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The question of violence in hunter-gatherer society has animated philosophical debates since at least the seventeenth century. Steven Pinker has sought to affirm that civilization, is superior to the state of humanity during its long history of hunting and gathering. The purpose of this paper is to draw upon a series of recent studies that assert a baseline of primordial violence by hunters and gatherers. In challenging this position the author draws on four decades of ethnographic and historical research on hunting and gathering peoples.

At the empirical heart of this question is the evidence pro- and con- for high rates of violent death in pre-farming human populations. The author evaluates the ethnographic and historical evidence for warfare in recorded hunting and gathering societies, and the archaeological evidence for warfare in pre-history prior to the advent of agriculture.

The view of Steven Pinker and others of high rates of lethal violence in hunters and gatherers is not sustained. In contrast to early farmers, their foraging precursors lived more lightly on the land and had other ways of resolving conflict. With little or no fixed property they could easily disperse to diffuse conflict. The evidence points to markedly lower levels of violence for foragers compared to post-Neolithic societies.

This conclusion raises serious caveats about the grand evolutionary theory asserted by Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and others. Instead of being “killer apes” in the Pleistocene and Holocene, the evidence indicates that early humans lived as relatively peaceful hunter-gathers for some 7,000 generations, from the emergence of Homo sapiens up until the invention of agriculture. Therefore there is a major gap between the purported violence of the chimp-like ancestors and the documented violence of post-Neolithic humanity.

This is a critical analysis of published claims by authors who contend that ancient and recent hunter-gatherers typically committed high levels of violent acts. It reveals a number of serious flaws in their arguments and use of data.

Designing management education and development programmes for developing countries raises difficult questions concerning the role of the local culture in the content of the programmes. This issue is examined in the content of the Indonesian culture. The results of a survey of technical managers lead to recommendations and provide first‐hand commentary.

Drawing on the six-dimensional framework of the Anholt-GfK Nation Brands Index (NBI), the purpose of this paper takes a government-to-business (G2B) perspective of international marketing by shedding light on how governments (as sellers) can harness their nations’ brand image to attract businesses (as buyers) to invest in the country.

Using Korea as context, this study interviewed Korea-based foreign multinational companies (MNCs) to elucidate how nation brand had influenced their FDI decisions to establish R&D centres in Korea. Purposive sampling identified 36 MNCs from diverse countries and industries that had set up R&D centres within the last decade. Individual in-depth interviews probed the MNCs’ views of Korea’s nation brand in regards to their FDI decisions. Recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed for common themes.

Five key thematic attributes of Korea’s nation brand emerged: rigid labour market, pro-FDI government, Chaebols’ dominance, strong nationalism and rapid industrialisation. These attributes relate to NBI’s dimensions of people, governance, investment/immigration, culture/heritage and exports, respectively. The dimensions impacted Korea’s nation brand differently.

This study contributes to nation branding research by applying the Anholt-GfK NBI to empirically investigate nation brand’s influence on attracting business investments at a macro-G2B level. The findings are particularly useful in guiding government policy-makers and trade organisations on running nation-brand promotions and marketing campaigns for FDIs. The findings will also benefit foreign businesses who are considering injecting capital investments into a country.

We propose a generic algorithm for numerically accurate likelihood evaluation of a broad class of spatial models characterized by a high-dimensional latent Gaussian process and non-Gaussian response variables. The class of models under consideration includes specifications for discrete choices, event counts and limited-dependent variables (truncation, censoring, and sample selection) among others. Our algorithm relies upon a novel implementation of efficient importance sampling (EIS) specifically designed to exploit typical sparsity of high-dimensional spatial precision (or covariance) matrices. It is numerically very accurate and computationally feasible even for very high-dimensional latent processes. Thus, maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of high-dimensional non-Gaussian spatial models, hitherto considered to be computationally prohibitive, becomes feasible. We illustrate our approach with ML estimation of a spatial probit for US presidential voting decisions and spatial count data models (Poisson and Negbin) for firm location choices.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.