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It's a small world:managing human resources in small businesses
Abstract
It has become widely acknowledged that, during the past decade or so, large mainstream companies in the UK have adopted a new agenda for managing people. Relatively little is known about the impact of this new agenda on small businesses. The small business sector has been long regarded as the natural home for ‘bleak house’ employment relations practices typified by direct management control, poor terms and conditions, high staff turnover and little training. In March 1993, however, a large survey of 560 companies in Leicestershire revealed a surprisingly high take-up and awareness of new management ideas among small business managers. These findings are at odds with a crude ‘bleak house’ scenario. This large-scale telephone survey was then followed up with detailed case study research. This article presents and reflects upon the evidence and reformulates ideas about people management in small businesses.
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Citations
Cited by
Wilkinson, A. (1999) · Employee Relations · doi:10.1108/01425459910273062 · Cited by 337
Professional HRM Practices in Family Owned-Managed Enterprises*
de Kok, J. M. P., Uhlaner, L. M., & Thurik, A. R. (2006) · Journal of Small Business Management · doi:10.1111/j.1540-627x.2006.00181.x · Cited by 290
Metadata
- Authors
- Bacon, N., Ackers, P., Storey, J., & Coates, D.
- Venue
- The International Journal of Human Resource Management
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 1996-02
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 82-100
- ISSN
- 0958-5192 (ISSN-L)
- 1466-4399
- OpenAlex
- W2059526323
- Cited by
- 232
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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How to cite
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: It's a small world:managing human resources in small businesses. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/09585199600000119
- The paper
- Bacon, N., Ackers, P., Storey, J., & Coates, D. (1996). It's a small world:managing human resources in small businesses. The International Journal of Human Resource Management. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585199600000119
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
