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THIS
WEEK'S QUOTE
"Her [Margaret Thatcher]
father kept a grocer's shop, and this meant that in her formative
years, she got to know people, not as manufacturing producers,
nor as collective aggregates, but as individual consumers. We
lived', she recalls, 'by serving the customer'. This is turn
meant that she did not share the views of Adam Smith (or Karl
Marx) that social identities were fundamentally fashioned by a
person's relationship to the means of production and that as a
result they were primarily shared, group identities. This
preference for individual consumers over collective producers was
further reinforced by the fact that Grantham provided her with no
first-hand experience of factory-based, traditional working class
'as a sociological entity'."
Cannadine,
D. (1998) Class in Britain, Penguin, page 172. (week
beginning 3rd February 2002)
QUOTE
ARCHIVE
"Epaulets for the Chief
Executive- With any encouragement, some people in your company
will spend full time getting the chief executive decorated by
foreign governments. Or putting his picture in the papers,
getting him made man-of-the-year by the American Pizza
Association, or press-released by some adventure in egomania like
the American Academy of Achievement. A good chief executive will
knock off all this nonsense. A weak one will accept the kudos
because his indifferent performance as chief executive creates in
him a real need for ego massage..."
Robert
Townsend (1985) Further up the Organisation, Coronet. (week
beginning 28th January 2002)
" Weber's view of entrepreneurship is often identified with
his theory of charisma; and according to this interpretation, his
main contribution is to be found in his analysis of that special
type of human being- the charismatic person- who makes other
people want to follow him or her, simply by virtue of his or her
extraordinary personality"
Swedberg,
R. (2000) The social science view of entrepreneurship:
introduction and practical applications', in Swedberg (ed)
Entrepreneurship: The Social Science View, Oxford University,
page 25 (week beginning 21st January 2002)
" An extraordinary variety of schemes of social
entrepreneurship have grown up in different countries since the
1980s. One is service credit, introduced in a range of cities in
the US and Japan. Volunteers who take part in charitable work are
paid in time donated by other volunteer workers."
Giddens,
A. (1998) "The Third Way, The Renewal of Social Democracy",
Polity, Cambridge, page 83 (week beginning 14th January 2002)
" The occupants of homologous positions primary school
teachers and professions, for example, or small shopkeepers and
commercial entrepreneurs, are mainly separated by the volume of
the kind of capital that is dominant in the structure of their
assets, i.e., by differences of degree which separate individuals
unequally endowed with the same scarce resources"
Bourdieu,
P. (1979) "Distinction: a social critique of the judgement
of taste, trans by R. Nice, Routledge, London, page 123. (week
beginning 7th January 2002)
" [Starting a small business] Are you ready for it? It means
120-hour weeks instead of the 30-hour week (two-hour lunches)
you're giving General Electric. Maybe you should spend some time
getting in shape; start by eating right, exercising, and giving
up smoking and drinking. Is your spouse ready to be married to a
worn-out stranger for five years?..."
Robert
Townsend (1985) "Further Up the Organisation", Coronet,
page 207 (week beginning 31st December 2001)
"I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with
integrity."
Sydney
Biddle Barrows, in Marian Christy, ''Mayflower Madam' Tells All,'
Boston Globe, 1986 (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning 24th
December 2001)
"The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and an
actualizer. He can visualize something, and when visualizes it he
sees exactly how to make it happen."
Robert
L Schwartz (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning 17th
December 2001)
"Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the
other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The
bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is
apt to be repeated."
B.
C. Forbes (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning 10th December
2001)
"these deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand
to be around for long, these people who'd never manufactured
anything or seen anything manufactured, who didn't know what
things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a
house or a car, had never sold anything and didn't know how to
sell anything, who'd never hired a worker, fired a worker,
trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker- people who knew
nothing of the intricacies or the risk of building a business or
running a factory but who none the less imagined they knew
everything worth knowing."
Philip
Roth, American Pastrol, quoted in Kate Jennings (2001) Fictional
Business, Prospect, December (week beginning 3rd December 2001)
"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to
begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the
way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business,
time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would
begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my
life."
Fr.
Alfred D'Souza (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning 26th
November 2001)
"Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has
never read old five-year projections."
