Corporate planning in the U.K.: The state of the art in the 70s

The paper reports the major descriptive results of a study of corporate planning in 48 U.K. companies in the mid‐1970s. Introduction of corporate planning clearly quickened in the 1970s. The number of specialist corporate planners tended to be small and was correlated with company size. Responsibilities of planners varied between operating companies, divisions, and the corporate parent company. Corporate planners had widened the scope of their plans since the late 1960s, made fairly extensive use of written documents and procedures, and often used a high number of sophisticated techniques for forecasting and evaluation, but their use of documents and techniques was far from uncritical. The extent of planning varied between types of companies.