Abstract. We investigate Banach spaces X such that X is an A/-ideal in X**. Subspaces, quotients and c0-sums of spaces which are M-ideals in their biduals are again of this type. A nonreflexive space X which is an M-ideal in X** contains a copy of c0. Recently Lima has shown that if K(X) is an A/-ideal in L( X) then X is an A/-ideal in X**. Here we show that if X is reflexive and K( X) is an A/-ideal in L(X), then K(X)** is isometric to L(X), i.e. K(X) is an M-ideal in its bidual.Moreover, for real such spaces, we show that K( X) contains a proper M-ideal if and only if X or X* contains a proper M-ideal.1. Introduction. The object of this paper is to investigate Banach spaces X, which are M-ideals in their bidual X**. Previous investigations of the question, whether the space of compact operators on X is an M-ideal in the space of all bounded operators, and the general study of the nature of the embedding of X into X** have led us to consider these spaces.In §2 we show some general results concerning Af-structure, which are perhaps folklore, but which do not appear in the literature.In §3 we start to study the properties of spaces which are M-ideals in their biduals. We show that subspaces and quotients of spaces, which are M-ideals in their biduals, have the same property. The proof of this result is based upon the fact that X is an A/-ideal in A'** if and only if the natural projection from X*** onto X* is an L-projection. Using local reflexivity we show that if X is an M-ideal in X** and Zis nonreflexive, then X contains almost isometric copies of c0. From this it follows that subspaces and quotients of such papers which are isomorphic to dual spaces are reflexive.