Malcom
Forbes (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning 19th November
2001)
"Business is a good game - lots of competition and a minimum
of rules. You keep score with money."
Atari
founder Nolan Bushnell (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning
12th November 2001)
"The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor
upon the business known as gambling."
Ambrose
Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary, (from
quotationspage.com) (week beginning 5th November 2001)
"We see that Prometheus and Odysseus have been replaced by
the folk hero of the industrial world, the entrepreneur. He has
become the last lone ranger, a bold individualist fighting the
odds of the environment... But frequently there is an epilogue
added to these fairy tale endings whereby the "and they
lived happily ever after" theme is missing. As in Greek
myths success may lead to hubris or excessive pride, and might
come to fall..."
Ket
de Vries, M.F.R. (1977) "The Entrepreneurial Personality: A
Person at the Cross Roads", Journal of Management Studies,
Vol. 14, No. 1, page 34 (week beginning 29th October 2001)
"Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do
it."
Andrew
Young (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning 22nd October
2001)
"No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or
"get rich" in business by being a conformist."
J.
Paul Getty (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning 15th October
2001)
"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin."
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of
crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in
concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final
result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded,
carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted
offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and
smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the
bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty
business concern."
C.
S. Lewis (1898 - 1963) (from quotationspage.com) (week beginning
8th October 2001)
"The entrepeneur in the rural area appears to be more likely
to be establishing a business for reasons of life style and to be
establishing a craft or very specialised type of business. He or
she appears to be more likely to be occuping a growing market
niche than the urban business and perhaps for this reason
experienced relatively bouyant demand for the product or
service..."
Curran
and Storey (1993) "The location of small and medium
enterprises: are there urban-rural differences?" in J.
Curran and D. Storey (eds) Small Firms in Urban and Rural
Locations, Routledge, London, p. 16 (week beginning 1st October
2001)
"Flowing from this, it can be deduced that the dualistic
conceptualisation of the economy into two sectors, i.e. a formal
and
informal sector, is inappropriate as far as linkages are
concerned. Naidoo (1993:37) writes "the informal sector
should not be seen as opposites, but rather as a continuum of
activities"
Ncwadi,
R and Woolard ID (2001) The attitude of the formal business
community towards the informal street traders in PortElizabeth
Central Business District (CBD), South Africa, ICSB Conference
Proceedings.. (week beginning 24th September 2001)
"...the SBS points out that the stock of small firms, at 3.7
million, has remained fairly static for six years now. However,
this reassuring suggestion of stability among Britain's small
business owners is a bit misleading. As the SBS itself admits,
there has been a steady increase in the self-employed who employ
no other people and in microfirms with fewer than 10 employees.
In other words, Britain's small firms are, on average, becoming
even smaller."
Colin
Gray (2001) Editoral Small Business Issues, ISBA, Vol. 9, Issue
3, page 2. (week beginning 17th September 2001)
"The upper classes may have lost their political power, but
they still manage to set the social tone and determine the
aspirations of the ambitious. So, when the successful businessman
makes his first £10 million, he starts scanning the pages
of Country Life for a manor house to buy..."
Jeremy
Paxman (1999) The English: A Potrait of a People, Penguin, page
175. (week beginning 10th September 2001)
The House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee (1999)
is reported by Curran and Storey (2000) as describing small firms
policy as "an excess of loosely connected and apparently
uncoordinated policy initiatives shooting off in all directions,
generating noise and interest, but not commensurate light"
(page 2).
House
of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee (1999) 13th
Report, Small and Medium Enterprises, HC330, September, cited in
Curran, J. and Storey, D.J. (2000) 'Small Business Policy: Past
Experiences and Future Directions', The Small Business Service
and Kingston University Small Business Research Centre SME
Seminar Series: Linking Research and Policy, DTI Conference
Centre, 12th December, London. (week beginning 3rd September
2001)
"Popular imitativeness will always, in a trading nation,
seize hold of such successes, and drag a community too anxious
for profits into an abysss from which extrication is difficult.
Bubble companies, of a kind similar to those engendered by the
South-sea project, lived their little day in the famous year of
the panic, 1825. On that occasion, as in 1720, knavery gathered a
rich harvest from cupidity, but both suffered when the day of
reckoning came."
