City Research Online

Abstract

"The Rise and Decline of Small Firms" by J.S. Boswell (George Allen and Unwin, 1973) was an exercise in micro-economic history based on published historical chronicles of family businesses, the records of over 400 small companies and field studies of 64 small firms. The book examined the great contrasts in economic performance in this sector. Critical phases in the development of small firms were analysed: birth, infancy, formative growth, transition, decline, revival, takeover, mortality. The principal influences on economic performance were identified as both exogenous (markets, technology, social trends) and endogenous (management problems mainly related to finance, fatigue, gerontocracy, family and social factors, succession and the inheritance system). The central phenomena emerged as dynamism in young small firms and stagnation - but also great survival power - in old small firms. It was suggested that Britain's small firm sector was unduly biased towards age and inheritance. Central importance was attached to the age of firms and to the related issues of new entrepreneurship, resource mobility and a phasing-out of the obsolescent.

Some of these themes are taken further in “Small Firms in British Industry, a critical re-appraisal", also by J.S. Boswell (The City University, 1976). This thesis argues that entrepreneurial renewal is more urgent than was assumed in the early 1970's in the wake of the Bolton Report on small firms. It suggests that the small firm sector has probably been deteriorating in age composition as well as numbers; that anti-youth and pro-establishment environmental biases may have increased over a long period; and that "Marshallian" age effects in large firms make a renewed small firm sector more desirable - but less likely as a result of unaided market forces. Subsidised, selective "nursery finance" for infant industrial enterprises is advocated. The implications of age effects and age structures of firms for both theory and policy are further developed.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Bayes Business School Doctoral Theses Doctoral Theses

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