Regional social mobility as a factor affecting small and medium-sized enterprises’ development

Regional circumstances play a crucial role in socio-economic situation of labour market. Its competitiveness depends not only on measurable factors, but also on soft factors. Nowadays more and more researchers and scientists pay their attention to the importance of social capital. Fragmentariness of scientific knowledge based on empirical investigation con-ducted in Polish reality, makes the author to prepare own empirical research in this field. The aim of the paper is to present the result of the research conducted in Southern Poland in late-2004. The region was defined as the area of two provinces Małopolska and Śląsk, but the choice was not stochastic. These provinces makes one region according to NUTS-1 nomen-clature. The research was conducted on a random sample of 109 small and medium-sized en-terprises localized in Southern Poland. Descriptive statistics (arithmetic average, median, mo-dal, quartile) as well as verifying tools (chi-square statistics, U Mann Whitney test) were used in order to verify the hypotheses.