Mackay,
C. (1852) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds, Office of the National Illustrated Library, republished
in 1995 by Wordsworth Editions. (week beginning 27th August 2001)
"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in
government and business."
Tom
Robbins (from Michael Moncur's (Cynical) Quotations via
quotationspage.com) (week beginning 20th August 2001)
"Winch, like Schultz, recognizes that the social sciences
may legitimately employ concepts that are not ordinarily familiar
to those to whose behaviour they refer. Winch mentions the notion
of 'liquidity preference' in economics, saying however that it is
logically tied to concepts businessmen do use in their
activities, 'for its use by the economist presupposes his
understanding of what it is to conduct a business, which in turn
involves an understanding of such business concepts as money,
cost, risk, etc."
Giddens,
A. (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method, Hutchinson University
Library, page 150..(week beginning 13th August 2001)
"Drive
thy business or it will drive thee."
Benjamin
Franklin (1706 - 1790) (from Laura Moncur's Motivational
Quotations quotationspage.com) (week beginning 6th August 2001)
"Serious
differences among social scientists occur not between those who
would observe without thinking and those who would think without
observing; the differences have rather to do with what kinds of
thinking, what kinds of observing, and what kinds of links, if
any, there are between the two."
C.
Wright Mills (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford
University Press (pub. 1969) page 33. (week beginning 30th July
2001)
"At first each firm was dominated by
one man, the entrepreneur owner-manager, who did all the
different management jobs himself, and exercised a highly
personalized control over everyone..."
Argyle,
M (1972) The Social Pschology of Work, Penguin. (week beginning
23rd July 2001)
"Marshall traced a decline in entrepreneurial vigour (sons
were not as good as their father), while other critics complained
that 'the Gospel of Ease' had 'permeated the nation'. 'Engalnd
shows traces of American enterprise and German order', wrote
Arthur Shadwell in 1906, 'but the enterprise is faded and the
order muddled'"
Asa
Briggs (1999) A Social History of England, Penguin. (week
beginning 16th July 2001)
"In the nineteenth century in England there was a slow
growth of management practices to deal with the increased size
and technological complexity of industrial concerns. At first
each firm was dominated by one man, the entrepreneur
owner-manager, who did all the different management jobs himself,
and exercised a highly personalized control over everyone; there
were no regular methods of working or of dealing with personnel."
Argyle,
M. (1972) The Social Psychology of Work, Pelican. (week beginning
9th July 2001)
"Most formal management development is generic, neither
aimed at or suitable for small firms, especially the
entepreneurial managers. Much of provision often has little
connection between development of the individual and the
business..."
Centre
for Enterprise (2001) Management and Leadership Development in
the East Midlands: is supply meeting demand? (week beginning 2nd
July 2001)
"Another
implication of our arguments is that relations between small
firms and the wider economy are much less ordered and small firms
are much more independent, than many have argued in the past.
Many previous arguments have seen the small firm as heavily
dependent on customers and supplies mainly larger than itself.
There are sectors of the economy where such relations may be
common- clothing manufacture is the example usually cited- but
the thesis we put forward suggests that, typically, such
relations are not common."
Curran,
J. and Blackburn, R. (1994) Small Firms and Local Economic
Networks, The Death of the Local Economy? Paul Chapman
Publishing, page 185 (week beginning 25th June 2001)
[Description
of people starting businesses] "Some are eccentrics, others
painfully correct conformists, some are fat and some are lean;
some are worriers, some relaxed; some drink quite heavily, others
are total abstainers; some have great charm, some have no more
personality than a frozen mackerel."
Peter Drucker, quoted in Barrow, C. (1998) The Sage Guide Setting
Up and Managing Your Own Business, Kessington West.(week
beginning 18th June 2001)
"...one
important issue to recognise is that such focused support would
be highly contextual and individulaised, with such training being
stimulated by specific needs of the entrepreneur in relation to
their business (Goss, 1989). To create such facilitative, dynamic
assistance would require a detailed knowledge of both the
entrepreneur and their business, and, therefore, highlights the
importance of long-term mentoring programmes within small
businesses."
