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The adequacy of logistics within the context of the Third World business environment is evaluated. Problems facing practitioners and educators are identified and suggestions to enhance logistics practice and education in Third World countries are offered.

Consumer behavior in international markets is a topic that is still not well understood. Proposes a framework, called the A‐B‐C‐D paradigm. Suggests that a marketer examine four stages – access, buying behavior, consumption characteristics, and disposal – covering the entire spectrum of consumer behaviors with respect to a product/service. The paradigm is universally applicable to any particular culture or country of interest. Since there has been no comprehensive examination of consumer behavior in eastern Europe and the Third World, focusses on using the A‐B‐C‐D paradigm to gain a better insight into consumer behavior in these countries. Offers recommendations to companies wishing to market their products in these countries.

Considers the factors hindering the transfer of information technology and subsequent automation of information management systems in developing countries. The same inhibiting factors which face conventional technology transfer, are identified for information technology transfer. Highlights the failure of policy makers in the Third World to grasp the importance of information and to plan for its collection and management: criticizes the theory of appropriate technology as seeming to aid instead of potential aiding agencies. Stresses the need for positive policies towards information technology in both aiding agencies and recipient governments and identifies the most common obstacles hindering introduction and management of information technology in developing countries.

After travelling and living for several years in the third world, I have now returned to America. My journey has taken me through the Andean countries of South America and then to Egypt. From Cairo I travelled East Africa and the Middle East. Recently I've spent seven months crossing Asia, with short trips into mainland China on my return home. During this time I tried to get as close to the local people as possible. I was fortunate in being able to experience much of what life is like for the majority of the earth's population.

Attempts to trace the process of internationalization of production since the late nineteenth century, which has laid down the path and pattern of modern economic growth in the Third World. Industrial capitalism emerged historically in the UK with the Industrial Revolution, and was subsequently transplanted first to western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan and then to the rest of the world. In this process, capitalism has released and developed the world’s productive forces. Today, it has achieved an unlimited capacity to produce, diversify, improve and exploit both human and natural resources. As a consequence, the world is becoming richer in capital accumulation and material goods but, paradoxically, poorer, with increasing human miseries and environmental deterioration. In a capitalist system of production, the latter is an inevitable consequence of the success achieved in the former.

To provide a systems explanation of world wars as civilizational phenomena with a special focus on the cold war defined as an interaction war between two parties which cannot communicate with each other.

As a theoretical framework for this analysis an elaborated version of Luhmann's systems theory is used which discusses the relationship between systems and media. The method is defined as a third‐order cybernetics which entails first‐order observations, second‐order observation of observers, and finally their mutual observations as being observed.

Identifies the east‐west ideological conflict as a conflict within the world system of society by which the system is at war with itself. This “self” is considered as comprising two parts: self and other. The one is identified as an autopoietic system and the other as an allopoietic system, each struggling for the status of system and for the transformation of the other into its medium. The traditional understanding of the history of the European civilization as having one single ancestor is challenged.

It is not an exhaustive analysis but rather an outline of a theory whose purpose is to define the source of international and intranational confrontations.

The approach can be developed further and used for the analysis of the war on terrorism and the relationship between political system and social movements.

The paper offers an innovative systems perspective on world wars with a special focus on the cold war which promises to overcome the difficulties which their analysis with traditional sociological theories at present encounters.

The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical conjuncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global displacement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sovereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land, farming and food.

It has been generally assumed that, although there may be material costs to the entire world which result from any attempt to eliminate global poverty through development, the only costs associated with the continued existence of poverty are human ones, costs which are borne primarily by the poor themselves. This article is a review of the literature on development and resource use; its primary purpose is to investigate the extent to which analysts have tested this assumption—that is, the extent to which they have addressed the issue of the material costs engendered by the perpetuation of global poverty. Its conclusion is that no systematic analysis of this assumption has been conducted. However, there is a recognition of the resource costs of global poverty implicit in much of the literature on development and on resource use, and there is sufficient evidence to indicate that more detailed study of the relationship is warranted, since it is clear that the continued acceptance of global poverty entails significant costs for every member of the global community.

The Bandung Conference played a constructive role in mobilizing a movement against the bipolar hegemony of the post World War II period. This period, from Yalta (1945) to Malta (1989), can be characterized as an international neo-colonial regime in a post-colonial world. Despite political, economical and cultural differences, the Third World states represented at Bandung called for a counter hegemonic alliance based on the principles of peaceful coexistence (The Pancha Sila).¹ These principles enabled cooperation among the states and peoples of Asia and Africa. The Latin American states later joined this non-aligned movement. The principles of peaceful coexistence, which were first proclaimed by India and China, represented an imaginative reformulation of the modern Western framework of international systems established initially by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This new framework, which based cooperation among the recently independent states on the Western principles of national sovereignty, stressed mutual respect and benefit in place of the Westphalia premise of international anarchy.