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Among the factors contributing to competitiveness problems for many American firms is the presence of excessive and inaccurate self presentations and resulting defensive communication routines among managers in these firms. Suggestions are provided to identify and reduce conduct leading to these dysfunctional tendencies, but caution is urged in recognizing the difficulties and potential ethical dilemmas that may occur in trying to resolve these problems. Any discussion of future American competitiveness should involve global changes and economic patterns, national trade policies, and manufacturing and quality control. However, executives should also examine questionable managerial communication in firms.

Employers in the USA often use employment‐at‐will statements in the employment application process to minimize their vulnerability in post‐discharge litigation. Reports survey results of job seekers′ attitudes towards such statements. The findings suggest that applicants would prefer to join organizations that do not include employment‐at‐will statements in the application process and that job‐seekers′ perceptions of the greater risk involved, greater expectations of employees, and a lack of company concern regarding its employees would significantly influence their views of an employment‐at‐will organization.

Often associated with early stages of individual and organizational change is exploration of basic premisses or assumptions held by individuals. Management faculty could benefit from an increased awareness of epistemological and values assumptions that they and others are applying in their educational planning and classroom instructional choices. Multiparadigmatic qualitative research on the evolving field of management education itself might allow better understanding of these deeper, partially taken‐for‐ granted and important faculty assumptions. One potentially useful multiparadigmatic approach for qualitative research might include aspects of interpretive, critical and post‐structural/postmodern social inquiry. Results from such basic research, through publication in some forum or outlet in the management discipline, could be applied for reference and unfreezing purposes in faculty development/ change programmes at individual business colleges or management departments.

Ethical duties or obligations of HRM practitioners are questioned and explored. Differing conceptions of HRM ethical duties seem to have arisen from differing values assumptions and social constructions of the employment relationship. HRM education and development programs must do a better job of exposing students to these contrasting values assumptions as well as helping students develop the ethical change skills necessary to act more successfully upon their moral values and perceived ethical duties.

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.

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.

In his article “The Management of Schools in Ncw South Wales (1848–1886): Local Initiative Suppressed”, E. J. Payne has argued that “The distinctly centralised pattern of educational administration did not evolve but was deliberately imposed, acceded to, and perpetuated, by reasonable people with varied motives, but their compromise was such that it has restricted the exercise of local initiative and the development of local institutions”. The purpose of the present article is to understand Wilkins and his employers' administrative problems and decisions rather than to judge them. The complexity of the historical situation in which they found themselves, the range of their possible decisions, and their day to day dealings with teachers and Local Boards as contained in archival records form the basis of the story told. This is mainly a story of the failure of many of the Local Boards to fulfil their responsibilities and the assessment by the Central administrators of the circumstances of their educational enterprise in country areas. To illustrate the financial, administrative, and geographical problems facing both the central and the local Boards a case study which is both typical and a‐typical of Local Patron performance is presented.