Industrial Relations in Small Firms by Rainnie Al;

Author:Rainnie, Al;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4595216
Publisher: Routledge

Small businesses in the printing industry

The printing industry is a diverse, and far from homogeneous, sector, Witness to this is the fact that the employers’ association for the non-newspaper side of the industry is called the British Printing Industries Federation. Delafons has commented that:

In detail, it (the industry) is composed of such a conglomeration of producing units, varying so much in size, in kinds of output, in methods and processes, in efficiency and quality, in structure, in organisation, in ownership and grouping, as to make almost any generalisation no more than narrowly applicable at best. (Delafons, 1960, p. 60)

And yet it is this very diversity that has perhaps paradoxically helped to ensure the survival of the small print unit, as Bollard argues:

Printing differs from most manufacturing industry, in that much of it is produced to the particular specification of the customer. The types of work demanded vary greatly, and there is room for a wide range of printers to specialise in a particular product or in short runs. It is this demand-orientated custom jobbing that has ensured the survival of the small printer. (Bollard, 1983, p. 57).

This great variation in the type of work has another effect that tended to perpetuate the existence of the small jobbing printer. The one thing that the products tend to have in common is that they are ‘bespoke’, that is they are produced to the specific requirement of a known customer at a given point in time (Saddler and Barry, 1970, p. 14). This is exacerbated by the nature of the market. Printers tend to operate in a confined sphere. Primarily it is the local market that is concentrated upon which ‘means a small average size of order, and this in turn implies that the local printer is often handling jobs that the larger regional or national concern would not find attractive. The smaller firm is, therefore, to some extent protected from competition from its bigger rivals’ (Sadler and Barry, 1970, p. 19).

It should, at this point be emphasised that it is not the whole of the print and publishing sector to which this report refers. We are concerned only with general printing, excluding newspaper printing and publishing.

Commenting on the general print sector, Sadler and Barry argued that ‘a marked feature of the industry is its large numbers of very small family firms’. (Sadler and Barry, 1970, p. 5). Neither is it the case that the small scale sector of general print, dominated as it is by family firms, is in decline, either relatively or absolutely. Bollard argues that

during the late 1950s and early 1960s, a series of large scale takeovers and medium sized mergers amongst printers caused some concern about concentration. But these mergers took place at the expense of medium-sized units, not the small ones, and … the work done by small-medium printers has increased faster than any other sized firms. In fact, the number of small printers continues to increase (by 50 per cent in the last two decades), apparently at the expense of medium-sized firms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.