The institutional environment of small industrial enterprises: methodological aspects of identification

The paper presents an attempt to study methodological aspects of identification of institutional environment related to small business industry. The relevance of the problem is preconditioned, on the one hand, by the contradiction between the high importance of institutions for the development of small firms, and on the other hand, by the lack of systematization of accumulated knowledge as a result of the increase in the number of institutional research. It is shown that for small enterprises, including in the industrial sector, the importance of the quality of institutional environment increases in the course of macroeconomic decline. The authors lay the emphasis on the phenomenon of “burden of negative feedback”, which is typical for any institutional changes. The following approaches to defining the category of “institutional environment” are identified within the systematization of accumulated experience of institutional research: structural, functional, structural-functional, and structural-evolutionary. The structural-functional approach is the most common in the Russian school. The paper also deal with the classification of the elements of institutional environment.