Industrial relations in SMEs: conceptual and contextual perspectives

Despite the growing significance afforded to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in contemporary Britain, much of the industrial relations (IR) literature in this country is based on research undertaken in large organisations. The minority of IR studies that are focused upon smaller firms tend to be prescriptive and their results polarise into either the 'small is beautiful' or the 'bleak house' perspective. Furthermore, most of these are qualitative studies that involve relatively small target samples and, as a result, there is a paucity of quantitative research that could be generalised across this important sector of the British economy. The research on which this article is based originated from a perceived need to redress this imbalance. As part of a larger, longitudinal research study of IR in Britain, it was carried out over a three-year period (1998-2000) and it collected quantitative and qualitative data from a target sample of 6,000 organisations. Respondents were selected at random from the Yellow Pages Business Database of Great Britain. Preliminary results indicate that the majority of small business owner/managers in the sample exhibited personalised and mostly informal management styles. It emerges that IR in this type of business can be varied as the characteristics, personalities and preferences exhibited by the respondents in the research sample