ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understanding of the educational and training requirements for small business management and entrepreneurship, partly by drawing on other debates, and partly by drawing on the results of a small-scale study of small businesses in Scotland. It deals with some thinking about education and management, and about education and small business. The chapter describes how the small-scale study of 14 small businesses in Tayside, Scotland, was conducted in 1993. It discusses how the empirical study and general understanding of managerial work have developed, in ways which parallel the development of the understanding of education and training requirements for management in general and for that of small businesses in particular. The ‘resource poverty’ and consequent economic vulnerability of many small businesses and their lack of formal planning and control techniques is widely known. The importance of human resource management to small businesses would seem obvious in the light of their relative resource poverty.
