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This study aims to investigate whether “small- and medium-sized enterprises” (SMEs) benefit from their external accountants’ business advice through enhanced firm performance. Most SMEs draw on external support, and their main advisors are external accountants (Bennett and Robson, 1999). The resource-based view of the firm suggests that firms will seek external support if they perceive a gap in their internal resources.

Data were collected from a questionnaire mailed to a random sample of Australian SMEs, defined as businesses having between 5 and 200 full-time employees.

An analysis of 380 survey respondents confirms a positive relationship between the voluntary purchase of business advice and SME performance, and that SME performance is further enhanced when business advice is purchased jointly with auditing. These relationships apply to the small (5-49 employees) but not to the medium-sized (50-200 employees) businesses. Findings are consistent with smaller firms having narrower resource bases and thus a greater need to source business advice.

The accounting profession has long encouraged a broadening of its service base, and evidence that small businesses perceive a performance benefit from their accountants’ business advice provides support for the profession’s strategy.

This research extends the empirical literature investigating the link between the business advice of an external accountant and SME performance. It explains small firms’ demand for business advice by extending the application of the resource-based view of the firm and provides new evidence consistent with “knowledge spillover” from auditing to business advice in the small firm environment.

The paper questions aspects of the UK government’s policy to target small firm support on fast‐growing firms – to maximise its employment impact. The paper explores the tension between advice likely to increase growth and risk‐taking and advice likely to ensure firm survival in the turbulent small and medium‐sized enterprises sector. The research data derive from 24 semi‐structured interviews and a group interview of ten business advisers in the West Midlands region collected between autumn 1996 and spring 1997, and a national survey of 175 Business Link personal business advisers (PBAs) conducted in April 1998. Interviewees responded to a prompt asking for advice to a fast‐growing firm. The paper compares qualitative interview responses from a wide variety of West Midlands business advisers with questionnaire responses from PBAs. The paper suggests that the advice given by accountants and bank managers differs little from that given by Business Link’s PBAs. The paper will argue that advisers including PBAs, offer risk‐averse advice and support to small firms. Present business advice might reduce insolvency rather than increase the number of fast‐growth firms. The risk‐averse nature of advice, reflecting the adviser’s clientele, undermines policies designed to increase the number of fast‐growth companies. It concludes that advice will often be inconsistent with the growth‐oriented aim of government policy.

As a generalisation, the sports industry is a multifaceted, complex and diverse industry, perhaps making it difficult to offer business support and advice. This paper aims to identify and analyse, through sport and recreation business owners, their experience of business support and advice. The study can therefore be seen as contributing to related studies by Mole et al. and responding to Pawson and Tilley's request for a more nuanced view of how public‐support programmes work.

A qualitative, collective case study design is adopted. Three in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with Directors of Sport Businesses were undertaken to identify business support in the West Midlands Sports sector. Interviews focused on business development, the support and advice directors received and the future direction of their business. Interviews were analysed using inductive and deductive content analysis.

The findings from the case studies highlight a variety of general support and advice mechanisms, e.g. Women's Business Development Agency, with differences in regional provision evident. One strong emerging theme indicates that specialised business support occurs which appears critical but ad hoc.

This paper considers the specific business support needs in a largely unreported, yet growing sports sector (based upon a demand led inquiry) into existing providers and business recipients. These findings are pertinent for various organisations such as policy makers, small business support agencies, as well as sports businesses themselves; as they seek to both identify specific sector support needs and evaluate existing practice.

We link the exploration–exploitation framework of organizational learning to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a developing economy. SMEs in a developing economy generally lack abundant resources and capabilities because of an evolving set of industrial and environmental regulations. Studying two SMEs in China, we argue that their approaches to balancing exploration and exploitation depend on the development stages of the SMEs and their industrial and environmental contexts. In particular, we propose a four-stage framework that unfolds via initiation, innovation, transformation, and expansion. In this framework, SMEs balance exploration and exploitation by adopting temporal separation and organizational separation sequentially. We also find that SMEs may benefit from exploring a narrow scope of products and exploiting them in a wide market scope.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the sources and use of social capital on small firm growth in an emerging economy. The study also examines the relationship between small firms’ human capital, internal resources and strategy on social capital sources used, and their impact on small firms’ growth in employment.

