Barriers to Change in Small Businesses: Some Cases from an Inner City Area

Abstract

DR. PAULJOYCE, DR. ADRIAN WOODS, and Tony McNulty are lecturers in the business school of the Polytechnic of North London, England. Dr. Paul Corrigan was also formerly based at the polytechnic. This paper examines the perceptions of business people on the barriers to making desired changes in various aspects of their businesses. The evidence is based on interviews conducted in a number of relatively small manufacturing and retail enterprises in the London borough of Hackney. It was found that the market was seen by these business people as an important barrier to making changes. This was so in a number of areas but was especially critical in respect of the firms' flexibility in changing their products or services and, for the manufacturing firms, in making changes to their orders. The analysis develops the argument that the market is a particular type of economic co- ordinating mechanism, one which is a source of opportunities for small firms and simultaneously a constraint on their actions. The opportunities create the potential for change; the constraint makes the actual change potentially difficult. It is the cause, on occasion, of the need to make changes. The market is, therefore, as a co-ordinating mechanism, full of difficult actual and potential changes for small businesses.