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The article focuses on the task and prestige of supervisors on industries in Great Britain. There have been major changes in the tasks and prestige of the supervisor in industry in the past twenty years. These changes can be attributed to a number of different processes resulting from different causes. These processes include advancing technology and automation, increasing trade unionism of the shop floor, changes in top management philosophy, increasing standards of education of manual workers, increasing supply of college graduates into industry etc. This paper contains the results of empirical studies in a number of industries which were used to develop a method of identifying specific processes of change rather than vague directions of change. This will provide a more realistic and pragmatic approach to the problem than has been achieved previously. The material used in this paper which is presented is drawn from intensive interview programs of supervisory staff which were conducted in five factories in the period October 1969 to January 1972. The results of the study indicate that the supervisors were not involved in areas such as decision-making and planning which they had traditionally regarded as part of their job.

Manpower planning is no novelty in the Royal Navy. It has been accepted as a necessity for many years. Its roots lie far back in history. It began as soon as there was a need - as soon as naval careers replaced a policy of 'hire and fire'. The transition to a career Navy began towards the end of the 17th century and was largely completed by about 1850. The need to plan increased yet more after 1850 as the technical complexity of the Navy grew, and the need was further reinforced after the 1939-45 War when new social and economic conditions brought a real risk that the Navy would not be able to recruit all the men needed. The ability to plan depended on the development of an appropriate organization, and the availability of appropriate expertise and resources. In the early days, officer-planning could be done reasonably adequately with a few Navy Lists, a quill-pen and a mathematical mind. This process is still good enough for a few very small groups of naval personnel, but for the Navy as a whole, all the techniques of social and management sciences need to be brought to bear, and geared into an organization for effective decision-making. This paper attempts to describe the main features of the organization for planning and decision-making as it exists today. Readers who are familiar with the organization will note omissions. For example, except in this paragraph, there is no mention of the Defence Council or the Admiralty Board, or of the Second Sea Lord who is responsible for all naval personnel matters. The fact that there are levels of responsibility above and alongside those described - including, of course. Parliament - must be taken as read. The paper describes only the essential core of organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS paper is concerned with a phenomenon which is constantly encountered bur seldom analysed. An internal economy or diseconomy would be external but for the fact that in occurs within a given firm or organisation. Consideration of this question raises others: the nature of cross-subsidisation, the meaning of organisational economies of scale, the identification of marginal revenue and marginal cost within systems of economic activity, the importance of the institutional setting in identifying costs and benefits, the criteria applicable to the operations of nationalised industries and much else besides. All the problems to be discussed below have been referred to somewhere in modern economic literature. Such words as indivisibilities, complementarities, sub-optimisation, interdependencies, which do raise similar issues, are to be found in many a textbook, bur all too often figuratively or literally in footnotes. They are seldom woven into the fabric of analysis. Once mentioned, they are forgotten by author and student, and the analysis, the concept of an optimum, proceeds as if these modifying circumstances did not exist, or could be abstracted without serious loss of theoretical rigour or practical relevance. What, then, is cross-subsidisation ? What is its relationship to "internal economies" as here defined ? The belief in the irrationality of cross-subsidisation is based on the apparently elementary principle that a loss-making activity involves resource misallocation, in that, in a market economy, one can increase the national product and welfare by reallocating resources to a profitable use. it is believed that the temptation to subsidise losses out of profits within a corporation or nationalised industry ought therefore to be resisted. Such a temptation may be due to a desire for a quiet life; thus the closing of uneconomic pits might cause questions in Parliament of a protest march by miners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eight equation dynamic model of aggregate demand in the United Kingdom is estimated by a variety of methods which make different assumptions about, and provide different treatments of, the problems of simultaneity and serial correlation, the latter being both within and between equations. Although the system appears to perform quite well on conventional criteria, the alternative estimators reveal a number of misspecifications and demonstrate the sensitivity of the results to estimator choice. The paper also considers the methodological problems involved in estimating dynamic simultaneous equation models with possibly auto-correlated errors using seasonally unadjusted quarterly data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the codetermination and worker participation in management decision-making in Great Britain. Codetermination can come about by two different methods. One is the organic method through which codetermination grows naturally from the grass roots situation in any undertaking in response to the needs and wishes of all parties. The other method is the imposed legalistic approach which brings about codetermination through the setting up of legally-required statutory bodies designed to promote it. Of these statutory management organs the two most important are the supervisory board and the works council. Moreover, the other minor codetermination organs are the various committees of the works councils and the supervisory boards. This being the case, it becomes an important matter to develop the capacity within companies to achieve joint decision-making and worker participation objectives by non-statutory means. These internal means can be described as organic, signifying that they grow from the grass roots by a gradual and natural process of evolution. The word organic also implies that this growth has to be cultivated. The view is that it is quite inappropriate to impose the form of joint decision-making from outside by law or even by national agreements. Part of the joint decision-making should be the original and basic decision on what form joint decision-making should take and the areas it should choose to tackle. The objective is the most important thing and the training material is important only so far as it promotes the attainment of the objective.

The article discusses the National Economic Development Office (N.E.D.O.). The authors feel that N.E.D.O. is paving the way for future forms of organizational adaptation, as it is an organization with several constituencies operating with powerful social organizations. The article offers a speculative, behavioral interpretation of N.E.D.O.'s creation and adaptation. The causal factors leading to the development of new social organizations, many of which are believed to have influenced N.E.D.O.'s development, are discussed.

