The Future for SMEs

Abstract

In the Conclusion, at the end of our last edition, we looked at the problems involved in trying to compare small and large businesses in non-financial matters. However, anything that cannot easily be measured cannot easily be ranked. Inevitably our conclusions were arrived at with great diffidence. Such evidence as was available seemed to confirm the traditional view that small businesses did fairly well in terms of job satisfaction, job generation, innovative research and flexibility, and rather less well in developmental research and job security. Particularly in the field of employment and employment relations the lack of well-documented research for small enterprises has been, and still is, quite startling. In Bolton 20 Years On: The Small Firm in the 1990s (editors, Stanworth and Grey) it is summed up by noting that the ‘the process of employment relations as it happens in the day-to-day life of the enterprise remains largely unknown because of the sheer difficulty of devising methodologically satisfactory ways of observing what actually happens, especially over relatively long time periods — say two to three years’.