Cope,
J. and Watts, G (2000) "Learning by doing, An exploration of
experience, critical incidents and reflection in entrepreneurial
learning", Int Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour &
Research, Vol 6 Issue 3 (week
beginning 4th June 2001)
Party
Quotes on Regulations
"We
will modernise company law to promote transparency, reduce
burdens on small business and promote long-term economic
success."
Manifesto 2001 ,
Labour Party
"Small
and medium-sized businesses have been hard hit by Labour. Smaller
companies are often the most vulnerable to extra costs and
regulations, and have frequently highlighted the difficulties
caused by the raft of burdens imposed by Labour."
Common
sense for business 2001, Conservative Party.
"Scrap
unnecessary business regulations. We have published a list of 25
specific major regulations which we will scrap... We will also
consult business before introducing any new measures"
Manifesto 2001 Liberal Party
(week
beginning 29th May 2001)
"Most
empirical studies of small firm development have used cross
sectional designs and quantitative methods (usually multiple
regression) to explain single episodes of growth measured over
short intervals of time. These have generally yielded fairly weak
explanations and are unable to say anything at all about why
growth was embarked upon and what happens within the firm before,
during, and after the growth phase."
Vinnell,
R. and Hamilton, R.T. (1999) "A Historical Perspective on
Small Firm Development", Entrepreneurship Theory and
Practice, Summer, page 5. (week beginning 21st May 2001).
"One
of the key results from this survey is that many small business
researchers are attempting to disseminate to a wide range of
stakeholders including fellow researchers, small business owners,
government policy-makers and to a lesser extent students and
advisers to small firms. The judgements the Management Panel
makes in the next RAE will send a signal to the small business
research community that will influence the emphasis of research
in the future. It hoped hope that the message will be that the
role of the small business research community is to undertake and
disseminate research to a wide stakeholder group that extends
beyond the confines of academe."
Perren,
L., Berry, A. and Blackburn, R. (2001) "The UK small
business research community and its publication channels:
perceptions and ratings", Journal of Small Business and
Enterprise Development, Vol. 8. No.1, page 77.(week beginning
14th May 2001)
"It can be concluded that ethnic minority enterprise can be
restricted both by powerful indigenous interest groups, by a
strong welfare state, and by a strong culture of business
regulation..."
David
McEvoy (2001) "International perspectives on Etnic Mintority
Enterprise: The Work of the EU Fourth Framework on Immigrant
Businesses", SBS and Kingston University SME Sminar Series,
DTI, London, 1st May 2001. (week beginning 7th May 2001)
"Entrepreneurs
and bureaucrats just don't mix do they? On the one hand the
entrepreneur swashbuckles his way into a new venture attempting
to chop aside all the non-sensical red tape put there by the
bureaucrat in stifling attempt to maintain the status quo...
Well, that's the received wisdom anyway. The truth is, of course,
much more boring. Most entrepreneurs are, apparently, like me-
they don't have a swash to buckle, and the last thing that they
actually do is to take extreme risk..."
Mike
Sands (2000) "The entrepreneur and the bureaucrat.. or vice
versa", Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Vol. 1, No. 1, page
65. (week beginning 30th April 2001)
"Not
only do we expect the proportion of older entrepreneurs to
increase, but we also expect a relative increase in the rate of
formation of businesses by very young people... We expect these
trends to continue..."
Peter,
M., Cressey, R. and Storey, D. (1999) "The Economic Impact
of Ageing on Entrepreneurship and SMEs", EIM Small Business
Research and Warwick University, May, page 6. (week beginning
23rdApril 2001)
"The
challenge is to find multidisciplinary and holistic approaches
towards understanding the context and process of business
development based upon frameworks which describe: how
entrepreneurs learn from their stakeholder environment; how the
stakeholders learn from them; and what both sets of partners
'need to know' and why."
Allan
Gibb (1997) "Small Firms' Training and Competitiveness:
Building Upon the Small Business as a Learning Organisation",
Int. Small Business Journal, Vol 15, No 3, page 25. (week
beginning 17th April 2001)
"Hostility to bigness of firms relative to markets has a
long and honourable history in economics, and the analysis on
which that hostility is founded- the resource allocation
consequences of monopoly- is clear. It doesn't follow, of course,
that a passion for resource allocation has invariably been the
primary motivation of anti-monopoly economists; and one might
suspect that monopoly has sometimes served as a stalking horse
for a variety of other social concerns with a less precise
rationale, including an aversion to great size as such, whether
relative to markets or not."
