We are still behind Thatcher
The world economy was in a phase of dramatic structural change. The large industrial enterprises, one after the other, were having financial problems and were beginning to reorganise themselves. Customisation and flexibility were the new success formulae. To accomplish this, units were scaled down through much of the production being handed over to third parties or getting robots to take over.
One result of this was that industry employed fewer people.
Other sectors began to expand instead. The first microprocessor came in 1971, and twenty years later, as the future researcher Anders Ewerman usually points out, the old industrial society was, statistically speaking, defeated. In 1991, the U.S. economy for the first time invested more money in digital technology than in mechanical.
Today we can easily follow the lines of development, but on May 4, 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, there was no consensus about where society was heading. Most established experts were trained in the thinking of industrial society and had obvious difficulty in interpreting the signs at that time.
In the post-war period, the dominant perception was that large operations would dominate almost all economic production. As the number of farmers had been reduced to only a few percent of the total number of enterprises as a result of increased mechanisation, other small businesses were expected to go the same way. But this did not happen and, during the 1970s, the trend reversed after a period of decline of more than a hundred years.
Initially, the increase in small business seemed of no importance, but the discussion took off in the same year that Thatcher came to power. Fortune magazine’s annual survey of America’s 500 largest companies then showed that these companies put together were no longer the country’s largest employers.
This sent a shockwave through the academic world, not least among Marxist-schooled sociologists, who had long regarded societal development as given in the showdown between big business and big labour. There were not a few researchers, including Swedish researchers, who in the 1980s would come to question the statistics on small businesses.
But despite the uncertainty about where the development was heading, Thatcher never wavered when it came to the importance of small business. In a speech to the Small Business Bureau in 1984 she said:
This government believes in small business. Not in
an attempt to turn the clock back to the days of yeomen
and craftsmen, although they derived enormous satisfaction
from their work. But because small firms are indispensable
to the creation of jobs and of wealth.
But she also saw other values ??in small business than those relating to the economy and employment, and concluded her speech as follows:
Small businesses are the very embodiment of a free society – the mechanism by which the individual can turn his leadership and talents to the benefit of both himself and the nation. The freer the society, the more small businesses there will be. And the more small businesses there are, the freer and more enterprising that society is bound to be.
Populärt
Amnesty har blivit en aktivistklubb
Den tidigare så ansedda människorättsorganisationen har övergett sina ideal och ideologiserats, skriver Bengt G Nilsson.
Thatcher then looked at both the economic and civil values ??of entrepreneurship, and the UK became, thanks to her political activities and her ability to inspire entrepreneurs, a country where entrepreneurship took off properly and has since continued in this vein. The development has also benefited immigrants. Unlike in Sweden, immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK is particularly viable.
Thatcher’s contribution to entrepreneurship is not unknown on the international stage, but here at home we almost completely ignored it. Here, we focus mostly on the deregulation of the financial markets and privatisation of public monopolies. Maybe this is to do with our not yet having left behind our large-scale thinking. Small businesses grow and thrive almost everywhere else in the world, but Sweden is still far behind.
At the political level – not least with Annie Loof – there is now an appreciation that new jobs are created in small and medium-sized enterprises. In this way, we have reached Margaret Thatcher’s year of 1984. But in terms of the Iron Lady’s understanding of the entrepreneur’s role in civil society, the political conversation has far to go. There is no lack of research in this area for those who are interested; it is a wide field of knowledge.
In this era of McCarthyistic witch hunts against people who do not express themselves exactly according to the public norm, I choose to conclude by pointing to the possibilities of free expression. A small business owner has a significantly bigger chance of withstanding a media campaign than an employee or a director of a large company. Perhaps, we are thus heading towards a more tolerable media life.