Sociological Research on Service Sector Small Businesses: Some Conceptual Considerations

Abstract

Recently 'small business revivalism', and the 'enterprise culture' more gener ally, has been articulated through a range of political discourses as a panacea for the economic and social ills of the British economy. This is sometimes linked — often in an implied causality — with official data showing self-employment and small business ownership increasing throughout the 1980s (Bechhofer and Elliott 1985; Creigh et al. 1986; Spilsbury et al. 1986; Curran and Burrows 1988; Hakim 1988). In turn, the rhetoric of 'enterprise' has become a central motif of everyday life as represented through the media and popular discourse. These political, economic and cultural developments have been mirrored by an increasing academic interest (Curran 1986). Indeed, in debates concerned with the current economic restructuring of Britain focused around the concept of 'flexibility' (Poliert 1988) small businesses have been analytically highlighted to an extent hitherto unheard of. As Poliert (1988) has demonstrated, the notion of flexibility has manifested itself in two distinct strands of the literature, which, although they come to opposing conclusions, both give small business a high profile. The first derives from the managerialist flexible firm literature (Atkinson 1984) which tends to see small businesses and the self-employed as dependent, often in subcontracting roles, and largely providing work for the peripheral workforce. In this strand the small firm and the self-employed are crucial to the numerical flexibility required increasingly for the 'Japanized' production systems allegedly developing in Britain (Dickens 1988: 38-89). The second strand derives from an institutional economics literature which claims to have located the beginnings of a 'second industrial divide' in capitalist societies. This involves the decline of Fordist mass production and the rise of a post Fordist system of 'flexible specialisation'. This new 'technological paradigm' involves large numbers of small, craft-based firms using technologically advanced methods operating within a network of similar small firms, but also