Hindley,
B. (1984) "Economics and small enterprises" in C.
Levicki (ed) Small Business Theory and Policy, Croom Helm, page
42. (week beginning 9th April 2001)
"The results indicate that many widely discussed features of
small business strategy have little, or even negative, impact on
performance. Of the numerous aims that owner managers may adopt
(survival, growth etc.), only one appears to have a major impact
on performance; the pursuit of the highest rate of return on
investment."
Reid,
G.C. and Smith, J.A. (200) "What makes a new business
start-up successful?", Small Business Economics, Vol. 14,
No. 3, pp. 165.(week beginning 2nd April 2001)
"Innovative methodological approaches are needed in
entrepreneurship. When working on thinking framework, as is the
case here, it is up to the researcher to establish a relationship
between the subject and the type of methodology needed to gather
and analyse the data required to meet the research objective."
Louis
Filion (1991) "Vision and Relations: Elements for an
Entrepreneurial Metamodel", Int Small Business Journal, 9,
2, p.38. (week beginning 26th March, 2001)
"Twain's
back-to-the-future novel is about a late nineteenth-century
time-study technician named Hank Morgan... who inexplicably wakes
to find himself in sixth-century Camelot...One day he comes upon
a group of hermits doing perpetual penance... Morgan at once sees
his opportunity to exploit the hermit for commerical purposes
[through the body movements of praying]"
Brawer,
R. (1998) "Fictions of Business", Wiley, pp. 182-183,
writing about Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court". (week beginning 19th March, 2001)
"People
with small, homogeneous, internally focused networks typically
experience social capital in the form of trust and cooperation
within a tight network, but they lack the ability to get
information or discover entepreneurial opportunities. Those with
large, diverse, externally focused networks typically have access
to social capital in the form of entrepreneurial opportunities,
but they also experience mixed messages, conflicting
expectations, and tensions."
Baker,
W. (2000) "Achieving Success Through Social Capital,
Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, p66.(week beginning 12th March, 2001)
"...these references to the workings of chance and luck
serve distinctive functions according to whether they are made by
those who have reached or those that have not reached the
culturally emphasised goals. For the successful, it is in
psychological terms, a disarming expression of modesty... For the
unsuccessful... the doctrine of luck serves the psychological
function of enabling then to preserve their self-esteem in the
face of failure."
Merton,
R.K. (1968) 'Social Theory and Social Structure: 1968 Enlarged
Edition', Free Press, p202-p203. (week beginning 5th March, 2001)
"...the model of competitive equilibrium is a travesty of
reality. The world does not consist, for example, of an enormous
number of small firms, none of which have any degree of control
over the market in which they operate. Small firms may be
fashionable at present, but it is the large multi-national
companies such as Ford, BP and Sony which dominate the world
economy. It is entirely illegitimate to make the link between the
model and the observed success of the Western market economies."
Paul
Omerod (1994) "The Death of Economics", Faber and
Faber, London, page 48.(week beginning 26th February, 2001)
"It
is possible that some people may feel sorry for me, but I see no
sign of it. My small business fills me with worries that make my
forehead and my temper ache, but without these offering any
prospect of satisfaction, because my business is small. Hours in
advance I have to make my dispositions, I have to keep refreshing
the storekeepers memory, warn against mistakes that I fear may be
made, and calculate each season the fashions of the next one, not
as these may hold among the people of my circle but among
inaccessible tribes of folk in the country. "
Kafka,
F. (1992) "Meditation: The Businessman", in "The
Transformation ('Metamorphosis') and Other Stories",
translated and edited by malcolm Pasley, Penguin, London. (week
beginning 19th February, 2001)
"In the Eighteenth century, Europeans also began to change
the merchant's image; intellectuals now saw him (sic) as an ally
against aristocracy. Voltaire portrayed businessmen as models of
adventurousness and honesty... The French Revolution rewarded
them with freedom from government interference, but even after
it, merchants, except the super-rich, still preferred to push
their sons into state jobs or the professions."
