Journal of Enterprising Culture

As a growth strategy, small businesses are increasingly seeking customers in foreign countries. Our knowledge about certain small business export concepts and relationships, however, is still fragmented. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine export start-up effectiveness issues for a set of small firms. Results indicate that sales measures, such as export intensity (export sales as a percent of total sales), were the most frequently used effectiveness criteria for the first year of exporting. This finding is important because in the literature export intensity has been criticised as an export effectiveness measure.

A young researcher who is new to small business research needs to accept that management is a nascent discipline and that the process of advancing knowledge is fraught with difficulties. This paper focuses on the approach utilised by a young new management studies lecturer, specialising in a large company oriented Human Resource Management knowledge-base, wishing to research for the first time on small business and its management training needs. The paper demonstrates how the shortcomings and difficulties of small business management research can be utilised as "signposts" to guide any future small business researcher. Integral to this signposting is the debate on quantitative versus qualitative research methodology. An alternative philosophical foundation is then considered allowing the co-existence of both methodologies. The paper also draws attention to the difficulties and shortcomings inherent in such a research approach and considers the role of "partial frameworking" in assisting the new researcher to develop an understanding from which to achieve a structured approach to case study methodology.

A large number of corporations around the world have changed their organisational structure in the past few years. The aim is to overcome rigid structures and to increase entrepreneurial flexibility. This paper first defines entrepreneurial flexibility and then analyses the forms of flexible organisational structures to determine the essential components of entrepreneurial and flexible organisational designs. The results indicate that, although many different flexible organisational forms have been proposed and implemented, entrepreneurial flexibility requires three organisational characteristics: teamwork, intense information and knowledge transfer between organisational units, and fewer hierarchy levels. Entrepreneurial flexibility does not imply dissoluteness and a lack of structure. Hierarchy and control remain important in every organisation.

This paper attempts to provide a new explanation of the huge trade deficit of US against Japan based on an analysis of different strategic behaviours between US firms and Japanese firms. More specifically, we intend to answer the following questions: (1) How do business culture and institutional arrangements affect a firm's strategic behaviour? (2) Who will be the winner when a profit-maximizer meets a revenue-maximizer under a simple duopolistic competition framework? (3) What are the policy implications of this analytical framework for the US-Japan bilateral trade? Why does the trade friction cyclically occur between two countries? Using a simple Cournot (quantity adjustment) model for a duopolistic market, we show that a revenue-maximizer will be the winner when it meets a profit-maximizer; that is, it will obtain a larger market share and a higher profit [i.e., in our terminology, the revenue-maximizer dominance hypothesis].

Four general stages appear to be common in the organisational life-cycle of small businesses in Papua New Guinea (PNG): Formation, Early Growth, Later Growth and Maturity. Owner/managers confront different set of problems as the life-cycle of their businesses progressed inevitably shifting their operational and management priorities, degree of involvement in running the business, and the scope of management. External environmental problems appear predominant over the life-cycle particularly in the formation and survival stages. Internal problems predominate the late growth and maturity stages. Planning emerged as the biggest problem of small businesses in PNG. At the formation stages, developing a viable business plan for the sourcing of funds and establishing a direction for the business was the major planning problem. Marketing planning problems were more prevalent in the growth stages, and financial planning problems appeared at both the formation and maturity stages. Other problems, such as poor customer contact and weak and fragmented market, spanned the life cycle stages. The organisational life-cycle concept was shown to be adaptable across cultures but problems at different stages of the organisational life-cycle differed across cultures and level of economic development of nations.

Regional economic or regional enterprise development has been subject to intense research by economists, planners, enterprise specialists and policy specialists for decades. The paper examines various models for regional economic or regional enterprise development and focuses on small towns and communities as an essential component of development. The paper reviews the role of entrepreneurs in enterprise strategies linked to towns and communities and the origins of entrepreneurs and strategies that might be adopted at the regional level to provide support for the entrepreneurial event. The results of a field study of over three hundred Australian regional development centres small enterprise clients, the strategies of those centres impact on entrepreneurs, reveal that the proposed objectives were not achieved and the strategies were in retrospect questionable. The paper concludes with recommended strategies for practitioners and policy makers dedicated to regional development and recognising the role of entrepreneurs in that process.