Spontaneity and Systematic Planning in Small Firms—a Grounded Theory Approach

parts of an explorative researchparts ~- project treating the question of how the small firm receives its organising structures (Brytting, 1990a, b). The choice of an explorative approach was based on a conviction that many of the traditional theories and models taught in our business schools do not function well enough to capture the kind of complex, capricious, and turbulent events often found in small firms. Often, our concepts fail to consider the importance of individual cognitive processes as explanations of small firm behaviour. Concepts taken from management theory and organisation theory, are rejected by small firm managers and our models do not make proper predictions. For instance, Plaschka (1987) compared 62 successful and 63 unsuccessful entrepreneurs and concluded that &dquo;schoolish and job oriented education has no significant influence on entrepreneurial success&dquo;. Several other researchers in this area have expressed frustration over the present theoretical’ situation, and have pointed out the problematic transference of existing management theory and organisational theory to the study of small firms. Many of them also express the need for a coherent small firm organisation theory. Ramstr6m discussed the existing small firm research in 1975, and concluded that the ’laws ’ discovered, mainly through extensive statistically based research, had limited relevance for any specific firm (Ramstr6m, 1975). After conducting a similar discussion ten years later, Ramstr6m reached the same conclusions (Ramstr6m, 1986). He found the research area fragmented and stressed the need for a common theory. Gibb (1986) also investigated the ’state-of-the-art ’ and found great ’misfits’ between the values and beliefs of large enterprises and universities on the one hand, and those of the entrepreneurs on the other. In his 1989 treatment of this problem, the same conclusions were reached. Gibb (1989) mentions, for example, ’market’, ’planning’, ’new products ’ and ’profits ’ as examples of highly ambiguous concepts taken from large bureaucratic contexts, which ar