JAMES CURRAN is Midland Bank Professor of Small Business Studies and head of the Small Business Research Unit at Kingston Polytechnic, England, and John Stanworth is Professor and director of the Future of Work Research Group at the London Management Centre, Polytechnic of Central London, England. Small business education and training has grown rapidly in importance as 'enterprise' has assumed a key role in the main political initiatives towards economic restructuring in Britain and elsewhere. This development has, however, been essentially ad hoc and there is now a need to identify more clearly the major forms of enterprise and training education, their target populations and their resource effectiveness. 'Entrepreneurial education' or 'training for entrepreneurship' are widely used phrases, often intended to take on a generic meaning. However, most small business educational activities have little to do with promoting 'entrepreneurship' in any strict sense. To clarify the analysis and disaggregate the main forms of education and training activities linked to the small business, the authors have distinguished four distinct types-entrepreneurial education for small business and self-employment, continuing small business education, and small business awareness education. They conclude that in research terms there is a considerable need for a great deal of further study in all four dimensions for each of the forms of education. In policy terms the most resource effective form currently is probably education for small business ownership but they say that the greatest need is probably for more continuing small business education although this may be expensive in resource terms.

No abstract

PROFESSOR JOHN STANWORTH, Stephanie Blyth, Bill Granger, and Celia Standworth are all members of the Future of Work Research Group at the London Management Centre, Polytechnic of Central London, England. At the current time, they are involved in several research projects, one of them being the study of rates of intergenerational inheritance of enterprise culture-a principal theme of this paper. The authors examine evidence from several countries in an attempt to predict the incidence of enterpreneurship and conclude that sociological determinants offer the best indication as to precisely who, among the many who express an interest, is most likely actually to make the transition to self-employment. In addition to examining the contributions of others in this field, the paper presents data recently collected by the authors themselves.

The 1980s and early 1990s have witnessed a substantial growth in the self‐employed component of the national labour‐force. Of these, around two‐thirds are one‐person businesses without employees. This article identifies an occupational grouping which occupies a position at the extreme point on a continuum of small business independence, virtually indistinguishable from that of employees.

PROFESSOR JOHN STANWORTH IS DIRECTOR of the International Franchise Research Centre, at the University of Westminster, England, and Professor Patrick Kaufmann is associate professor of marketing at Georgia State University, USA. The dominant quest for 'independence' (and allied intrinsic satisfactions) among those entering self-employment has been well-documented in the UK, the USA and elsewhere. This appears to hold true for those entering franchising as well as those staging an entry into more conventional small businesses. However, in addition to this, franchising, as a 'tried-and-tested' business format is designed to appeal to motives of economic security far sooner than would normally be the case in a small business career. Additionally, franchisors frequently acknowledge the changing developmental nature of franchisee motivation over the lifespan of a career in franchising and yet, to date, no theoretical framework has been developed to aid an understanding of the dynamic and changing nature of franchisee motivation and its behavioural implications. This current paper represents a first stage attempt at construction of a motivational model capable of being extended through the full career of a franchisee. The research reported here examines data drawn from 728 face-to-face interviews with individuals ('potential franchisees') attending franchise exhibitions held in London, England, and Washington DC, USA, during the spring of 1994. The results indicate marked similarities. The sample is disaggregated into three distinct sub-samples which are then treated as cross-sectional in terms of their socialisation into patterns of motives normally associated with self-employment. The model which emerges is seen as being capable of being extended through the entire career of a franchisee and the paper points to areas of future research required to develop further this process of model construction.