Search results

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.