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In this review it is intended firstly to set out the available statistical evidence on differences in the level and character of work stoppages due to industrial disputes in developed market economies, and secondly to review the available literature on the reasons for such international differences.

According to officially published statistics, there began in the UK during 1979 some 2,080 stoppages of work due to industrial disputes, involving 4.584 million workers and resulting in 29.474 million working days lost (Department of Employment Gazette, 1980, p. 874). The purpose of this article is to summarise some of the main developments which have occurred over recent years in the economic analysis of strike activity and to illustrate some of the insights provided by economic theories of the collective bargaining process and its breakdown. We begin with a brief survey of the literature which provides a discussion of its major findings and of the limitations of existing studies. In subsequent sections, some basic theoretical concepts are introduced and after a brief discussion of some important elements of bargaining theory these are used in the construction of an alternative model of the breakdown of the collective bargaining process and the occurrence of strikes. In the penultimate section, this alternative model is tested against UK data and in the final section the main findings are summarised.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

A number of time‐series regression analyses of British strike activity have appeared in recent years. These analyses are the lineal descendants of the “strike cycle” models which have a long history in the United States, although most of the British literature springs from the more sophisticated bargaining models which began to appear in the 1960s.

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.

Reactions to dissatisfaction in the employment situation take disparate forms. Despite the efforts of several branches of the social sciences little progress has been made in understanding the phenomenon of industrial conflict. An adequate theory of conflict should be capable of explaining at least the following three crucial aspects. The first concerns the sources of conflict — more specifically, the extent to which conflict should be seen as an endemic or a latent feature of the employment relationship. The second concerns the mode of grievance expression adopted, in particular, whether the various modes represent alternative or complementary forms. In addition, there is the problem of clearly delineating the probable effectiveness and costs of alternative expressive forms under various conditions. Thirdly, there is a need to address the supposed problem of explaining the rationality of acts of industrial protest.

Some may think that a practical attitude to social implications would be “Automation and robotics are part of ‘progress’. Progress is inevitable. So let's stop all this talk about social implications and get on with the job of developing, designing and installing more robots.”

It is the author's view that industrial conflict arises in the specification and interpretation of the labour contract, whether this be at shop floor or national level.