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Investigates customer attitudes towards the direct marketing strategies employed by banks in relation to how attitudes toward the marketing media used and response channels influence the customer’s intention to purchase. Marketing media include mail promotion, telephone, and e‐mail promotions. Response channels include mail order, telephone and e‐mail orders. A total of 153 customers of bank services and products completed a survey questionnaire on their attitudes. Research indicates that customers generally evince a negative attitude toward banks using direct marketing strategies. They have mixed feelings about response channels, and low intention to purchase as an outcome of direct marketing. Purchase intention is significantly influenced by attitudes toward direct marketing media rather than response channels. Attaching promotions to communications a customer is expecting to receive can strengthen purchase intention. No demographic differences indicate that attitudes may have a stronger association with purchase intention. Revealed dilemmas faced by bank managers, marketers and researchers.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Tourism may be described variously because of its “close” relationships with other social sciences, including economics, politics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology and even law and statistics. As per Wahab (1971) tourism is a “system” that relates to the sociosphere and is a complex combination of interrelated industries and trades. Although it would be very difficult to describe tourism under one definition due to its many facets, a clear concept and a precise definition of the terms related to the phenomenon of tourism is required before we proceed with the analysis of determinants and motivations of tourism in the world economy.

This article attempts to examine the impact that traditional island cultural events have on tourism development in some of the West Indian (Commonwealth Caribbean) islands, how national tourist boards and hotels use these mega‐events for promotional purposes, how these cultural events are looked upon by the tourists themselves, and the possible dilution of the basic traditions and cultures of the territories if they are abused for tourist gain only.

When we say that a tourist agency is an indispensable participant on a tourist market, we have just stated a fact accepted by both tourist theory and practice. Yet, there are, relatively speaking, few researches and analyses of tourist agencies work, still less such that would try to scientifically deal with the problems of a tourist agency's operation. With this lack of tourist technical literature in the field of the agency's role in tourism, the absence of theoreticians and those who work in practice can easily be noticed especially in area of sales on a tourist market. It is difficult to answer the question why it is so, nor can we enter into such discussions now. The aim of this contribution is to point out the importance of a process of the agency's work and give arguments for it.

THE NINETIENTH ANNIVERSARY of Sean O'Casey's birth and the recent acquisition by the New York Public Library of the papers of his literary estate afford an opportunity to view, once more, the remarkable achievements of a dramatist of universal distinction. A passionate believer in the cause of man's dignity and freedom, whose plays touched off riots and sparked off controversies, whose works wrung the beauty and passion and heartaches from the experiences of everyday life and ‘whose lips were royally touched’—to quote J. C. Trewin's recent colourful phrase—O'Casey was, with Shaw, one of the few incomparably great playwrights of the present century. Not without his detractors: one critic's jibe that O'Casey is ‘an extremely overrated writer with two or three competent Naturalist plays to his credit, followed by a lot of ideological bloat and embarrassing bombast’ is the kind of factitious reaction one expects from critically immature minds. Shaw's plays, at first, were slighted, but they survived, and today are flourishing; predictably, O'Casey's will enjoy a similar fate. O'Casey is a world dramatist in the widest sense, because he viewed the theatre in the same epic way as Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans.

Subsonic jet transport has been with us now for about a quarter of a century. There are young people starting their careers today who have never known a sky without jet noise and the V‐wing silhouette of a passenger carrying aircraft. Indeed, it must seem to them as permanent a feature of our world as the steam train between the world wars to people such as myself; the big difference is, as I hope to show, that air transport has not yet reached a development plateau.

‐ One of the consequences of the present long period of economic depression, which has been felt with particular severity by most Third World countries, has been a necessary critical reassessement of many development strategies. Especially in Africa, the balance sheet between efforts and results has not been very encouraging. The massive industrialization programmes and the large projects of the last three decades have neither helped to achieve a more competitive production nor have introduced widespread prosperity, as hoped. Gradually the accent is now shifting toward new “soft options”, one of which is tourism. We remember that only 15–20 years ago many African governments or international development agencies were still considering tourism as a marginal economic activity, to be left to poor nations without much prospects for industrialization. Since then much has changed and ‐ especially in the present post‐industrial economies ‐ tourism and the whole gamut of other leisure industries have become one of the most dynamic fields of expansion, even in the developing world.