ABSTRACT
Spearheaded by a series of fundamental changes to fiscal policy and industrial relations legislation, the development of an enterprise culture has been specifically linked to the birth of new small firms and the enlargement of the private sector. Despite consistently strong evidence that the German, Japanese and Southeast Asian economic ‘miracles’ spring from cooperative working practices (if not always from collectivist social policies), enterprise culture policies in Britain have also been characterised by attempts to foster individualism as the dominant ideology. Apart from a fairly wide-ranging privatisation programme and the extension of the notion of the market into such areas as health and education, government policies have aimed at reducing so-called supply-side constraints in factor markets, promoting private competition in areas previously in the public sector and encouraging the unemployed and newly redundant to start their own businesses.
