Given the extent to which recent contributions
are, in their various ways, attempting to
acknowledge (if not yet to celebrate) ‘difference’
in the study of rural industrialisation
(North & Smallbone 2000),1 this recourse to
empirical generalisation – so indicative of the
positivist approach – arguably represents a
barrier to further progress and understanding.
Leaving to one side the difficulties of ascribing
causal status to something as nebulous as ‘enterprising
behaviour’, basing classification (and,
by implication, causal inference) upon empirical
‘stereotypes’ effectively forces the data into
‘neat’ categories, implicitly marginalising those
findings which – for whatever reason – fail to
conform. Moreover, the suggestion that empirical
outcomes can be predicted on the basis of
observed regularities in previous events seriously
underestimates the complexity of the
relationship between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Thus,
while Keeble, North and others are certainly
correct in their assertion that different spatial
‘contexts’ serve to influence the competitive
performance of manufacturing businesses in
different ways, they over-simplify the relationship
between ‘context’ and ‘outcome’ by assuming
it to be both enduring and direct. Put
simply, they appear to endorse a form of environmental
determinism in which the various
manufacturing enterprises operating in a given
region are influenced identically by the prevailing
local ‘milieu’. Whether expressed in
terms of the ‘constrained’, ‘remote rural’ SME
(North & Smallbone 1996) or the ‘enterprising’,
‘accessible rural’ SME (Keeble & Tyler 1995),
the recognition of empirical diversity is thus
continually undermined by the positivistic tendency
to champion ideal forms, stereotypes and
extended generalisations. What is needed is
an approach that combines theoretical rigour
with a genuine capacity to accommodate (and
account for) the empirical diversity that most
commentators now insist is a principal feature
of rural industrialisation. In the next section of
the paper the authors develop an alternative
conceptualisation of the competitive performance
of rural manufacturing SMEs that draws
upon the tenets of critical realism.2 They begin
by outlining the main features of realist philosophy
and method, before proceeding to show
how these may be applied to the study of rural
manufacturing SMEs.