If the lionization of firms is unhelpful, how about gazelisation ?

The Mighty Middle by GOOD infographics

There has been a wave of skepticism against small firms. Charles Kenny exposes why support for SMEs in developed economies is not beneficial to the economy as a whole (but beneficial to politicians). Felix Salmon argues that lionizing small business is unhelpful. James Surowiecki compares the growth rate of different developed economies with more of less percentage of small firms:

The developed countries with the highest percentage of workers employed by small businesses include Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy—that is, the four countries whose economic woes are wreaking such havoc on financial markets. Meanwhile, the countries with the lowest percentage of workers employed by small businesses are Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the U.S.—some of the strongest economies in the world.

These articles deserve a few comment. First, the debate over firm's size and growth started with D. Birch claiming that small firms generated a large share of net job creation. The literature on SMEs (here's an excellent review of it by Henrekson) and job generation separates now between "elephants" (large companies), "mices" (small one that tend to stay small) and "gazelles"(not nessarily small but fast growing). So it is not simply Big versus Small.  Second, the lacking component of this debate is the link with entrepreneurship. The praise of SMEs is attached to the notion developed economies have of it. Whereas a classification of firm's size is fixed in time, entrepreneurship as a concept captures a process. The benefits or disadvantages of small firms don't come exclusive from it size, but how the size relates to entrepreneurship and innovation, and the of "population" of firms. Perspectives from evolutionary economics would enrich the debate. Big is not necessarily better in evolutionary economics and you adaptive efficiency has to be taken into account. By te same token, as this study from Badudenko shows, reaching an optimal scale of production can be more important than technical efficiency.