ABSTRACT
It has become evident in recent years that the theoretical tools that proved so valuable to economic geographers in their analysis of economic growth may be less suited to analysis of the economic success of small and medium-size enterprises. For a number of scholars a major response was a shift towards the study of entrepreneurs' and firms' embeddedness in wider social and political networks. In these studies the intensity and dynamic of inter-firm linkages and business networks are seen as beneficial for market penetration and growth (Grabher 1993; Taylor 1995; Uzzi 1996; 1997; Oinas 1999), and they are thought to have a particularly critical impact on small plants' growth chances (Kay 1993; Hardill et al. 1995). These ideas were amalgamated into an analysis of the patterns of firms' and entrepreneurs' embeddedness in their social and economic milieus, where the markets in which entrepreneurs operate are treated as both fields of power and cultural constructions (Fligstein 1990; Grabher 1993; Sofer & Schnell 2002).
