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The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework on transitions is used to interpret European electric vehicle take up and auto mobility transition. It finds that environmental and energy security pressures have created a favourable landscape 'push' for Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) that in turn has encouraged and facilitated serious commitment from some manufacturers. Yet BEVs, as a niche product seeking to disrupt an entrenched and established regime, face significant multi-level forces acting as barriers against such a transition, which the paper explores. This combination of factors creates a situation where BEV market penetration remains far below the level required for mass market transition. For BEVs to 'cross the chasm' and gain an established foothold in the market and hence significantly disrupt the regime, more holistic and effective solutions are required. It is argued that, so far, this has yet to be fully taken on board by policy makers.

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Recent research attributes rural industrialisation to the enhanced competitive performance of rural small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Central to much of this work has been a desire to acknowledge empirical diversity in business behaviour and performance between different rural spaces. Drawing on the tenets of critical realism the authors develop a conceptual framework which permits the diversity of behaviour exhibited by rural SMEs to be more fully recognised and understood. This highlights the role of generic 'structural' influences on the performance of rural enterprises, yet emphasises the need to investigate the precise 'local' conditions through which these mechanisms are mediated and experienced. In this way, the form of competitive behaviour exhibited by rural SMEs is posited as an outcome of the interplay of structural influences (or mechanisms) and the unique circumstances (or contingent conditions) prevailing at the level of the individual enterprise. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.