This paper addresses differences in the way that the problems of small UK firms are construed by policy makers on the one hand, and by the executives of small companies on the other. The authors employ a discursively-based analysis of interviews carried out with managers of small manufacturing companies in the West London area. They suggest that SME executives construe their attitudes to advanced technology and innovation within the terms of some clear, but implicit management values which tend to lead to the perception of innovation as a risk to be managed, rather than an opportunity to be exploited. It is suggested this has significant implications for attempts to change small company culture.
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References
1.
DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), Competitiveness, Forging Ahead, CM 2867, HMSO, London, 1995; DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), Competitiveness, Creating the Enterprise Centre of Europe, CM 3300, HMSO, London, 1996.
2.
OST (Office of Science and Technology), Realising Our Potential, Cm 2250, HMSO, London, 1993.
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OST (Office of Science and Technology), Science Shaping the Future?, OST, London, 1997.
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CooleyM.European Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century, FAST Programme, Brussels, 1990.
5.
RocheB., Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Small Firms, Trade and Industry, ‘Enhanced Business Links — a vision for the 21st century’, Ministerial speech, 8 October 1997, with foreword by Margaret Beckett, the President of the Board of Trade, Web publication: www.dti.gov.uk
6.
DTI, 1996, Op cit, Ref 1.
7.
We actually interviewed 21 companies, on the basis of information provided by two local TECs (Training and Enterprise Councils). In the event, however, one of these companies (Company 21) turned out to be a distributor rather than a manufacturer, and two (Companies 3 and 19) were more properly divisions of a larger corporation. In fact several of the companies we interviewed were members of a larger group: We included as SMEs any that had financial and strategic responsibility for their own product and process decisions.
8.
We assessed the SMEs in terms of various available definitions of ‘technological advance’, such as that developed by the European Commission (Cordis Focus, Supplement 11, 29 October 1996, p 5). According to these criteria, all bar two (Companies 5 and 6) were describable as in some respects ‘technologically advanced’.
9.
In this case, the company did not describe itself as ‘backward’. We have suggested that it is effectively positioning itself as backward, because the executive we interviewed described the company's market position in terms of the opportunity for repairing old pumps which few others still had the equipment to repair.
10.
It is interesting to note that such self-positioning in terms of being ‘leading-edge’ or not is not an indicator of whether a company mayhave relationships with the academic research community. Of the companies quoted above, Company 18 had the richest set of links with universities of any company that we interviewed (including use of university researchers as consultants, and a plan to fund a research fellowship). Company 11 had some links and carried out some monitoring of academic research development. Companies 13 and 2 had no substantial links with universities, except that Company 2 had university research departments among its customers.
11.
DTI,1996, Op cit, Ref 1.
12.
WatermanN. A., ‘The management of innovation’, Europe 2000, Vol II, No 5, pp 69–74.
13.
The rationale behind policies of ‘increasing innovation’ is similarly put into question in Steve Woolgar's 1997 Brunel 3M Innovation Lecture, ‘A new theory of innovation?’, forthcoming in Prometheus.
14.
Roche, Op cit, Ref 5.
15.
In the terms of discourse analysis, it maybe said that good management practice is ‘performed’ in these descriptions; that is, that specific standards of good management are sustained and endorsed in their implicit use as standards. Cf WoolgarS.GomesP.VauxJ.EzingeardJ-NGrieveR.‘Abilities and competencies required, particularly by small firms, to identify and acquire new technology, Technovation, Vol 18, No 8/9, 1998.
16.
See Note 8.
17.
Indeed, calls for a ‘change of culture’ can often be understood as simply acknowledging the complexity of a problem. To call for ‘the culture’ to be changed becomes a way of avoiding the specificity of issues and differences that need to be addressed.
WoolgarS.‘Configuring the user: The case of usability trials’, in LawJ., ed, A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Routledge, London and New York, 1991. See also GrintK.WoolgarS., The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organisation, Polity, 1997.
20.
GomesM.P.S.F.VauxJ.H.EzingeardJ.-N.GrieveR.J.RaceP.WoolgarS.W., ‘Promoting exploitation of university research by SMEs: On evaluating technology discrimination on the World Wide Web’, Industry and Higher Education, Vol 11, No 11997, pp 21–27.
