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From a literature review and a comprehensive survey aims to analyze how small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) use existing support systems. The analysis is specifically on focusing different size groups within the SME category, the role of industrial sector, and regional location.

The combination of macro‐economic theory and entrepreneurial perspectives constitutes the theoretical framework for this study. Empirical data are collected via a survey to over 1,000 Swedish SMEs with one to 49 employees, from both manufacturing and service industries, and from three different regions. Descriptive as well as multivariate statistical techniques are used in the analysis.

The results indicate low participation rates of available support services and the largest manufacturing companies with a location in sparsely populated areas are the most frequent users. Vague arguments from neo‐classical theory and lack of clarity in definitions of small firms pose an obstacle to the production of empirical results as well as theoretical development. Support users are mainly positive to the services and, although the “take‐up rate” has increased in recent years, a better match between demand and supply of support services must be undertaken.

This paper gives understanding of how the business support programs are received among small companies. The results generated via a large sample size, 1,022 companies, combined with theoretical considerations, give a solid platform for research and policy conclusions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of the special interests of key decision makers in entrepreneurship policy formation at the national level. The core question is: what is the role that special interests play in a situation with significantly improved evidence through a growing number of high-quality international benchmark studies on entrepreneurial performance.

An ethnographic method is applied to analyse in depth the 2005 decision by the Danish Government to shift from a volume-oriented to a growth-oriented entrepreneurship policy. This decision process is an extreme case since Denmark has world-class evidence of its entrepreneurial performance.

Even in such a well-investigated country, which since 2000 has had a pioneering role in the development of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor study and international register-based studies, the special interests of a few top-level politicians and civil servants have significantly influenced the decision to shift the overall policy. These special interests guided the interpretation of the ambiguous evidence provided by these two benchmark studies.

Policy makers are made aware of the need to take a critical view on international benchmark studies, asking what is studied and how and realising that “the truth” about a country’s entrepreneurial performance cannot be found in just one study.

The theoretical value of this paper is its challenge to the widespread rationality view in the entrepreneurship policy field and a deepened understanding of how the pursuit of special interests is related to ambiguous evidence and system-level rationality.

The focus in this chapter is on male strategies of coping with unemployment and how these strategies are gendered due to local contextual factors, physical and natural as well as social and cultural. The results of the study show, in the case of men's relations to the labour market and the factors affecting such relations, how the Swedish welfare model and gender contracts work in a rural setting. The interrelation among labour market, household and family is formed according to the local gender contract and is supposed to develop within the frames of national policies, but it is also formed according to hegemonic gender regimes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of Sweden as a racialised spatial imaginary in the emerging transnational networks of far-right media production. Departing from President Donald Trump’s widely reported remarks, in 2017, as to “what happened last night in Sweden”, it examines the racializing discourses through which Sweden is constructed as a dark future to be averted; a failed social experiment in immigration and multiculturalism symbolised by the “no-go zones” held to be dotted, yet denied, in its major cities. While the symbolic production of “problem areas” is a familiar dimension of the politics of immigration, the paper explores why Sweden-as-nation is so insistently and intimately associated with its putative no-go zones in what are termed the “revenge fantasies” of the far-right. Further, it argues that these modes of representation cannot be understood without examining the value of Sweden as a news commodity in the expansive far-right media environment.

The analysis offers the idea of “taboo news” to conceptualise putatively “alternative” news about Sweden which is confirmed through its denial in the mainstream.

It argues that examining the increasing importance of “taboo news” as a commodity form must be integrated into a reading of how these racializing narratives are produced and circulated.

In so doing, it examines the shaping of this racialised imaginary as a digital assemblage taking shape as a commodity in a newly emerging and under-researched field of communicative and ideological action.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue about the construction industry and the management of its supply chains. It aims to discuss and point to some differences and possible similarities with traditional manufacturing and its supply chains.

The paper is mostly a literature review and contains official statistics.

The market of the construction company is mostly local and highly volatile. The long durability of the construction “product” contributes to the volatility. The product specification process before the customer order arrives shows different degrees of specifications: engineer to order, modify to order, configure to order, select a variant. (The common make‐to‐stock in traditional manufacturing does not exist.) A construction company only executes a small part of the project by its own personnel and capacity. This is a way of risk spreading and risk mitigation and to compensate for an unstable market. If a construction company wants to establish a new concept, from “engineer to order” to e.g. “configure to order”, it must be engaged earlier in the business process and with other than usual customers, which might complicate the process.

Experiences from Sweden and Swedish developments are the main source of information.

The paper introduces the articles that are a source of scientifically generated knowledge regarding various problems and opportunities associated with supply chain management in the project‐based construction industry.