Investigating the Behaviour of Small Businesses: An Empirical Case for Ethnography1

A review of the extant scholarly literature reveals that ethnographic methods have seldom been employed in the study of the behaviour of small businesses. This perhaps derives from the impression, belied by published ethnographies, that insofar as small businesses are often run by a single person or a very small group of individuals who try on various hats and fill various roles, they have little or no time for a fieldworker. Besides, the size of small businesses stands in inverse relation to their number, thus tending to accentuate concerns about the generalizability and external validity of the findings that are engendered by fieldwork-intensive ethnographies of single settings. Our objective in this report has been to make an empirical case for injecting qualitative research methods, specifically participant observation, for studying small business behaviour. We consider two radically different contexts: (i) small, neighbourhood outlets that retail groceries and (ii) small businesses that are spawned by government privatisation. With regard to the former, we draw upon secondary ethnographic data to build a rich theory of financial success that features less obvious antecedents such as the control over shoplifting as well as associated tactics. In relation to the latter context, we elucidate patterns of behaviour that deviate from the norm of 'simple' structures. Specifically, such businesses can manifest not-so-simple structures owing to a reversion by members to prior statuses and divisions of labour that obtained in the parent government organisation. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]