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This paper explores embeddedness in small firms from a foundational perspective and how these foundations effect resource dependency and business decision-making. Building on debates in firms embeddedness and its role in addressing questions of resource-limitation, the paper positions embeddedness as outcome of a value-set occurring within an organisation directly affecting resource decisions. Using case studies of six creative industries small and micro firms, it argues foundational embeddedness influences firm-based practices and relationships over conventional business logics. Certain flexibilities in this foundational embeddedness can be seen, responding to external challenges through formation of esoteric relations and iterative systems. The extent of this flexibility is however limited by the entrepreneurs’ willingness to compromise individual values. Foundational embeddedness is thus a necessary consideration in understanding entrepreneurial decision-making.

This paper explores the methodological challenges facing SME researchers through overdependence on quantitative methods. It proposes how a diagnostic-based form of engaged scholarship can enhance the portfolio of research tools and address existing deficits in current research methods by building on tools developed as part of a multi-determinant research process for exploring SME growth. The paper argues existing methods of SME research are insufficient to address their heterogeneous and context-dependent nature. New tools are therefore required to mitigate embedded shortcomings in terms of depth and breadth of understanding alongside impact for practice and for SMEs as active stakeholders in the research process. The design and implementation of diagnostic tools has the scope to address these deficits. The benefit of this paper is to outline an additional approach to SME research which addresses embedded issues in existing methods. It proposes a tool that addresses certain academic research challenges, but also integrates research more substantially with policy and SME requirements. In thus doing it makes a novel contribution to debates on how SME research is undertaken, to the development of methodological tools appropriate for dealing with the challenges of contemporary research, and to methodological approaches integrating research within wider networks and communities.

The regional scale continues to be considered critical to UK economic governance. Successive iterations have however seen limited impact in addressing enduring issues of uneven development despite significant reform. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of the region and regional geographies through application of an assemblage reading. Building on existing work in economic geography, it argues regional economic governance should be considered as an assemblage process involving overlaying territorialisations of place, policy, and stakeholders, and related dynamic capacities involving the multiplicity of components and interactions, legacies of prior arrangements, and agency of actors. Regional governance therefore occurs through a process of continual becoming. Similarly important here however is decoupling. Decoupling has significant spatial and sectoral implications as changed arrangements shift the dynamics integrating actors and groups of actors locally and regionally. Using analysis from Southern Staffordshire, part of the Greater Birmingham city-region, the article argues the shifting nature of regional assemblages and distinct forms of territorialisation are material in decoupling key local sectors from local economy and place. We conclude the application of an assemblage reading, and its enhancement through application of decoupling, has scope to illustrate key causes of uneven development within regions.