Human Resources Aspects Of Small Business And Enterprise Development

The third issue of Volume 9 is dedicated to a particularly pertinent aspect of small business and enterprise development: Human Resources (HR). Interestingly, until the late 1960s, HR received scant attention from academics, practitioner and policy makers. The organisation, as the main unit of economic measure, appears to have held the ‘‘dominant paradigm’’ position throughout the Industrial Revolution and well into the second half of the twentieth century. Incremental shifts within dominant organisational paradigms tend to be evolutionary in character and are most likely to occur intermittently until the critical mass of change gathers momentum. Until recently, revolutionary shifts were rare and seemed to be confined mainly to the domain of scientific and/or military innovation. In the UK, the rise of ‘‘corporatism’’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century signalled the slow but potent growth of ‘‘managerialism’’. Inherent within this movement was the decline of individual corporate ownership and its replacement by institutional and mass shareholding. Many notable exceptions to this trend lingered on, but the growth of the managerial class and its influence on organisational strategy gave birth to its own core paradigm. The development of the management paradigm was further fuelled by the post-Second World War period of fast economic growth and relative affluence. The oil shocks of the early 1970s, however, heralded the onset of large-scale youth and adult unemployment. Downscaling, restructuring and the relocation of large chunks of corporate activity resulted in structural changes and labour migration across national and international boundaries. Simultaneously, the much-debated notion of HR emerged as an important component of sustainable competitive advantage strategies. Notably, during the 1980s and 1990s, an increasing number of interrelated concepts made their appearance and grew into topics and subtopics of their own: Human Resource Management (HRM), Human Resource Development (HRD), Human Resource Accounting (HRA), Vocational Education and Training (VET), Continuing Education and Training (CET), Enterprise Education and Training (EET), Industrial Relation (IR), Employee Relations (ER), Lifelong Education (LE) and so on. The list grows exponentially and even dedicated ‘‘holistic approach’’ academics can no longer attempt keep up with minute and/or marginal developments in HR and related issues. Initially, the HR approach to small firm needs and strategies involved mostly the customisation of large business solutions. Usually, best practice or recommended interventions that were found to work in large organisations were cut down to a size that supposedly fulfilled the perceived needs of a large and diverse population of SMEs. Invariably, however, such expectations were not realised and owner/managers failed to buy into the dominant HR paradigm