The economics of the advanced industrial nations still contain legions of small business - family stores, two-man workshops, small production units and enterprises offering diverse services. Most businesses are small and persist in spit of, but also because of, the large corporations. In some socialist states small-scale concerns have not vanished but co-exist with collective or cooperative enterprises and, in the exploding cities of the third world, millions live as petty producers, traders or own-account workers.The essays in this book deal with Canadian and British farmers, French bakers, petty producers in Senegal and Columbia, the German and Polish petits bourgeois and the place of small business in Italy and Britain. They represent a first step in the comparative analysis of 'the uneasy stratus.'