The work of North & Smallbone (1995, 1996)
also sought to appreciate and understand the
wider innovative milieu that appears to characterise
rural space economies. However, they
offered a rather more pessimistic theory of
‘constrained behaviour’, which questioned
the value of using employment change as an
indicator of competitive performance and highlighted the constraints that operate on SMEs
in remote rural areas. Derived from a survey of
over 300 mature manufacturing SMEs in urban
and rural locations, North and Smallbone’s view
was that, for some localities, rural industrialisation
may reflect more labour intensive business
development strategies imposed by a peripheral
business environment, as much as it does the
adoption of more ‘enterprising’ commercial
strategies.