ABSTRACT
John Major, subsequently to become the Prime Minister of Britain, was reported as saying in May 1989 when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury that 'There is a great deal of evidence to show that the jobs and products of tomorrow are highly likely to come from the activities of the small business sector ... in our judgment the future belongs to them' (quoted in Leighton and Felstead 1992: 15). Such opinions about the increasingly pivotal role of small businesses were common during the 1980s, from government and politicians, from some business quarters and from some academics, not only in Britain and the European Community, but in the United States and the Pacific Rim countries. And recently they have featured as part of the Eastern European discourses on moves to market economies. In this sense it can be said that there was in the space of a decade an ideological change, probably most marked in Britain, from regarding the term entrepreneur as one of mild abuse (Hobbs 1991) to seeing enterprise as central to regenerating a declining economy. How far a culture of enterprise became embedded, beyond the widespread use of the term, is much more open to question.
