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The case-study method has a long and respected history in the mainstream management literature. The philosophy and implications of the case-study method have received considerable attention and there are a number of standard texts on the approach. The method is also gaining acceptance, along with other qualitative methods, within the small business and entrepreneurial research community. Yet there has been little discussion of the distinctive philosophical consequences of applying the case-study approach in this area. This article will address this gap by mapping the paradigms adopted by small business and entrepreneurial case-study researchers. This will provide a platform upon which to explore the consequences of the paradigmatic position that researchers adopt.

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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. ABSTRACTThis research examines micro-enterprises pursuing gradual growth. While very little research has been targeted speci®cally at the growth of micro-enterprises, there are a host of possible in¯uencing factors suggested by the rather broader small business literature. Less research has attempted to integrate the factors that in¯uence growth of small ®rms into some form of model. Those models that were found had a number of shortfalls when it came to understanding the development of micro-enterprises. A framework has been developed through this research that addresses these shortfalls. First, it has targeted speci-®cally gradual growth micro-enterprises; secondly, it is rigorously under-pinned through empirical research; thirdly, it attempts to comprehensively cover the range of factors that in¯uence development; fourthly, it focuses on the complex interaction of factors that may in¯uence development.The research ®ndings and implications are presented in two parts. Part 1 develops an empirically veri®ed framework that explains how growth is in¯uenced by a myriad of interacting factors. This leads to a discussion of the policy implications of the framework. Part 2 is presented in the next edition of the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development (JSBED) and will explore the managerial implications of the framework. This will provide a diagnostic toolkit to help micro-enterprise ownermanagers and advisers pursue growth. The paper is derived from research conducted initially for the submission of a PhD thesis at the University of Brighton (Perren, 1996).

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Research into management information, control and decision-making in small businesses appears on the surface to be contradictory. Some research suggests that small businesses have little management information, poor control and that decision-making is ad hoc (Nayak and Green®eld, 1994). Other research suggests that small businesses acquire eective information (Schafer, 1990) and control (North et al., 1995) through informal means, and that decisionmaking can be sophisticated (Curran et al., 1997;Lightfoot and Kitching, 1996). This research addresses these apparent contradictions by conducting a longitudinal, in-depth exploration of the management information and decision-making processes in four service sector businesses that have recently broken through the micro-enterprise 1 barrier.Multiple sources of evidence were used to construct a longitudinal history of information provision and decision-making in each case. These included taped, oral, accounts of each owner-manager's life, focused semi-structured interview questions and documentary evidence. The quality of the data has allowed a cross case causal network to be constructed which synthesises the evidence. This traces the chains of causality from the informal systems at the start of the businesses through to the later developments of more formal systems. This leads to a consideration of implications for small businesses, practitioners and policy makers.MANAGERIAL AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS . The fear of failure by owner-managers acts as a stimulus for establishing processes of control. . Owner-manager learning is problem focused, suggesting that owner-managers need context speci®c and timely support rather than generic training programmes. . Owner-managers appear to rely on tacit routines to manage key business processes during the early development of their businesses. . There is a need for owner-managers to surface tacit routines as their businesses develop. Small business advisers may have a role in mentoring owner-managers through this process. . Skills are often acquired to address particular problems. They are obtained through informal means and developed in tandem with the business's growth. Such informal incremental approaches to skills development may seem haphazard, but they are appropriate for the scale of business, being timely, low risk and requiring little resource. . Owner-managers that lack management vocabulary may still understand and employ the underlying concepts. Therefore, business advisers should avoid technical terms and explain concepts clearly. . The business, the owner-manager and the management control processes develop in tandem, acting sometimes as a stimulus to each others' development and sometimes as a brake. . As micro enterprises develop so informal personal control by the owner-manager becomes stretched and needs to give way to more formal delegated processes of control. . The transition to more formal delegated processes of control is not a clear step nor are infor-

Small business and entrepreneurship has emerged as an important area of research over the past 40 years. Much of this development has been achieved by drawing on and adapting the theoretical frameworks of disciplines from outside. However, such diversity of disciplinary foundation does not necessarily result in a diversity of underlying meta-theoretical assumptions within an area. Other areas of the social sciences have benefited from the consideration of the meta-theoretical foundations of their research and as a consequence they have been able to extend their research into new agendas. There has been some meta-theoretic discussion of small business and entrepreneurial research, yet the review conducted for this project found no recent articles that provided a systematic analysis of contemporary research. This article will address this gap by employing Burrell and Morgan's (I1979) paradigmatic taxonomy to conduct a systematic meta-theoretical analysis of articles published in the year 2000 by leading authors in key small business and entrepreneurial journals. The analysis shows a dominance of the functionalist paradigm that pervades the elite discourse of research in leading journals and acts as a potential barrier to other perspectives. Whether a Hegelian or Kuhnian perspective on knowledge production is taken, it is clear that the health and future development of research in this area requires a broadening of perspectives to enable debate, friction, creativity and ultimately new theories and understandings.