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The public availability of detailed data from the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK allows an analysis of the publications cited in submissions to the Business and Management panel. Eighty per cent of the 9,942 publications submitted were journal articles. Submissions to the RAE can be scored in terms of the number of citations they make to journals that appear on various lists, such as the Financial Times list. The concentration of articles in a minority of journals, with 50% of all citations to just 126 journals, means that a core list of business and management journals can be compiled. The core list presented contains 562 journals out of the 1582 journal titles that were cited in Business and Management submissions. It includes all journals with more than two citations overall at least one citation in a 5*, 5 or 4 rated submission. It also includes all journals cited in the RAE from Starbuck’s ranked lists of journals and the Financial Times list.

The disputes between sociologically informed organization theory and organizational economics revolve around the relative importance of efficiency and power. The concepts of efficiency and power are clarified in this paper, with distinctions being made between subjectivist and essentialist versions of efficiency, and between institutional and processual perspectives on power. Economists have largely ignored sociologists' discussions of power. It is argued that if path dependency is allowed for then organizational economics may well be compatible with an institutional view of power. The main theme of the paper is that efficiency is no less of an ‘essentially contested concept’ than power.

SUMMARY This paper discusses the use of performance related pay (PRP) as a means of control over the relationship between effort and reward. Taking a critical perspective, it describes how the implementation of PRP in a UK-based electronics company has been used as a device to remove trade union influence in wage-setting arrangements and to effect changes in employee behaviour. The opinions of supervisors, line managers, personnel managers and shop-floor staff are discussed and the implications for management control are assessed. The paper concludes that from management's perspective the PRP system appears to have been a success, for it has in some cases ‘commercialized’ the relationship between effort and reward, and has pre-empted expressions of employee resistance.