[...]... for small businesses), fellow members of the board of the Institute of Small Business Affairs and the people who keep small but lively Camden Enterprise in the business of helping new and established local enterprises have all informed the ideas presented in this book (wittingly or otherwise) Gratitude also to Formez (the Italian state agency that used to be responsible for developing small and Introduction... early 1990s, when the Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) and Local Enterprise Companies in Scotland (LECs) took over local responsibility for enterprise training, a number of national training programmes were designed for existing small firms and other specific groups Without each of the many enterprise training programmes being described in detail, generally they fall into two broad categories:... dramatically, jumping from 7,870 in 1984/5 to 26,294 in the following year and just under 60,000 a year later Allowing for slight variations in teaching methodologies and target populations, enterprise training courses share the common training objectives of inculcating sufficient management skills to enable trainees to start or develop their own businesses Occasional remarks from various Small Firms Minis-ters... essentially retains a big -business approach and, as the findings of the surveys mentioned in relation to Table 2.1 indicate, the effects of individualism and non-economic motivation so strongly present among the smaller enterprises are reflected in aversion to growth and may inhibit the desire to pass through many of these stages Many small enterprises opt for a non-growth approach and intentionally decline to... costing and control of information; organisation and delegation; marketing; information use and retrieval; personnel management; technological change; production scheduling and purchase control Over the past twenty-five years, many of these problems have been extensively researched For instance, problems with raising and using finance and with obtaining and applying information on costs and control, as much... training and other forms of systematic management development, was a strong feature of the small enterprise sector As these features characterise the small enterprise sector today, not only in Britain but also across Europe (Stanworth and Gray, 1991; Storey, 1994; ENSR, 1995), it is worth listing the main management weaknesses identified by Bolton: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 raising and using finance; costing and. .. not inclined to accept, so he refused and left: clearly a lucky decision, as history demonstrated But Roger was not just a man off the street seeking to start a small business in an old steel works He had education, excellent marketing and management training, and plenty of high-level responsibility and management experience in a relevant field There was also an element of being pushed and suffering... the Christian Democrats in Italy also tried, with some initial success, to appeal to the cultural values of small enterprise managers and mobilise them as a political force in support of individualist policies The strategic interests of larger enterprises, however, demand much more cooperative business behaviour from local small and medium enterprises, if vertical integration and industrial cooperation... at reducing so-called supply-side constraints in factor markets, promoting private competition in areas previously in the public sector and encouraging the unemployed and newly redundant to start their own businesses RATIONALE OF THE ENTERPRISE CULTURE MODEL According to the enterprise culture model, the public sector is inherently inefficient, and private firms, spurred on by competition and the fear... people starting new firms and taking on their first employees They are faced by a formidable array of regulations on direct and indirect taxation, social security, health and safety, planning, consumer protection and trading standards… New business start-ups are the essential source of jobs in the future Two of the assumptions of enterprise policy in particular—first, that selfemployed small business managers . policies 2 Introduction aimed at increasing self-employment and small business development in Britain, since the early 1980s, have been in creating an enterprise. For instance, problems with raising and using finance and with obtaining and applying information on costs and control, as much due to external constraints