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Draws upon a study of the ways in which entrepreneurs use trust to mediate customer perceived risk at the start of a venture in order to show how researchers can combine elements of both approaches in an epistemologically consistent way. Specifically, researchers seeking to use an inductivist/qualitative approach can start with an a priori specification of constructs, perhaps in the form of a model. One of the ways in which this can help researchers is to identify where they should look in order to find the phenomena of interest to them. We argue that the difference between inductivist and deductivist research is how they draw upon existing research: in inductivist research theory can be used where it is composed of constructs while theory represented in the form of variables is more appropriate in hypothetico‐deductive research.

Worldwide economic decline, rampant inflation, floating exchange rates and the rise of the Pacific Rim countries mean that businesses in the Western World must adopt a different strategy.

The relationship between strategic positioning and the appropriate mechanism for its implementation is important to most top managers. The determination of an appropriate organisational relationship will largely reflect the complexity of the trading environment. Intrapreneurship within traditional organisational structural formats is one mechanism to combat turbulent trading conditions. A “menu” of organisational relationships is presented which are used within a looser model of organisational relationships. Changes of this nature imply a re‐examination of managerial “grooming”. Educators must design school curricula around criteria of increasing self‐reliance and risk taking. Management developers should encourage the same characteristics. A change in political and social attitudes is also indicated.

Ten years ago, small businesses were very much viewed as “country cousins” and were considerably patronized by their larger counter‐parts in big business. The small‐business owner was considered rather odd, and was certainly bereft of the modern techniques and skills possessed by the larger company manager. Organizations were established, serviced by retired large company executives, in order to pass on their administrative pearls of wisdom to these ignorant embryos. Wise old “grandfathers” would smooth the way for these “children” to bypass the trauma of adolescence and achieve adulthood.

This article describes the perceptions of 177 senior executives within smaller firms as to the extent to which the marketing concept is practised within their company. The study was conducted amongst manufacturing firms in the Northern Indiana, Southern Michigan, Eastern Illinois triangle in the United States. The aim of the research was to discover the extent to which size delineated firms with respect to their marketing activity. Would the popular wisdom that small firms do not market, and as a corollary that larger ones do, be supported?

This is the second and final part of an article which considers the role of the UK education sector in small firms management, education and training. The first part reviewed the changing pressures on the higher education sector which provide opportunities for its greater involvement with the owner‐managed company. It also looked closely at the needs of the “customers” for small business training and discussed how these might be usefully segmented. We now discuss the contribution of the education sector along with the “supply side” problems. The data is drawn from a survey of 80 ex‐participants of the UK Small Business Management Teachers Programme. The survey was undertaken in 1982. The objectives of this programme and its importance in the field of the small business management were discussed in the first part.

This article provides an overview of the changing pattern of education and training for small business in the UK (in so far as such training is carried out in the education sector). The article is divided into two parts. Part I provides an overview of the key factors influencing training provision in the UK, in particular the growth of official policies of support for small firms development. It then reviews the overall needs that might be met by programmes for small business and postulates a model based on the career cycle for consideration of teaching and training opportunities. Part II, to be published later, surveys the management problems that the education sector faces in coming to terms with small business and discusses how these might be overcome. The evidence for this is based on a 1982 survey of teachers who have attended the UK Small Business Management Teachers Programme. This programme, which has been operating since 1977, is presently run by a consortium of Trent Polytechnic, Central London Polytechnic, London Business School and Durham University Business School. The programme aims to encourage the systematic development of the response of the education sector in the UK to the needs of the smaller business.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Literature on spin-offs still lacks a thorough understanding of the forces governing spin-off performance. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by taking a network perspective.

The paper combines the literature on spin-offs with the network approach to new ventures to proposing a model showing how networking in the pre-entry phases affects a spin-off's survival and early growth.

The intensity and variety of interactions between the future entrepreneur (FE) and other individual actors has a positive impact on spin-off performance in both the incubation and the emergence phases. The degree of overlap between the network of the incubation phase and the network of the emergence phase also reinforces the effects of the intensity and variety of these interactions on performance during the emergence phase. Finally, entrepreneurial innovativeness is an antecedent of spin-off performance in that it requires different degrees of overlap between the network of the incubation phase and the network of the emergence phase.

Being a conceptual paper, the study needs the support of empirical research. For example, samples of spin-offs achieving a high and low performance could be compared in relation to their FE's networking activity.

The paper creates a bridge between the inherited knowledge approach to spin-offs and the network approach to new ventures to provide a framework for explaining spin-off performance.