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In Australia most manufacturing firms are force to make at least two kinds of location decisions, one involving the merits of the six capital cities, and the other based on variables operating inside the metropolitan areas. This paper is concerned with the behavior of the individual manufacturing firm when making the letter decision; empirical data have been obtained from three case study areas in Sydney. There is purposeful economic behavior by firms in locating, the most important influences being closeness to product market and the cost of land. The spatial effect is an arrangement of manufacturers strongly oriented to the CBD and to centrally located transport terminals. In a theoretical context, the neglect of rent considerations is a serious weakness in traditional manufacturing locating theory. The growing ability of firms to substitute among production factors also has important locational effects.

The article cites a study which concentrates on a simplification of the general design problem of comparing one specified information system, an information structure, with an alternative. The author states that the review of the literature indicates that research methodology for this question is incomplete, especially with respect to empirical verification of hypotheses, with respect to the development of empirical measures of the usefulness of changes in the information system, and with respect to inclusion of the real decision maker into the analysis. He explains that a main purpose of this study is to develop and carry out empirical means of measuring and comparing the effects of changing the design of an information system.

The rationalization of industrial management has limited the role of innovation and encouraged the substitution of the concept of manager for that of entrepreneur. The author shows that the distinction is still useful if entrepreneurship is redefined in terms of formal authority. This requires the replacement of Schumpeter's classical emphasis upon innovation with Weber's concept of the entrepreneur as the source of all formal authority within the organization. A survey of German management suggests that Weber's definition and the author's concepts are operational. Other bases of differentiation such as decision making, functional role, and charismatic qualities are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preliminary findings indicate that businessmen often fail to plan exchange relationships completely, and seldom use legal sanctions to adjust these relationships or to settle disputes. Planning and legal sanctions are often unnecessary and may have undesirable consequences. Transactions are planned and legal sanctions are used when the gains are thought to out-weigh the costs. The power to decide whether the gains from using contract outweigh the costs will be held by individuals having different occupational roles. The occupational role influences the decision that is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The firm of the classical theory is managed by a single person, the entrepreneur. He has complete knowledge of his present and future environment and is efficient in the special sense that he chooses plans maximizing his profit. More recent studies deal with a firm that is led by one or more persons. Each of them decides on the basis of partial information and the decision may or may not be efficient. The action of the decision-maker given the environment, determines his future state. Therefore, depending on the particular criterion applied-profit, sales, status, survival or power or any combination of these-action and environment jointly determine the utility or pay-off. Under uncertainty, the firm has to determine not an optimal action but an optimal decision rule. Information is not costless. A firm which, not contented with a rough idea of averages, bases its decision on a very close continual study of various markets, has to pay for it. Cost is also attached to each decision rule.

The article focuses on the executive decisions in the top level management. The task of management has been spelled out with great finesse by many economists and in language which those who do most of the business managing for the country might not always understand. The concepts of marginal productivity, may or may not be a part of the intellectual equipment of today's speakers. Each is, however, equipped with a record of unusual experience and effectiveness in management and in the making of executive decisions at the top level. Economist Alfred Marshall said that the greater part of the business of the modern world--the task of so directing production that a given effort--may be most effective in supplying human wants has to be broken up and given into the hands of a specialized body of employers, or to use a more general term, of business men. The article consists of various speakers from the top level management. They are lawyer and business executives and president of organizations.