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The purpose of this paper is to examine and explain why most small firms remain small. A new conceptual framework – the condition of smallness – is proposed.

A critical examination of the literature about the nature of being a small firm is first conducted. Employing an inductive analysis of responses from a survey of 2,521 small business owners about employment regulation, the nature and effects of smallness is examined.

It was found that owners' choice making combines with perceptions about their resources to produce a condition of smallness. The condition of smallness is conceptualised as the circularity perceptions, attitudes and consequent practices that reflect lack of knowledge, time and capability. It is argued that this condition of smallness inhibits growth to create a wicked problem that explains why most small firms don't grow.

This work is largely conceptual, albeit the argument is grounded in, and illustrated by, empirical data. The findings may not be generalisable beyond this paper's data sets, but may be generalisable conceptually.

The focus of much scholarly work has been on growth firms. Yet the typical small firm is excluded so that the issues of smallness are often overlooked. This paper, therefore contributes to understanding why small firms don't grow.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and explore why “Small-Businesses” resist employing outside the immediate family and investigate the employee as an outsider and entrepreneurial resource.

The authors review the literature on barriers to small-business growth concentrating on key empirical and theoretical studies. The authors use empirical data from the Federation of Small Business in which informants commented on growth and employing outside the family.

The findings suggest that small business owners adopt a polemical stance, arguing that a barrage of employment regulations deters them from employing outsiders because doing so brings trouble in terms of costs such as insurance, taxes, paperwork, leave (maternity and paternity) entitlement, etc. They argue that employing from inside the family or ones peer group is much cheaper, convenient and less hassle. This ignores the entrepreneurial employee as a potential ingredient of growth and points to a paradox whereby the very values and emotions characterized by fairness of which of “smallness” and “familialness” is composed compound the issues of discrimination central to the debate.

The paper offer important insights for growth issues among small businesses and challenge the contemporary equilibrium in terms of small “family-orientated” business philosophy relating to employment practices. Ideologically, the entrepreneur is an “outsider” fighting the establishment, yet paradoxically, in a small-business context s/he becomes the establishment by employing outsiders. This results in the fairness vs unfairness paradox.

The paper contributes to the existing knowledge and understanding on growth issues among small businesses by illuminating a paradoxical insider vs outsider tension.

Cute products have found market success. The literature has identified various factors of cuteness, but the effect of size is under-addressed. This study aims to investigate whether and how size perception influences consumers’ cuteness perception.

In three experiments, size was manipulated in terms of visual cue, product description and product name to determine its impact on cuteness perception.

The results of the three experiments demonstrate that a size cue of smallness can heighten consumers’ perception of product cuteness. The first two studies provided converging evidence for the main hypothesis that smaller objects are evaluated as cuter. Study 3 not only replicated the findings of the first two studies but also revealed that vulnerability acts as the underlying process for the smallness-cuteness relationship. Study 3 also showed that the purchase likelihood for an extended product warranty is higher in the small condition compared to the control condition.

While the findings were robust across product types and size manipulations, possible boundary conditions related to product types or individual characteristics were not tested.

The findings suggest how brand managers can use size perceptions to influence consumers’ perceptions of the cuteness of their products and brands.

The findings inform brand managers about the nuances of size cues that may affect how customers perceive their products and identify a more generally applicable cuteness factor that may have downstream implications for marketing practitioners.

A multidimensional scale was developed to measure the cuteness experience a destination can offer. In doing so, this paper attempts to explore the implications of the cuteness aesthetics for destination marketing.

The procedure of scale development was followed. A survey was administered to a college student sample. The scale of cuteness experience was validated. A four-point scale turned out to be effective in terms of measurement.

The results show that cuteness experience of a destination consists of five dimensions: smallness, irregularity, roundness, lightness and creativity.

The cuteness attributes have significant implications for promoting destinations to the East Asian markets, which have seen the rise of the cute culture in recent decades.

This study identified a unique selling point of destinations, namely, cuteness as a destination attribute. The study results also contribute to understanding of destination personality by drawing attention to the childlike personality trait: cuteness.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test the theory that new industry entrants hold advantages over incumbents in the shift from unidirectional to multi-directional revenue streams.

Using a Cobb-Douglas production function, modified to isolate returns to innovation, the authors examine data from three separate contexts: steamships on Western US rivers (1810-1860), satellite-based internet services (1962-2010) and food waste recycling (1995-2015).

The results reveal that while incumbents often attempt to stretch existing technologies to fit emerging circumstances, entrepreneurial innovators achieve greater success by approaching multi-directional value creation as a distinct challenge, one requiring new technologies, organizational forms and business models. Existing theories have primarily attributed incumb ent inertia to a firm’s inability perceive and pursue radical innovations, the results also suggest that existing firms are unwilling to pursue innovations that are likely to erode the marginal profitability of their respective business models. Ironically, rather than protecting incumbents’ financial interests, the authors find that “marginal reasoning” can lead to diminished performance and even extinction.

