It is commonly reported that new businesses have difficulty in accessing finance. Such businesses can engage in ‘bootstrapping’ activities as a way of compensating for the lack of finance and other resources. This paper extends prior research on start-up finance by investigating how social...

Over 7 years, the UK-Government funded an entrepreneurship scholarship scheme in the most deprived regions of England. This study examines how, for 211 of these nascent entrepreneurs, bootstrapping compensated for their inability to obtain debt or equity funding. Results show that social capital...

Summary Recent research into gender equality in small- to medium-sized organisations (SMEs) in the UK demonstrates low engagement with a formal model of procedural equality. This paper explores whether a diversity approach might be more helpful in evaluating SME practice in the area of gender...

Using a longitudinal research design, this article considers employers' human resource management practices in respect of disability equality: in 1995 under the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act and in 2003 under the Disability Discrimination Act. The article analyses whether there has been a...

We explore how socially embedded life courses of individuals within Britain affect the resources they have available and their capacity to apply those resources to start-up. We propose that there will be common pathways to entrepreneurship from privileged resource ownership and test our...

Business start-up is promoted to the labour-market disadvantaged internationally. This policy increasingly draws on the concept of social inclusion. In this paper we define ‘enterprise inclusion’ policy as situating the chance to start a viable business as a right and supporting the multiply...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate different quality approaches in managing innovation and new product development (NPD) and to examine these with particular reference to the quality enablers/mechanisms that each approach provides. An attempt has also been made to provide an introduction...

The authors focus on the way in which owner-managers in smaller firms improve their businesses through the creation of ‘strategic space’. The term ‘strategic space’ refers to the process by which owner-managers are able to access resources, motivation and capability to review existing...