Small business growth in contrasting environments
manner. In the past two decades, several organization theorists have tried to structure this reservoir of 'everything outside the organization'. They stratified the environment according to levels of specificity, immediacy, and relevance to the organizational phenomenon concerned (cf. Beard and Dess 1988; Castrogiovanni 1991; Starbuck 1976). Moreover, for the sake of comparison, theorists have described the basic character of environmental elements in terms of various theoretical dimensions (cf. Aldrich 1979; Child 1972; Dess and Beard 1984; Mintzberg 1985). Thus, it is argued that environments are both multilevel and multidimensional (Betton and Dess