Zeldin,
T. (1994) "An Intimate History of Humanity", Minverva,
London, page 156-157.(week beginning 12th February, 2001)
"If
I would be a young man again and had to decide to make my living,
I would not try to become a scientist or a scholar or teacher. I
would rather chose to be a plumber or a peddler, in the hope to
find that modest degree of independence still available under
present circumstances."
Albert
Einstein quoted in While, R. (1987) "Speakers Digest:
Business Quotations", Foulsham, London. (week beginning 5th
February, 2001)
"... the apparent simplicity of the small business has
tripped up a lot of researchers. Small does not mean simple.
Neither is a small business merely a scaled-down version of a
large business. A small number of human beings engaged in a
common endeavour can create very compex, subtle interactions.
Unravelling the underlying meaning and patterns of these
interactions can be far from straightforward. The motivations of
those involved, for example, can be very diverse and complex."
Jim
Curran and Robert Blackburn (2001) Researching the Small
Enterprise, Sage, London. (week beginning 29th January, 2001)
"There
are many issues that have hindered the development of
entrepreneurship as a discipline, one of which is its
relationship with organizational behaviour and the base
disciplines (economics, sociology and psychology) that comprise
'management'. One focus of these studies of organizational form
(size, structure) has enabled an understanding to be developed of
the nature of different types of organization. But the issue of
size of organization has become 'sensitive'. In Europe, for
example, the proportion of small to medium-sized businesses is 95
per cent of the stock of all firms. Yet management education has
focused on the large coorporation as the primary source of
knowledge on MBA and other education programmes."
E.
Chell, (2001) "Enterpreneurship: Globalization, Innovation
and Development", Thomson Learning, London. (week beginning
22nd January, 2001)
"The
extreme socialists desire [is] to run every nation as a single
business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find
much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic
basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their
population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we
could find them, would make Belgium Ltd. or Denmark Inc. pay
their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an
obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier
to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United
States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus
jumping a hedge.."
J.B.S.
Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" in the (1928) book
"Possible Worlds" from a search quotationspage
(week beginning 15th January, 2001)
"The
so-called private ownership of large-scale enterprises is in no
way analogous to simple property of the small landowner,
craftsman, or entrepreneur. Is is, as Tawney says, analagous to
'the feudal duws which robbed the French peasant of part of his
produce till the revolution abolished them."
Schumacher,
E.F. (1973) "Small is Beautiful", Abacus, London. (week
beginning 8th January, 2001)
"The
private property of the labourer in his means of production is
the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural,
manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential
condition for the development of social production and of the
free individuality of the labourer himself... Self-earned private
property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the
isolated, independent labouring-individual with the conditions of
his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which
rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others,
i.e., on wage-labour... "
Marx,
K. "Capital Volume 1", Chapter 32: "The Historical
Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation", in E. Kamenka (ed)
(1983) "The Portable Karl Marx", Penguin,
Harmondsworth.(week beginning 1st January, 2001)
"Men
there have been, ignorant of letters; without art, without
eloquence; who yet had the wisdom to devise and the courage to
perform that which they lacked language to explain. Such men have
worked the deliverance of nations and their own greatness. Their
hearts are their books; events are their tutors; great actions
are their eloquence."
MACAULAY
quoted by Samuel Smiles, Men of Invention and Industry, published
by Project Gutenberg Etext, this etext entered by Eric Hutton of
Hertforshire, UK . (week beginning 25th December, 2000)
"..the
sheer hegemonic power that notions such as 'the entrepreneur',
'entrepreneurship' and the 'entrepreneurial society' have
acquired since the late 1970s, has not encouraged serious
assessment of policies promoting the small enterprise which is
seen almost universally as the embodiment of such notions."
James
Curran and David Storey (2000) Small Business Policy: Past
Experiences and Future Directions, Small Business Service and
Kingston University Small Business Research Centre, SME Seminar
Series, DTI Conference Centre, December, London. (week beginning
18th December, 2000)
"Perhaps
Schumpeter (1939) was closer to the truth. He emphasized that
while entrepreneurs play a significant part in the establishment
of new branches of industry, during the later phases of an
industrial development innovation increasingly requires large
firms because of the high costs involved, and considerable market
power if innovation is to be worthwhile. "
Roy
Rothwell and Walter Zegveld (1982) innovation and the Small and
Medium Sized Firm, Frances Pinter, London. (week beginning 11th
December, 2000).
