After the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong its smaller banks carved out a niche for themselves in the corporate market by embracing relationship marketing as a way of doing business. Examines the commitment‐trust dimension of the relationship marketing paradigm in the Hong Kong’s corporate banking sector. The findings show that the Hong Kong banks’ marketing strategy and a long‐term orientation were positively correlated with customer commitment and trust; communications and relational norms were positively correlated with trust; relationship benefits were positively correlated with customer commitment; and the banks’ reputation was negatively correlated with trust and commitment. To continue to be successful in the corporate sector, smaller banks must invest in the long‐term relationship marketing infrastructures to support a customer‐oriented approach. To enhance the corporate customers’ confidence further, the banks must develop parallel communication channels with their customers, show flexibility in their dealings and maximize mutual relationship benefits by minimising drastic recovery actions.

The day‐to‐day operations in small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) tend to reach a bottleneck before the owner‐managers think of engaging an external expertise to help. By then the situation is often difficult to salvage, and management consultants tend to get blamed for the outcomes. In this study, 40 management consultants were asked to allow a researcher to be present during their first meeting with a potential client. Four agreed. The objective of this study was to evaluate a model of pre‐entry phase of consultancy behaviour against the real‐life interaction, in which two parties attempt to choose the best problem‐solving partner. The findings suggest that, far from management consultants and potential clients behaving in a rational way, as proposed by the pre‐entry phase model of consultancy, each partner brought into the interaction their personal agenda, therefore taking the interaction processes away from the “purely business” rational level, as present management literature suggests. This has some important implications for the research methodologies used to study SMEs.

During the past few decades, TQM principles were universally accepted as a means of improving overall organizational performance, and the nature of each organization, its specific marketplace challenges, usually defined the boundaries of implementation. Back in the 1990s, an attempt was made to downsize and re-engineer organizational processes in order for organizations to become leaner, while at the same time remaining competitive in the fast moving global marketplace. Re-engineering was fundamentally a structured coordination of people and information, based on a conviction that corporate knowledge could be contained in technological systems. However, both, instead of posing a challenge to the TQM approach, resulted in a critical loss of knowledge and expertise from organizations. Today, the Knowledge Management (KM) approach is poised to replace the TQM as a quality approach measurement tool. Leveraging corporate knowledge in order to gain competitive advantage in the global marketplace is not just a matter of knowledge creation or innovation. It must be built on a foundation of challenging what is true and what nurtures the organization. If the KM approach can hold onto its ability not to regard blindly all knowledge as true, and not to repeat some of the TQM mistakes of impracticability and exaggeration of achievement, then it has the potential to replace the TQM in the near future.

This study provides an analysis of two regional samples on R&D activities in manufacturing small and medium‐size firms in the UK. The results show that there are statistically significant regional differences between the North East and the West Midlands (χr2 of 11.8 s.s. at p < .01), where the North East SMEs seem to engage less in R&D activities. The results may be of some interest to the relevant R&D funding bodies.

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