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Dr T M Husband suggests some basic reforms in the planning of management courses.

The ever‐increasing demand for rationalization of manufacturing activities requires closer co‐operation and integration between design and production planning. Since the impact on the overall cost of production of designing a product for ease of assembly was realized, feedback from assembly planning to the design process has become important for improving the design. Traditionally, planning for assembly takes place after the design of the product has been completed. Often it proves necessary to modify a design, because some aspect is not particularly convenient or efficient under the available assembly facilities. However, considerable time and cost savings can be made by making assembly‐planning information available to design engineers, so that they can take account of assembly factors when designing a product.

Legislation is being prepared in both Canada and the USA to force a new social reality on the workplace in which pay systems will be made equitable. The vehicle will be job evaluation. This article details, in practical terms, how job evaluation techniques can be used as a means of social‐reorientation towards a new era of industrial relations.

This paper demonstrates the application of three productivity measurement techniques—added value, productivity costing and total factor productivity. It takes the form of a case study within a British engineering firm producing high precision products in medium/large batches. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed and the empirical results for a five year period analysed. The main conclusion reached is that no single measurement technique is sufficiently comprehensive to meet all requirements.

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.

In the past few years the Science Research Council has encouraged a small number of Universities and Polytechnics to design and launch post‐graduate engineering courses in total technology. This article describes the workings of the new Loughborough University total technology PhD programme in particular, and discusses some aspects of the total technology concept in general.

IT was only a very few years ago that computers came into fashion, as it were. Firms, unfortunately denied the benefit of foresight, vied with each other in being the first in their respective fields to own a computer.

The design and administration of payment schemes present difficult problems for many large manufacturing organisations. These problems have been compounded in recent years by external factors such as unfavourable economic circumstances, high inflation rates and the constraints of government legislation and pay guidelines. It appears, however, that relatively little effort has been devoted by companies to assessing the effectiveness of their payment systems in the face of these pressures. This article is intended as a contribution to the development of appropriate methods of assessment which could be applied within organisations, using commonly available accounting and performance data.

This paper supports project based research and agrees with the view that it is impossible to draw a boundary around a group of subsystems in the real world so as to research only these. All aspects of the manufacturing system including strategy, management style and organisational structure are involved potentially. Project based research has produced little in the way of generalisable results, and in some cases is difficult to distinguish from management consultancy. What needs to be understood better are the methodologies of a general nature. The main movements are likely to be away from calculation towards data analysis and definition, and away from mathematical models towards formal descriptive models.

IT IS a widely admitted fact that a large proportion of inventions come from Britain. We have always been an innovative group of nations (for we are not referring to England alone. Scotland and Wales have done more than their share,) but far too often the exploitation has enriched firms and countries far removed from these islands.