The Rise and Decline of Small Firms (Routledge Revivals)

ISBN-13: 9781138781221 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 268 str.

Jonathan Boswell

Opis

First published in 1973, this title examines the development patterns of small businesses. It considers why people found firms; the factors that contribute to entrepreneurial success; problems of management succession and inheritance; the strengths and weaknesses of family firms; the reasons why small firms are taken over; and the social, economic and managerial context of their growth, decline, and revival. Based on a survey of sixty-four firms, each employing fewer than five hundred people, in engineering, hosiery, and knitwear, and on the records of 370 similar organisations, a striking gap in performance and management attitudes emerges as between dynamic, mostly founder-run firms and stagnant, mostly inherited ones. Where many books are either minutely specialised or highly abstract and over-generalised, Jonathan Boswell s work is practical and diagnostic, probing the inner recesses of the small firm sector. With particular relevance to the difficulties faced by entrepreneurs in today s economic environment, this title advances selective measures to deal with old firms and inheritance, and a wide range of policies to encourage new entrepreneurship. "

Spis treści

Preface;  1. Why Bother About Small Firms?  2. Performance, Goals and Problems  3. Why People Found Businesses  4. Strengths and Trials of Young Firms  5. Gathering Clouds  6. Take-overs  7. Lessons from History  8. Decline  9. Rigidities of Old Firms  10. Revivals  11. What Should Be Done?;  Appendices: 1. Definitions  2. Field Study Methodology  3. Some Results of the Field Study  4. The Companies House Study  5. Other Studies; Bibliography;  Index

O autorze

Jonathan Boswell