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THE British Motor Corporation has taken an important step in setting up a new centre to give a thorough training in modern management and techniques to many of its own people. Of course, Haseley Manor, the Corporation's staff college for almost ten years, has done much to weld together the constituent companies which make up the parent body and it created a climate of good management during a period of rapid growth.

THERE have been official links for the past twelve years between the Institute of Incorporated Work Study Technologists and Time and Motion Study. Many of its members have been valued contributors to our pages and the Institute has had editorial space for its news.

MUCH has been written about industrial engineering, especially in regard to American practice, but a good deal of confusion still exists about the whole subject.

Words like Participation tend to be labels stuck on generalities, signifying nothing. They are used as verbal bromides by publicists anxious to cover harsh realities with an attractive veneer. As a rule, once they have served their purpose, they are conveniently forgotten.

IN A RECENT issue of New Scientist a letter was from a graduate (or should it be graduette, for she was a girl) who said she was writing on behalf of many unemployed graduates; and she posed a ‘Catch 22’ query. What she wanted to know how anyone could obtain the experience needed to gain a job if no one will give such a person a job to get the experience?

WE desire to draw special attention to an article appearing in this issue, entitled “Materials Handling and Work Study”—it is of special significance to production engineers. And the reason for this special significance is, not only that production engineers tend to neglect this most important field of industrial activity, but also that they show an appalling lack of “know‐how” in the attainment of efficient materials handling procedures.

FOR SOME YEARS there has been a tendency for the number of industrial workers to decline and that of clerical staffs to increase.

A NEW word is being thrown at management from every direction. It is Participation. Just what does it mean, what does it entail? To many board members it means little but a confounded nuisance. Not only in private or public companies; also some of the nationalised industries To workers it can mean many different things: the realisation of a dream; or a nightmare. For the fact must be faced: participation in management and direction must entail participation in responsibility. So it is sharing blame as well as grabbing credit. Unfortunately even apportioning blame doesn't keep a sinking company afloat; and the end result is the same whether the inexpert direction came from one end of the industry or the other. Inefficiency has to be paid for by bitter experience.

BEFORE the war Japanese industry concentrated on the production of large quantities of cheap articles. Today it is so quality‐conscious that every week there is a Government broadcast to the whole nation to stress to workers and management the fact that quality control is the business of everybody. The six countries which comprise the Common Market are equally pressing ahead with the same subject, intent upon supplying the customer with what he requires at the price he is ready to pay.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how working university students in Ghana are able to combine work and study, and the effect of this on their academic performance.

An exploratory survey method is used to collect data from 360 working students randomly selected from four universities in Accra, Ghana. The study employs the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r²) to test two hypotheses and both are affirmed by the results.

It is found that combining schooling with work results in less time for studies which negatively affects academic performance. Again, difficulty in finding time for studies due to work requirements ranks the highest, and finally, students receive slightly better support from their academic institutions than from their employers.

The study focussed only on perspectives from working students in Ghana. The dimension of employers and officials of academic institutions was not investigated.

The findings imply that to achieve sustainable development in the tertiary education sector and even in industry, all stakeholders – universities, policymakers, employers, students, etc. – must find practical ways to assist these students to combine work and study.

The study bridges the empirical gap of this critical phenomenon in the Ghanaian context. It will inform government and corporate policy on higher-level skill development among the workforce, and also tertiary institutions on how to address the needs of the critical mass of working students.