Special book review

The period of the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s was the decade of the small entrepreneur. The outcome was an entrepreneurial explosion during which small suddenly became more beautiful in the marketplace. During this period, entrepreneurship was everywhere, offering something new to governments, cities, corporations, and individuals [3, p. 16]. The new interest in entrepreneurship was not confined to the public and small business sectors. Many big business corporations in the United States and Europe were also exploring ways to elicit entrepreneurship within their structures. Soon, the rising belief in 'an entrepreneurial age' became synonymous with 'the down-sizing ear'. Hence, for more than a decade, the public has been told repeatedly that small firms are the engine of economic growth, while large corporations are in many respects becoming something of a dinosaur with bureaucratic organizations, and increasingly unable to compete in a post-industrial world. Corporate giants once walked tall and proud, championing business development and economic growth across the globe. In the 1990s, big business is undergoing structural changes which have embraced the world of business and have caused the breakup of these mega-firms [1]. At the same time, no single factor, economic or demographic, is responsible for the changes sweeping through big businesses which have brought about this restructuring over the past decade. To some this is another episode of 'creative destruction', the fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion as put forward by Joseph Schumpeter [5]. To others, including Bennett Harrison, 'the fall of big business' and 'the entrepreneurial explosion' of small businesses or the so-called 'wonderland economy' in the last decade represents a fundamental question: Is the large corporation indeed on the road to extinction as a viable, ecologically competitive form of business organization? Throughout the pages of Lean and Mean, Harrison, a professor of political economy in the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy