ABSTRACT
As previous chapters have noted, there is a particular area of concern about the impact of occupational health and safety issues on smaller businesses. Much of the criticism of ‘red tape’ that we met in the first two chapters focussed on the supposed problems for small businesses in complying with regulations that were too prescriptive and disproportionate to their available resources and the nature of the risks that they encountered. In the last two chapters, we noted the particular difficulties that small businesses experienced in connecting to knowledge flows. These might pass by because the smaller enterprise could not devote the same resources to scanning for new knowledge or absorbing it as might be possible for larger organisations. The intermediaries who brought the knowledge to the small organisation had their own biases, interests and agendas, which might not match those of their clients.
