“…It could be, therefore, that benchmarking against the standards of very large companies has little to offer the SME. Indeed research confirming the under-performance of SMEs in relation to a variety of new working practices including TQM (Ghobadian and Gallear, 1995), stress management (Johnson, 1995), Just In Time (Raine, 1991) and information handling (Pleitner, 1989) highlights the need to question the appropriateness of such``large firm'' solutions. For example, van de Wiele and Brown (1998) suggest that small firms are no less concerned with quality initiatives than large firms, rather they are less comfortable with the formal approaches that are often advocated as part of quality standards registration programmes.…”