The American national government is in the business of promoting small business. Government agencies help entrepreneurs start and grow small businesses through a smorgasbord of programs providing financial assistance such as loans; help obtaining government contracts including the set-aside of contracts for bidding by small concerns; and management and technical support. Unlike government programs for farmers and big businesses which are usually invisible to the citizenry, small business aid programs are extremely visible and intentionally so. The nation that lacks an explicit industrial policy not only employs industrial policy tactics to aid small firms, it even has an explicit small business policy. That policy is to “aid, counsel, assist and protect” small business.

Congress declared the policy of aiding small business and launched the contemporary era of small business assistance programs in the Small Business Act of 1953. And in spite of the view that small business was an economic anachronism espoused by economists during the next few decades, inattentive interest groups, major scandals, and often unsympathetic administrations, aid programs expanded, multiplied, and spawned special programs for firms owned by the disadvantaged, minorities, and women. After surviving Reagan administration termination proposals, budget cutting, and other challenges during the last two decades of the century, small business aid had an aura of invulnerability.

Most investigations of specific public policies do not spotlight American core values. Yet these values are evidenced in longitudinal studies; cross-national comparisons of political socialization, economic, social, and political behavior; and since the 1930s, survey research. And they loom large in influential explanations of such broad policy patterns as the absence of socialism, the limited scale of the welfare state relative to other advanced industrialized democracies and the focus on education. However, the studies best known for linking core values with these policy patterns do not spell out the exact mechanisms through which values shape concrete policies. In contrast, this book pinpoints specific paths through which values influenced small business policy and will likely influence other policies.

The argument is that core values are criteria that have been employed in making the various judgments involved in defining the policy problems addressed by small business aid. Problem definitions, interpretations of conditions that people think government should do something about, are receiving increasing attention because they help to understand agenda formation, the substance and design of policy, decision-making venues, coalitions, and leadership decisions. A way of thinking about policy, successful problem definitions can become institutionalized and affect implementation, future policy proposals, and the transferability of tactics across policy domains.

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