It is the conjuncture of the necessary causal powers and liabilities (that empower and encourage decision-makers to act in particular ways)with the internal and external contingencies (that mediate their effects) which ultimately produces the various forms of competitive behaviour exhibited by rural manufacturing SMEs. In this way, a realist conceptual framework enables the time, place and companyspecific nature of empirical outcomes to be more adequately acknowledged (Figure 1).Specifically, it raises the possibility that two or more structural mechanisms could operate simultaneously in a particular situation; that individual decision-makers could interpret, and
respond to, the same causal stimuli in different (as well as similar) ways; and that decisionmakers could adopt the same strategies in response to different causal mechanisms.