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During the first half of the twentieth century, “accounting theory,” developed primarily by accounting scholars and academics, provided the primary basis for the practice and teaching of financial accounting in the United States. Since the creation of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in the early 1970s, the FASB conceptual framework has provided the primary basis for accounting standards setting as well as for the practice and teaching of financial accounting. While the purpose of creating a conceptual framework has been to develop an agreed upon set of concepts and principles to guide accounting standards setting, a related goal has been to reduce diversity in accounting practice and to move toward greater uniformity. This chapter traces the influence of accounting theory on the conceptual framework and explores some of the consequences of this influence.

Ever since the Bolton Committee published its Report in 1979, the small firm sector has been a focus for economic regeneration and employment creation. The potential of this sector was further highlighted by the controversial research findings of Birch. Notwithstanding the rigour and robustness of the work, it was used to strengthen and validate the U.K. government's policy of providing considerable assistance towards encouraging new “start‐ups”.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/EUM0000000001875. When citing the article, please cite: Robert Paton, Douglas Brownlie, (1991), “STRATEGY FORMULATION IN SMALL ENTERPRISES: A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH”, European Business Review, Vol. 91 Iss: 2.

A simple but effective approach to the analysis of market opportunities is outlined. It is argued that for small enterprises the link between business development and management development is clear and direct: the consequence being that useful techniques have to be explored and discovered in a partnership with managers, not prescribed on the basis of what other larger firms might do. A process is described that has been tested with the managers of numerous small enterprises as they struggled to come to terms with the implications for their business of the liberalisation of the European market in 1992.

The purpose of this paper is to concentrate on how assessment is used to support the aims of enterprise education leading to recommendations for improvements to the current approach to the assessment of enterprise.

This paper presents a review of entrepreneurship education literature and a qualitative case study conducted on a sample of enterprise educators at University of the West of Scotland. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Paradoxically, the traditional enterprise education paradigm harms that which it attempts to nurture: entrepreneurial thinking and activity. The rationalised approach to education conflicts with the aims of enterprise educators, and there is evidence of a visible and growing disconnect between academia (the theory) and industry (the practice).

The work is limited as it concentrates on a single case study. The qualitative approach focusses on a specific social field and therefore the findings cannot be generalised to other settings. These limitations can be addressed in future research.

This work has resonance for enterprise educators delivering and assessing entrepreneurial learning in an academic setting and will also be of interest to decision makers within this sector concerned with ensuring academic practice remains aligned to policy and industry requirements.

Enterprise education is well researched; however, there is a gap in the area of enterprise assessment which is under researched and not well understood.