The investment decision-making process in small manufacturing enterprises: with particular reference toprinting and clothing industries.

This research is concerned with the investment decision making process in small manufacturing enterprises in the printing and clothing industries. The focus is on the actual decision-making behaviour of owner-managers. The study uses' Insider accounts' as a qualitative and innovative methodology, which involves in-depth, semi-structured interviews and direct observation,conducted longitudinally in 8 case study companies. It is a research method which includes detailed accounts from the actors themselves, incorporating the actual motives and behaviour of owner-managers based on the philosophy that the 'objects' studied are in fact 'subjects', who produce accounts of their world. The results of the study suggest that owner-manager use 'bootstrapping’ techniques for their investment appraisal instead of formal methods such as those recommended in the financial management literature. Bootstrapping represents an approach to decision making that is grounded in previous experience of key decision-makers and their organisations and the largely informal routines that they develop from this. These techniques include a combination of experience judgement and gut-feeling,budgets and forecasts and the tendering process. The concept of bootstrapping is not simply a way of owner-managers finding a solution to a problem or a sort of 'fire-fighting’ it is a concept of actions grounded in experiential leaming. In this sense, bootstrapping is a particular form of learning behaviour. It is essentially a trial and error learning process which brings knowledge, skills, values and attitudes together and provides owner-managers with an opportunity to evaluate outcomes associated with investment based on previous experience. Therefore, the researcher believes that conceptualising small firm investment decision making within the context of an organisational learning approach holds promise as an explanatory framework for investment behaviour in small firms.