Storey 1993; Cosh & Hughes 1998).
In the wake of these developments, academics
and policy-makers concerned with rural
development have increasingly taken the view
that ‘the bulk of new jobs in rural areas [are]
going to come from new and existing small
firms, not just in service sectors like tourism, but
also in some lighter manufacturing industries’
(North & Smallbone 1996, p. 151). Accordingly,
considerable research has been devoted to
establishing the reasons for small business success
in the countryside (Keeble et al. 1992; Cosh
& Hughes 1998). To date, most studies have
examined those leisure and tourism industries
emblematic of a ‘post-productivist countryside’.
However, there has been a recent revival of
interest in the urban-rural manufacturing shift
and the contribution small manufacturing
firms can make to the economic vitality of rural
areas (Yarwood 1996; Jarvis et al. 2001). This
paper makes a contribution to this debate by
developing a conceptual framework for understanding
the competitive behaviour of rural
manufacturing SMEs; an issue which lies at the
heart of recent debates about rural industrialisation
and the urban-rural shift (Keeble &
Tyler 1995; North & Smallbone 1996, 2000). The
paper is presented in three main parts. The first
discusses the principal strengths and weaknesses
of existing approaches to rural industrialisation,
and assesses their implications for the
development of an alternative approach. The
second, main, section of the paper develops a
realist conceptual framework for the examination
of the competitive performance of rural
manufacturing SMEs in remote and accessible
locations. Finally, the paper concludes with a short
assessment of the likely application of the realist
framework in concrete empirical situations