small, family owned business firms will those strategies designed to (a) improve internal organizational communications, and (b) decentralize authority and responsibility within the organization.
The most important term that must be identified is "small business." Attempting to discover a definition of small business is analogous to fighting one's way through a blackberry bramble. In spite of all the efforts made, and all the scratches suffered, the desired fruit is often just out of reach. In seeking a definition of small business for this study, it is useful to proceed from the inane to the more thoughtful and useful.
In the context of inanity, it is difficult to top Ralph Gaedeke and Dennis Tootelian. Their silliness defines a small business in the contexts of the following three perceptions:
1. A small business is one which "is small enough to be exempt from the government regulations it knows about, but large enough that government agencies cite it for violating regulations it never heard of."
2. A small business is one which "has at least three fewer employees than it really needs to get the job done."
3. A small business is one which "has missed at least one payroll."
In illustrating their definition of big business, Gaedeke and Tootelian used as examples automobile manufacturers and professional football teams. To equate the two within an economic context of large scale enterprise is ludicrous. As a consequence, their definition is rendered inappropriate for use in scholarly research.
The Committee for Economic Development (CED) proposed some more meaningful criteria for defining small business more than 40 years ago. The CED defined as small businesses those in which (1) management is independent, (2) capital is supplied by either an individual owner, or by a small group of individuals, (3) operations remain local, and (4) firm size is small relative to the industr...