The article focuses on the methodology and terms behind successful long term planning in Great Britain. The article suggests three areas on which this planning is based: analysis and forecasting for long-term decision making, analysis of individual steps necessary in developing plans, and research into the particular practices and experience of individual companies. The article comments on long term planning as it relates to operational planning, project planning, and strategic planning. It mentions the background of executives responsible for long ranged planning, and suggests that the majority of long ranged planning arises from an organization's finance group, and that the role of the long range planner is often combined with that of chief accountant or finance director.

The article looks at some of the general characteristics held in common by directors of companies in Great Britain. The majority of research on company directors has been sociological and focused on the education and career history of directors as a social class. The author feels that educational and social background is less relevant to the practical function of directors in the management of their companies than are their industrial and commercial experience and the area of their professional and academic training.

The article focuses on the work activities of industrial middle management. It presents information from surveys given to middle managers of companies in Great Britain concerning how they utilize their time. It examines how the knowledge and skills required for effective management could be assessed, and to which extent managers work activities differ and are similar. It comments on differences in management in companies of differing styles and production technologies. It states that management is comprised of five activities: commanding, controlling, forecasting, organizing, and planning.

The article discusses the works of the Medical Research Council's Industrial Psychology Research Unit in Great Britain during 1958-1967. A number of publications relating to the earlier Conditional Aid projects appeared at the beginning of this period. These concern communication and decision-making in industry and incentive payment systems. Also within the general field of motivation a number of studies were made of the practice of overtime, which had now become an accepted feature of the working week. Confirming evidence was provided that individual differences in overtime hours were related to family and financial responsibility. The question of employee choice in working hours was also examined in the context of working in shifts. In the light of increasing complexity in the information presented in the form of visual displays, perceptual problems were also studied from the viewpoint of the road user. Special attention was given to advance road direction signs of the type placed before road junctions.

This article examines some of the ways in which the work of Mark Huish, who was General Manager of the London & North Western Railway from 1846 to 1858, encouraged the development of improved techniques in railway management. Huish's personal contribution to management accounting practice deserves close investigation. The fact that he was at all concerned with matters other than those relating strictly to the operation of the trains places him above all contemporary executives in the railway industry, both in Britain and United States. In his time, the London & North Western created a regular reporting system, exemplified by Huish's own monthly reports to the Board of Directors which augmented the detailed statistical information essential to effective decision-making. Moreover, his reports on specific problems of management were not only a guide for his own company, but were often of theoretical value for the industry as a whole. Huish's experience with the London & North Western was an important chapter in both railway and business history. He had shown how the professional manager, acquainted with the details of the business, could participate in all facets of managerial control. His interests in accounting, costing, statistics, technology, and organization were all part of an important reaction to the problems of large scale business.

The British Mineworkers' union combines perhaps the highest degree of local administrative autonomy in Great Britain, a carryover from a previously federal form, with national decision-making on industrial and political policy. The decision-making processes have entailed a high level of electoral opposition over a prolonged period of time, and have resulted in a sharing of important posts among different political tendencies. This article will attempt to show how the distribution and regulation of power in the Mineworkers has resulted another important exception to the iron law of oligarchy. The explanation will be primarily in terms of formal organizational factors, rather than a bypassing of the official structure. The Mineworkers' combination of decentralized administration, national decision-making and democracy may continue to be viable for some time, even in the face of the technological advances in the industry and the contraction of the labor force now well under way. Its rarity elsewhere may be explainable in terms of sociological or historical trends with little inherent relationship to organizational effectiveness.

In 1945 Great Britain held its first General Election since 1935, and for the first time the British Gallup Poll was given an opportunity to carry out surveys concerned with predicting the outcome of a major political battle. It succeeded admirably in this task, and this success undoubtedly played its part in encouraging the use of public opinion polls in four separate areas. First, it stimulated a handful of more enterprising academic political scientists at three English universities to use polls to study voting behavior, not with a view to predicting the outcome of an election, but in order to discover "what makes the elector tick." Second, the News Chronicle-Gallup Poll success quickly encouraged at least one other publication to commission and publish its own surveys. A third development in those early postwar years was that some advertisers and some advertising agencies began to widen considerably the scope of their consumer surveys and to develop an interest in the "why" of popular behavior as well as in the "how." This was of considerable importance when the Conservative Party began to employ an advertising agency and turned, almost fortuitously, to one that had played a prominent part in the postwar expansion of market research. And finally, the highly, and properly, advertised success of the General Election Gallup Polls helped one or two highly placed civil servants to justify the use of public opinion polls to measure the effectiveness of the Labour Government's propaganda and the success of its appeals to the electorate to raise productivity, restrain consumption, use the National Health Service sensibly, and help to expand exports. This article discusses the use of public opinion surveys by the conservatives and the labour party.

Almost all universities with accounting major programs are engaged in a sweeping overhaul of their curricula. The subject matter of each course is being carefully studied to determine how well it fulfills the objectives of the course. The objectives themselves are under close scrutiny. With this attention to the course objectives and content it is perhaps a particularly appropriate time to have a look at new developments in methods of teaching accounting. Significant developments are taking place in both methods of teaching and supplemental aids available for the use of the student. Some of the more important areas warrant our consideration. Business games, at their best, are simulations of business conditions which require a sequence of decisions from the players. Results of these decisions are fed back to the players through periodic financial and other reports, and new decisions are then required. Only incomplete information is available and decisions must be based upon anticipation of the probable result of both their own team action and that of competing teams.