Major British private companies

with which to provide themselves with an education related to their tastes, their aspirations, and also to the image which they have built up of life in society and of their role within that society’. Moreover, the higher education cycle is envisaged as terminating by the latest at the age of 20. This would give the basic skills which would enable students to undertake professional training and return when necessary to be rebriefed at stated intervals with new technology and knowledge. Summarixed in terms of percentage the authors conclude that whereas thirty years ago leas than 5 per cent of the appropriate age group went to universities in thirty years time it will have reached 30-40 per cent to say nothing of a greatly increased proportion of the adult population returning for retraining. All these, of course, rest on a number of assumptions summed up by Gaston Deurinck by saying, ‘Throughout our study, we are wagering on man, on his will to give himself and others the masons or the motivations for living, for acting and for accepting constraints which a higher and continued education imposes both aa concerns the social function. he will have to ful5 and the unremitting, lifelong pursuit of education that will be demanded of him’. The seventh volume, however, concerned with primary education, is a far more di5cult task. It contains two serious omissions vital to any speculation about the future of primary education. The tirst is the absence of any speculation of class differential birth rates--it is already obvious in Britain that the class fertility curve is no longer skewed in favour of classes 4 and 5 but since 1961 baa become virtually a shallow U curve between classes 1 and 5. The spread of birth control techniques amongst classes 4 and 5 with the consequent smaller families will undoubtedly have its impact on the size of working class families and their possible embourgeoisification. The second omission is any kind of consideration of the Delphi published in 1969 by the British G5ce of Health Economics which envisages psycho-pharmaceutical aids to understanding. Certainly the decline in birth rate in Britain, will, if it stabilizes, enable some aspects of the scenarios envisaged by De Bartolomeis to eventuate. As he sees it, the school will be baaed on laboratories and operated on the basis of group activity and team teaching: already common, as the authors admit, in many English primary schools. It is hard to accept his contention that ‘almost every teacher’ rejects the link between clinical and educational psychology: the intluence of child guidance clinics, the general exfoliation of autobiography and the increasing accent on perceptiveness in teacher training does not warrant this limited context. It provides us with a reacension of recent tindings in order to point the way forward in three curricula areas in the primary school: mathematics, social studies and artistic/creative activity. Here they accept the extrapolation of the present revolutionary changes and one has no serious quarrel with their conclusions. It is pleasing to see Antonio Santoni Rugiu’s acceptance of Erikson’s challenging idea that-‘The playing child, then poses a problem: whoever does not work shall not play. Therefore, to be tolerant of the child’s play the adult must invent theories which show either that childhood play is really work, or that it does not count. The most popular theory and the easiest on the observer is that the child is nobody yet, and that the nonsense of his play reflects it’. Discovering identity may well be an even greater problem as families shrink and smother love intensifies. But then Volume 7 was written entirely by Italian academics, where the size of the family is governed by considerations not quite as manifest as in North West Europe. W. H. G. A~MY~AQE Division of Education The University Shetheld

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Major British Private Companies, by Tmr Fntmcu~ ANALYSISGROUP, Gower Economic Publications, Epping (1974), 150 pp. E29.00 (softback). Major British Private Companies is a useful reference work providing in one place a compendium of basic financial statistics on 60 of Britain’s largest private firms ranging in size from the E7OOm plus turnover of George Weston Holdings, down to the LlOm turnover of Sir Isaac Pitman. Coupled with basic balance sheet data the survey also provides brief details as to the nature of the business each ftrm operates, a summary of major shareholders, a list of directors including other directorships and pertinent remarks extracted from recent reports. For each company basic balance sheet data is provided in standardized form over a 4 year period up to, and includina. 1972 or early 1973. This basic data is suonlemented by the-provision of the main financial ratios, and at the end of the book a series of interflrm comparisons tables are provided. While the latter are interesting they are clearly less useful than tables showing how the private companies compared with their neatest quoted rivals in similar industriea, but this would have been beyond the scope of the title of the book. The volume may be of some value to planners interested in making acquisitions from amongst the ranks of private companies, but only as a tirst cut. Further, such planners could extract similar information from Companies House returns, since the statistics are, for acquisition purposes, out of date by at least one financial year. For library reference, however, the work is useful in providing details not adequately covered elsewhere even if the price is rather expensive. Daronr F. CHANNON Manchester Business School.

Managerial Planning, a bi-monthly publication of the Planning Executives Institute, Ohio, May/June and July/ August 1974, each 40pp. (softbacks). The 6rst of these issues contains a paper by Fulmer and Rue which extends the investigations of Ansoff ef al. into the benefits of LRP. Their preliminary analysis covering 386 firms shows that there is no simple, across the board relationship between completeness of LRP and financial performance. ‘The most consistent results appear in the service industries where the non-planners out-performed the planners in all cases, and in the durable industries where the planners out-performed the non-planners in all cases’. Obviously, the authors say, such variables as timing, luck, and the immeasurable quality of ‘overall management competence have a more direct relationship on a tirm’s performance success than the formality of its LRP activity’. Amongst the other papers, most of which deal with specialized areas of planning and financial management, a paper by Andre van Damm (‘Can Corporate Planning Invent the Future of the Thud World’-nresented originally to the Third International Conference on Corporate Planning in Brussels, 1973) is likely to interest wider-thinking planners. The paper is in the now well known style of the author and tries ‘to sensitize the rich nations to the needs of the develop ing countries’. The problems posed by the fact that the latter contain the largest fraction of the world population as well as that of potential raw materials, are dealt with on the baais that Third World Governments and private enterprise should synchronize their plans. The author has seven proposals to this end-the creation of employment, improvement of the balance of payments, adaptive technology and manpower training, help by the ‘multi-nationals’, integration of activities both national and regional, food preservation and finally the integration of the Third World activities into the world economy. The second issue of Managerial Planning contains nine short papers on specific sectors of planning-The Planning Process, a recital of well established sub-stages, Sales

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