The study uses logistics regression and structural equation modelling to analyse data gathered from 441 small firms located in six regions of Ghana where approximately 81 per cent of all businesses are found.

Among the 16 sources of social capital examined, customers were found to be the most used source and the only social capital source that showed significant statistical association with firm growth in employment. Also, the study revealed that human capital, firm resources and strategy variables such as educational level of the owner-manager, firm size, location, firm involvement in internalisation and innovation are statistically significant with social capital sources such as accountants, banks, solicitors, business associates and chamber of commerce.

The findings of the study have implications for policy and practice in situations where government and private sector institutions mandated to support enterprise development appear to be the least social capital sources used by small firms. The findings also provide a better understanding of the use and impact of social capital sources on small firm growth in an emerging economy in Africa.

This study appears to be the first known research on small firms’ social capital that has examined 16 different social capital sources and shown how human capital, internal resources and firm strategy have influenced the use of social capital sources by small firms in an emerging economy.

Uses a large sample survey of businesses to demonstrate that a critical mass threshold exists for their use of business support organization services. This critical mass threshold is very marked for the two organizations examined: British case studies of chambers of commerce and government‐supported business training and advice bodies. Beyond this threshold, managers of chambers of commerce can achieve nonlinear returns to scale, while returns to scale for government‐supported bodies are almost exactly linear. Infers that this results from the very different motives of commercially based chambers and their members, compared to government‐supported bodies, which allow the benefits of service bundling for chambers while managers of government bodies have to deal with multiple discrete programmes offering few synergies. Also examines the effects of external economies of agglomeration and shows that these increase market penetration and hence reduce the catchment sizes necessary to reach critical mass only in the case of the most agglomerated urban and industrial centres.

Building on crisis management studies, this study aims to advance research on brand recovery from the existing focus on product brand/customer dyad into stakeholder marketing and corporate branding.

This study uses a single case of industry-dominant corporate brand in an enriched context through in-depth analysis of industry informant and secondary data.

The paper uncovers detail of corporate brand and stakeholder interactions directed towards recovering corporate brand and restoring trust in the industry.

This study offers an evidence-based framework of stakeholder interactions designed to support corporate brand recovery (CBR). The rich data are bounded within a single case.

Framework illustrates the importance of drawing on stakeholders in CBR, particularly in an industry crisis, emphasises trust restoration and reveals the peripheral role of customers in CBR.

This study points to significance of stakeholder networks, particularly in insurance and financial services, in addressing social and ethical issues related to corporate misdeeds is identified.

This study makes noteworthy contribution to brand recovery research in two ways: firstly, by investigating the recovery of brands at corporate level and, secondly, by detailing the interactions between corporate brand and industry stakeholders in recovering the brand within a stricken industry.

To review empirical contributions to the small business growth literature since the mid‐1990s.

Narrative review of the literature using the framework adopted in previous reviews: management strategies; characteristics of the entrepreneur; environment/industry factors; and firm characteristics.

The absence of any unifying theory means that the literature continues to feature a wide range of growth measures and model specifications. As a result of this, knowledge development appears fragmented rather than cumulative. New theoretical perspectives are needed if we are to develop our understanding of the growth process in small businesses.

Alternative types of research are suggested that focus on small business growth as a process rather than an episode. Future research needs to adopt multiple measures of growth and, more importantly, be based on theory longitudinal in scope but idiosyncratic in its focus. Empirical work should seek to explain the periodicity of growth and the role that learning plays in the idiosyncratic development of small businesses.

The paper synthesizes the literature in an area that is critical in terms of the advice given to policy makers and business owners. It does so while building on the frameworks used in previous reviews and then identifying new research approaches that are needed to advance understanding of the small business growth process.