The proposed framework and empirical findings have implications for numerous multi-directional frontiers, including: social networking, commercial space travel, distance education and medical treatments using nanoscale technologies.

While incumbents often lament the destabilizing effects of multi-directionality, new and small firms enjoy a compelling array of entry points and opportunities.

Scholars, incumbent firms and start-ups both benefit from insights stemming from the novel formulation of multi-directionality challenges and opportunities.

This study aims to analyze the individual and joint effects of institutional support by government and nongovernment institutions on early internationalizing firms’ (EIFs) performance. It also investigated the moderating impact of firm age and size on the institutional support-firms’ export performance relationships.

Data were collected from 705 EIFs in the apparel industry of Bangladesh and analyzed with hierarchical regression.

The positive influence of institutional support on exporting firms’ financial performance is stronger for the joint effect of government and nongovernment assistance than the individual impact. Firms’ size positively moderates the impact of individual government and nongovernment assistance, while age positively moderates their resource-bundling effect.

The findings suggest the necessity of integrating resources from diverse but complementary sources of institutional support for superior export performance. The findings also show the presence of the liability of smallness and liability of newness in the standalone and joint influence of institutional support, respectively.

Firms need to bundle resources obtained from the government (unrequited) and nongovernment (reciprocal) institutional support to overcome the liability of smallness they might encounter while availing of support from only one source.

Distinguishing between government and nongovernment institutional support, this paper sheds light on exporting firms’ resource-bundling mechanism for these two sources of support in the backdrop of an emerging economy. It also offers fresh insights into the critical role of the liabilities of newness and smallness in early internationalization, especially with regard to the home-country institutional environment.

The authors advance a model theorizing how new ventures elicit citizenship behaviors to cultivate dynamic capabilities that help bolster survival in their nascent years of operations—a characteristically resource-scarce and turbulent context.

Drawing on and integrating research on citizenship behaviors with dynamic capabilities, the authors develop a theory that new ventures that are better able to evoke a combination of affiliative and challenging citizenship behaviors from their wider entrepreneurial team (i.e. internal, and external stakeholders) are more adept at mitigating the liabilities of smallness and newness. As these behaviors are spontaneous and not explicitly remunerated, new ventures become stronger at utilizing their limited resource base for remaining lean and agile. Further, key boundary conditions are theorized that the sociocultural norms the venture is embedded within serve to heighten/attenuate the degree to which entrepreneurs can effectively cultivate dynamic capabilities from their team's “extra mile” behaviors.

The propositions extend a rich body of research on citizenship behaviors into the new venture domain. As all new ventures face the challenge of overcoming liabilities of newness, models that help understand why some are more adept at overcoming this and why others fail, hold substantive practical utility.

This research is the first to unpack how citizenship behaviors manifest among an extended range of stakeholders traditionally overlooked in new venture teams research and the mechanism for how this links to venture survival.

Reaching customers globally and building a global brand and market presence is a demanding task for any firm. For early and rapidly internationalising small firms this is exceptionally challenging due to the restraints that ensue from the liabilities of smallness, newness and foreignness and the speed of their internationalisation. We argue that entrepreneurial marketing is a driver of entrepreneurial internationalisation and one of the – neglected – explanations for superior international performance. The authors conceptualise entrepreneurial marketing along four core (marketing) abilities which fit particularly well the international new firm and show how these positively impact on early and accelerated internationalisation and alter the risk profile of the venture in general.

Switzerland is characterized by the smallness of its territory (41,000km²) as well as by its considerable ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. This combination of small size and diversity has had a strong influence on Swiss politics and the Swiss militia army. There has always been a pressure to take into consideration many different interests in political decision making. It is not primarily theoretical considerations that have been decisive for the army format (model) and the civil–military relations but rather the political and historical conditions of the founding of the Swiss Federation. These circumstances are the principles of federalism on the one hand and the century-old tradition of the citizen militia in connection with a deeply rooted distrust of military professionalism on the other. In addition, the neutrality of Switzerland plays an important role as well.

This conceptual paper aims at providing the readers of the Journal of Management History with an evaluation of the overall impact of Arthur Stinchcombe's liability of newness construct on the management literature about organizational evolution over time.

The paper adopts an historical approach for discussing the development of those theoretical and empirical trajectories which, drawing on Stinchcombe's seminal underpinnings, have been developed by scholars over the second half of the twentieth century. The most recent enhancements on this topic are also discussed.

The analysis demonstrates that the impact of the liability of newness on the related literature is great and twofold. On the one hand, it emerges that this concept has directly inspired a number of subsequently formulated constructs, such as the liabilities of smallness, adolescence and aging. On the other hand, it is evidenced that Stinchcombe's seminal insights still constitute one of the most fascinating bases for directing and positioning scholarly efforts within the organizational evolution research domain to date.

The value of this paper is that it adopts a unique way for examining the development of a number of theoretical frameworks and empirical inquiries variously associated with the liability of newness over time. Three time decades are historically identified and the links among them are deepened.