Francesca Visintin

Organising for Growth: Theories and Practices Francesca Visintin

Publisher Marketing: The issue of organisational growth is increasingly crucial in the current economic landscape for most European countries, in particular given the need to recover competitiveness through stronger companies, especially in strategically relevant industries, and to capture immediate advantages in terms of job generation. As recently pointed out by the Economist, "Europe produces plenty of corner shops, hairdressers and so on. What it doesn't produce enough of is innovative companies that grow quickly and end up big" . Therefore, the attention of scholars, entrepreneurs, managers and policy makers should shift from an emphasis on start-ups and micro-businesses towards established small/medium companies with the potential to grow. Organisational growth is a multifaceted topic dealing with various relevant issues such as: growth meanings and measures, growth determinants and explanatory factors, supportive contexts, interplays between company-level and economic system growth, characteristics of growing and fast-growing organisations, the relationship between economic growth and social/cultural development. "Organising for growth" is at the same time an area of scientific inquiry, where organisational scholars can make a distinctive contribution to national and European competitiveness, and a call to reflect on the current state and future perspectives of the community of organisational scholars.