The Universal LME

In the literature of the firm there has been a tendency towards polarization in the discussion. Typically, in the early writing the large corporation was considered the archetype to which all lesser firms should ideally aspire in their conduct of business, while from the 1980s especially, this assumption has been met with a counterthrust pointing to the differences, merits and distinctive functioning of the smaller enterprise. Little attention has been directed towards the medium-sized firm as an entity in its own right. All too often it has been subsumed under the rubric of the large or arrogated to the cause of the small. In the first case, implicitly at least, the impression is given that a company with a workforce of, say, 600 somehow has the capacity to act like General Motors with its hundreds of thousands. In the second, inclusion of relatively heavy-weight medium-sized enterprises in an analysis of SME activity can raise the performance mean, thereby somewhat distorting the picture as to what the average small firm — if indeed there can be such a thing — is capable of.