Abstract
This book is a collection of 20 original chapters on policy development in countries around the world, practical tools to foster small firms and entrepreneurship, and policy and programme evaluation and assessment. The book tries to span both SMEs and entrepreneurship, and this raises the issue: are policies and programmes for SMEs the same as those for entrepreneurship? Policymakers around the world are asking this question, as they hear mixed messages from researchers about the economic importance of small firms on the one hand and entrepreneurial firms on the other. The editors’ answer is that the terms “SME” and “entrepreneurship” are meaningless to many people running a business, and policymakers need to understand the very different motivations that different business owner-managers have for doing what they do before they can devise useful policies to help them (p.7). They also point out that these terms mean different things to different policymakers around the globe. This causes difficulties in comparing experiences.
This book reveals big failings by academics and policymakers to get to grips with SME/entrepreneurship policy. The theme of disconnect between policymakers and academics on the one hand and business owners on the other runs through several chapters, including 5, 6 and 19. Another theme is short-termism (e.g. chapter 18). Given limited budgets and short ministerial terms of office, policies and programmes get dumped before they have had a chance to have an effect or to be properly evaluated, and potential for learning is lost for ever. Of course, this is not true universally, but it seems to be a frequent occurrence.
One of the most interesting insights to come from this book is the stark difference between policymaking in theory and in practice, at least in the UK. In chapter 5, Norin Arshad and Sara Carter provide a penetrating insider’s view of the policymaking process in a UK ministry just before the defeat of Labour in the 2010 general election. Far from following the prescribed best-practice formula, officials were focused on “announcements” of initiatives and ministerial reputation management. This provides an explanation for the mistaken assumptions of policy and consequent lack of impact noted by Simon Bridge and Ken O’Neill in chapter 19. Those of us who are engaged in entrepreneurship policy in the UK will recognise these symptoms of dysfunction immediately, but I have not seen them brought to light before in quite such a vivid way. If this is typical of enterprise policymaking, it is no wonder that the number of initiatives in the enterprise policy “industry”, as Greene, Mole and Storey (2008) call it, grew steadily for decades. Although the incoming Conservative government has since abandoned many initiatives and the organisations that delivered them, this has enabled plenty of space for new initiatives to be announced.
It is easy to blame this on the political system of relatively short ‘tours of duty’ for many ministers and civil servants, who feel the need to nurture their reputation by announcing new initiatives before moving on. But if researchers cannot provide cast-iron proof of the effect of alternative policies and programmes, there is room for this sort of game-playing. And this is where this book leaves one wanting more. There are no robust global studies here of cause and effect. The problem with a collection of (mainly) single country cases is that the context is not controlled for. For example, one “lesson offered by the British experience, for those seeking to develop SME advisory services” (Bennett, Chapter 13, p195) is that “centralised structures for government provision, covering a whole country, with simple and single branding, offer superior management of expectations, simpler means of quality control and much lower costs of provision”. This might be true of England, but is it true of all countries? What about Switzerland, for example?
This lack of control of context means that few overall conclusions can be drawn. Even where the editors do draw conclusions, some of them seem at odds with the contributors at times. For example, both Bennett in Chapter 13 (p.195) and Kantis and Frederico in Chapter 4 (p.57) seem wary of decentralised systems of delivery. The editors seem to draw the opposite conclusion (p.9). If the academics do not agree, officials might as well go with gut feel.
The editors of this book rightly describe it as a work in progress, offering no “quick solutions or universal fixes to the challenge of effective policy” (p10). Personally, I think that unless we are able to control for context, it will be extremely difficult to draw useful conclusions in this area. One way to do this is to conduct comparative studies, with robust theoretical frameworks at their heart, across many countries. There are organisations that are capable of doing this, including the OECD, UNCTAD, and GEM. It will be interesting to see, if the editors try a second edition in say five years’ time, whether they can include chapters of global entrepreneurship policy development and evaluation that really do control for context.
A second approach is what Kania and Kramer (2011) have called “collective impact”, where instead of policymakers decreeing a new policy – perhaps after listening to an academic ‘courtier’ whispering in their ear – there is a truly shared identification by all relevant stakeholders of issues and then shared commitment by these stakeholders to carry out a mutually agreed set of interventions. This “ecosystem management” approach is particularly relevant for deep-seated social issues, which were the subject of several chapters, including 6, 7 and 18. Here, context is controlled for in a different way, through the deep knowledge of embedded experts and concerted action of many stakeholders. This could well be one way of tackling difficult and complex issues like entrepreneurship policy, at least at the level of the small nation, region, or sector.