few minor exceptions, was without indigenous tribal societies. Even after anthropology turned its attention to the study of peasantries, Caribbean peasantries were ignored in favor of more stable and tradition‐oriented peasant societies in other parts of Latin America. When anthropologists began to study Caribbean peoples in a more serious and systematic fashion, they found that they had to develop new concepts to explain the variation, flexibility, and heterogeneity that characterized regional culture. These concepts have had a significant impact on social and cultural theory and on the broader contemporary dialogue about cultural diversity and multiculturalism.

New B.C.I. chairman Sir Peter Lane has been appointed chairman of Brent Chemicals International PLC. Sir Peter, who is esnior partner of Binder Hamlyn, has been a non‐executive director of Brent Chemicals International since 1976 and was previously chairman of Savilles Hydrological Corporation, now part of Reddish Savilles Ltd, one of the major operating companies in the B.C.I. Group.

The New Year will see Britain a member of the largest multi‐national free trade area in the world and there must be few who see it as anything less than the beginning of a new era, in trade, its trends, customs and usages and especially in the field of labour, relations, mobility, practices. Much can be foreseen but to some extent it is all very unpredictable. Optimists see it as a vast market of 250 millions, with a lot of money in their pockets, waiting for British exports; others, not quite so sure, fear the movement of trade may well be in reverse and if the increasing number of great articulated motor trucks, heavily laden with food and other goods, now spilling from the Channel ports into the roads of Kent are an indication, the last could well be true. They come from faraway places, not all in the European Economic Community; from Yugoslavia and Budapest, cities of the Rhineland, from Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Mulhouse and Milano. Kent has had its invasions before, with the Legions of Claudius and in 1940 when the battle roared through the Kentish skies. Hitherto quiet villagers are now in revolt against the pre‐juggernaut invasion; they, too, fear more will come with the enlarged EEC, thundering through their one‐street communities.

We have on many occasions drawn attention to the all too prevalent fallacy of judging the nutritive and dietetic value of foods solely by their chemical composition without regard to the digestibility of the foods, and to the more or less prevalent idiosyncrasies of the public in connection with such foods. In an excellent article in The Times, Sir Wyndham Dunstan observes that “it has to be remembered that, however desirable the constituents of a given material may seem, in order to be of real value that material must be digestible— capable of assimilation within the body. In this matter of digestion people differ greatly and there must be latitude in the choice of food. While consumption in quantity of uncooked green and other vegetables is widely advocated, many are unable easily to digest some vegetables unless cooked, and not always then except in very moderate amount. Many other factors have to be taken into account in planning a common dietary. There are different tastes and preferences. The appeal a particular food makes to the individual and the appetite it stimulates are important points. The psychological factor plays a significant part and must be met by providing as wide a selection of palatable food as possible. These are a few truisms often overlooked.” With regard to the kind of bread we should eat and ought to be made to eat in war‐time, the writer observes that “there is unanimity in regarding a wholemeal bread (not always the same thing as “brown” bread) as that which should be generally eaten and readily procured. This is not at present the rule. Should it be made so? The constituents of wholemeal bread supply not only nourishment for the body but protection against ill‐health. Some of the more valuable constituents are absent from the white bread, so long the staple of this country, because they have been removed in the conversion of the wheat into white flour, which is now often further whitened and further deteriorated by a chemical bleaching agent. White bread is therefore a sophisticated and inferior food to which we have grown so accustomed that its use has become an ingrained habit. The obvious course in the circumstances, especially in war‐time, would be to compel the use of wholemeal bread and prohibit white bread. But, though such a course would be for the good of the nation, a sudden change of the kind, however beneficial, is bound to be inconvenient, if not distasteful, to many who are attached to white bread, and particularly to those who do not, or cannot, understand the need for change. There are people who say they can digest white bread more easily than “brown.” Thus it happens that the Ministry of Food, advised by numerous experts and confronted with numerous objectors, is apparently in favour of the evasive alternative of restoring artificially to white bread one at least of the valuable constituents it has lost in manufacture without impairing its whiteness. At first it was intended to do this by adding to white flour suitable quantities of two chemically prepared substances, one a vitamin and the other a calcium compound. Recently the synthetic vitamin only has been indicated as the proposed addition. This seems a clumsy and unnecessary concession to sentiment, involving considerable expenditure. It has been widely critised and regarded as “faking” bread. An eminent physician, Sir Ernest Graham Little, while condemning the proposal on general grounds, also questions its efficacy. Why first remove a natural constituent of wheat in making flour and then afterwards, at a cost, add to the flour this constituent artificially manufactured: He presents a convincing case for the use of wholemeal bread. With regard to the argument that some people dislike wholemeal bread and find it less easy to digest, it may be doubted whether many of them have eaten true wholemeal. “Brown” breads, including bread made with coarse ground wheat or bran and also several varieties of “brown” bread sold under largely advertised names, are almost everywhere procurable at higher prices than white bread. Fine wholemeal bread as well as flour is less easy to find. Large numbers of people eat very little bread, and it is therefore of small importance to them whether it is wholemeal or white. They consume far less than the three‐quarters of a pound a day included in Sir William Bragg's basal diet and make up for it with other foods which they can afford to buy. A really nutritious bread chiefly concerns the poorer classes, who eat much more bread than those better off. For the poor the substitution of wholemeal bread for white is a matter of far‐reaching importance. It has been stated that in many places wholemeal is dearer than white, but inquiries in the trade suggest that this is not as it should be, apart from “fancy” brown breads. As has been pointed out, the Ministry of Food, confronted with alternatives, apparently favour the introduction of “faked” white bread rather than the adoption of wholemeal. There is, however, a medium course. In this country we have come to recognise the “inevitability of gradualness,” and the medium course would meet present needs and might lead to the voluntary adoption of all that is desired.— It has been found that the admixture with fine ground wholemeal flour of about 10 per cent. of white flour makes a light coloured, very palatable, and digestible bread of good texture. Its nutritive value is very little less than that of full wholemeal bread; in fact a rather larger proportion of white flour would be permissible. The mixed flour is quite satisfactory for rolls, scones and cakes.” If an admixture of the kind suggested would overcome the prejudice against wholemeal bread and render it palatable to those people who dislike the ordinary wholemeal bread, there would seem to be a very strong case for adopting such a suggestion rather than first to remove a natural constituent of wheat and subsequently, at a cost, artificially add to the flour the constituent which has been removed in the manufacture of the flour.