Abstract

This case reports on research into small manufacturing businesses in the UK. This sector is vital for growth. Over the years, governments have established different types of policies to support this sector. One policy has been the provision of business advice. Our research aim was focused on finding out if the perceptions of SME owner managers was that their firm’s performance was improved by using advisers. This involved establishing an understanding of SME decisions making. This is complex and a survey method would have made it difficult to comprehend the contextualized worlds of owner managers. Alternatively, the phenomenological interview was utilised to access the experiences of a small number of expert respondents. The phenomenological method seeks to unravel the meaning of events as lived by others. Consequently, in phenomenological research, the primary source of evidence is respondent’s perceptions of an object, in this case, business advice. Subsequently, we examine our research approach to planning, conducting and analysing the phenomenological interview. Sometimes mistaken as an umbrella term for all qualitative research, we also highlight some problematic issues when undertaking the phenomenological interview. Through these interviews, owner manager ‘decision stories’ were successfully generated about their perceptions of business advisers. From the owner manager’s accounts, we extracted a number of key themes. The resulting discussion of these themes or meaning units, subsequently enabled us to meet the aims of the original study, which are also outlined here.