About this issue

All three technical articles in this issue are related to aspects of organization and human relations in Research, Development, and Engineering (R, D, &E). This is in contrast to most of our issues which contain a mixture of such articles and those related to economic-analytic aspects of R, D, &E management. Two of the articles — Dewhirst et al. and Purchase/Cotton — are in the mainstream of research and writing about the organization of R, D, &E, and the one by Milligan treats a subject of more recent concern. Dewhirst et al. present the results of a study of information accessibility in R&D which comes at a time when the costs and benefits of more and better information flows are being questioned by many organizations. In one of the field studies on the role of “key communicators” being conducted by our Program of Research on the Management of Research and Development (POMRAD) at Northwestern University, for example, the top R&D management is concerned about the increasing costs of journal subscriptions, trade association and professional society memberships, and travel by members of its staff to a “huge number of meetings of questionable value.” The issue is that the value should be systematically questioned, but from the viewpoint of the many possible beneficial impacts on the staff, the R&D program, and the company, as well as with respect to out-of-pocket costs and time away from the laboratory. In another of POMRAD´s research projects, we are attempting to evaluate the usefulness of technical symposia and other meetings sponsored by a government agency for contractors in a particular technical area. We are probing both the short and longer term potential benefits of such meetings or others that might augment or replace them. Dewhirst et al., in their attempt to relate information accessibility to performance, are attacking a fundamental issue in the operation of - &D groups and contributing to our understanding of the perennial question of how and how much to communicate in R&D organizations.