"The
ambivalence potential of [the word] 'enterprise' and the
possibilities for manipulating it by varying the verbal context
constitute a resource that is open to strategic exploitation, and
is indeed strategically exploited in the Young speeches.
Different speeches highlight different senses, not by promoting
one sense to the exclusion of the others, but by establishing
particular configurations of meanings, particular hierarchical
salience relationships among the senses of 'enterprise', which
can be seen to be suited to wider strategic objectives in the
speeches."
Norman
Fairclough (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis, Longman, London.
(week beginning 4th December, 2000).
"Gradually,
as industrial activity further displaces predatory activity in
the community's everyday life and in men's habits of thought,
accumulated property more and more replaces trophies of predatory
exploit as the conventional exponent of prepotence and success.
With the growth of settled industry, therefore, the possession of
wealth gains in relative importance and effectiveness as a
customary basis of repute and esteem. "
Thorstein
Veblen (1899) The theory of the leisured class, unabridged, Dover
Publications, New York, printed 1994 (week beginning 27th
November, 2000).
"Orthodox
theory assumes that the objective of the firm is to maximise
profits, and it follows that the performance measures advocated
are largely based upon this theory. However, research has shown
that small firms used a variety of measures and indicators to
assess performance. profit measures were found to be less
important than conventional views suggest. In particular, cash
flow indicators were considered to be critical. Other performance
measures adopted by owner-managers include the quality of inputs
and outputs and intangible indicators"
Robin
Jarvis et al (2000) 'The use of quantitative and qualitative
criteria in the measurement of performance in small firms,
Journal of Small Business and Enteprise Development, 7(2), (week
beginning 19th November, 2000)
"The
most effective entrepreneurs understand that one of the realities
of life in business is that the world of make-believe is all
important. The truth is that people need fiction in their lives.
If we wear our consumer hats, we can understand this. In the
world of make-believe, there are no rules, no ready-made
formulas. But for the self-made individual, the individual who
recreates him- or herself as the occasion warrants, who makes
customers form new images themselves, there are endless
possibilities for creativity and improvisation, just as there are
in the performing arts."
Robert
Brawer (1998) Fictions of Business, insghts on management from
great literature, Wiley, New York. (week beginning 12th November,
2000)
"Conventional
wisdom often reduces entrepreneurship to the art of small
business by formulating an ideological spirit rather than a
scientific foundation for the field. Debunking the
entrepreneurial myth, the focus must be on the political ideology
behind the entrepreneurial explosion of hte 1980s. Acting as the
ideology of business avant-gardism, the entrepreneurial myth has
become the context within which conventional wisdom about
entrepreneurship has been influenced."
Omid
and Patricia A. Nodoushani (2000) "Second thoughts on the
entrepreneurial myth", Int. Journal of Entrepreneurship and
Innovation, Vol. 1, No. 1 (week beginning 6th November, 2000)
"There
is an obvious danger that the essence of the matter will be lost
under this mass of impersonal data, and it must not be forgotten
that what we are basically talking about throughout this Report
is people: the small firm sector can only be sensibly discussed
in terms of people- and many of them we know to be remarkable and
highly individualistic people- who are prepared to to accept the
risks and reponsibilities of the entrepreneur."
Small
Firms, Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Small Firms, 1971,
Chaired by J.E. Bolton, Cmnd. 4811, HMSO, London, xviii (week
beginning 30th October, 2000)
"Around these mythical concepts and myths are arranged sets
of assumptions about how the world works and priorities as to how
it ought to work, around which are built policy actions. Every
now and again ritualistic meetings, workshops, conferences are
held to bring groups of different stakeholders together, usually
with the key stakeholder- the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME)-
absent"
Allan
Gibb, International Small Business Journal, Issue 71, 2000 (week
beginning 23rd October, 2000)
"Because of the well-entrenched unanimity on the value of
small business support in the UK, little attention has been given
to whether the support represents good value for public money"
James
Curran, International Small Business Journal, Issue 71, 2000
(week beginning 16th October 2000)
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