Guest editorial

Thomas W. Dichter

Thirty years ago in this journal’s first issue, Vijay Mahajan and I published an article on a contingency approach to enterprise development (March 1990). The main message was that everything we do in this field ought to depend on context. It’s disturbing, to say the least, that three decades later such a self-evident message seems not to have penetrated as much as it should have. In the arena covered by EDM, those practitioners whose primary concern is an impact on poverty still tend to lose sight of the contextual big picture. Day-to-day operations concentrate on a general orthodoxy of best practices and a relatively two-dimensional view of success and failure. In the first of the two areas the journal covers, enterprise development, enterprise success remains wedded to the standard triad of talent, markets, and financial services. The enabling environment – politics, social structure, culture, and especially the formal and informal arrangements they engender in the political economy – is acknowledged, but it is neither deeply delved into nor rarely seen as conceptually central. Project interventions consist of training, business services, loans, and help in sourcing equipment, organizing networks, and the like. As for explaining enterprise failure (and everyone acknowledges how dodgy it is to sustain a small enterprise whether in the developing or in the so-called ‘developed’ world) we tend to stick to a menu of poor management, poor planning, under-capitalization, poor location, too rapid growth, lack of experience, over-investment in fixed assets, and so on.