Management and business studies

This page explains what the subject of management and business studies covers, gives an overview of the material the British Library holds for this subject, and advice on how you can find and use it. It also gives details of current activities for developing the collections for this subject.

Covers all aspects of business and management theory, including: strategy, international business, corporate social responsibility, organisation theory, change management, public sector management, operations management and operations research, management development, leadership, organisational psychology, HR management, employment relations, marketing; business history; and theoretical aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation. For information and advice about starting a business or patents/intellectual property, please see our Business and Intellectual Property Centre (BIPC) or find out about our innovations research service.

Collection overview

The British Library's business and management studies collection is extensive and has particular strengths in English-language material published in the UK and North America. Most printed material is kept offsite and has to be ordered in advance of your visit; or ordered via our Document Supply Service; but a selection of around 800 relevant books and reports published in the last three years, and selected key journals published in the last 12 months, are available on the shelves in the London Social Sciences Reading Room. See the collections leaflet (pdf)

Overall we have:

a comprehensive collection of UK material acquired through legal deposit, including report literature, working papers and conference papers
strong English-language collections from other countries, especially North America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, Africa. East European collections are also strong, reflecting interest in the transition to capitalism. Asian-language material has been collected selectively
extensive collections of market research reports, company annual reports, patents and trade directories in the Business and Intellectual Property Centre (BIPC) in London, where you can also use financial, market and news databases
extensive journals coverage, with many journals in full text online in our London Social Sciences Reading Room, plus indexing and abstracting databases to help you find articles
extensive newspaper collections, print and online
a growing collection of electronic resources and useful websites. We also archive relevant websites as part of the UK Web Archiving Consortium
oral histories of various aspects of business and finance.

Finding aids

Explore the British Library. Use Explore the British Library to find details of books, reports, journal titles, newspapers, maps and many more parts of the Library’s collections
Electronic resources for this subject that are available from our reading rooms
Business and economic statistics pages
Company annual reports page
Topical bibliographies on subjects such as the Enron scandal, and Globalisation and employment

Social Sciences Enquiry team

For more help on using the Social Sciences collections, contact the Enquiry team at Social-sciences@bl.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7412 7894 from 10.00 - 20.00 Mon- Thurs or 10.00 - 17.00 Friday.

Current activities

We are supporting the ESRC seminar series When World Collided: Contested Paradigms of Corporate Social Responsibility,

British Library Content Strategy

We have refined our Content Strategy (i.e what we collect now and in future). Please see the content strategy pages on our website. These pages are organised by subject. Please remember that different aspects of a research theme may be described under more than one subject. A subject will also cover a variety of research themes, so even though your topic may not be specifically listed, it will likely be found under one of our headings.

If you have comments on the Library's content strategy, we would be pleased to hear from you.