Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify factors associated with business success, measured through employment growth, in a sample of rural Scottish businesses. Design/methodology/approach – The use of telephone interviews was used to construct a dataset based on the outcome of 399...

Over the last decade, research has been reported that appears to underline a mismatch between what is supplied by public sector support agencies in the form of small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) management and leadership development programmes and market needs and expectations. Thus, this...

Purpose – To study some of the difficulties involved in defining the nature of social enterprises and the environments in which they operate in order to provide a framework to show how and where social enterprises fit in the overall social economy. Design/methodology/approach – The...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to demonstrate empirically the relationship between firm characteristics and information use within a small and medium sized enterprises (SME) context, proposing that firm characteristics are a catalyst of information use. With marketing information it is...

Purpose – Research has shown that employers in small businesses may not provide, or fund, off‐the‐job training for reasons including that they believe that no training was considered necessary in their business. The research reported in this paper aims to focus on a study of...

Purpose – The growth of the so‐called “knowledge economy”, whereby the primary sources of firm value are claimed to be an increasing reliance upon the exploitation and management of intangible assets that are not reported in company balance sheets, has led to a questioning of the...