The implications of internationalisation on the management process of the Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise

In the economic, political, social and financial context that has been a feature of the early 21st
century, factors such as the deregulation of markets and commercial practices and the growing
interconnection of markets have resulted, virtually inevitably, with Small and Medium-Sized
Enterprises having to get to grips with the phenomenon of internationalisation.
This challenge is having inescapable consequences on the organisation and day-to-day operation of
SMEs, forcing them in particular to make their management practices more professional, especially
in terms of implementing systematic control procedures into their activities. SMEs have also had
effectively to introduce a multicultural dimension linked closely to the internationalisation of their
business to their management practices and processes, and to their way of making strategic choices.
These changes are having an effect on the tools, rules, lines of conduct, internal directives, informal
practices, etc. that together make up the system of processes deployed by SME managers to enable
their companies to be managed with regular and recurrent performance in mind. This is
characterised in particular by the fact that they need to be capable of achieving the financial,
manufacturing and employment-related objectives that they set themselves.
The aim of this contribution is to identify, through a structured framework of analysis, what the
implications are that internationalisation may have on the system of processes within SMEs that are
performing well. It is based on a summary of the elements highlighted in the specialist scientific
and business literature devoted to the impact of internationalisation in the context of an SME. It is
structured and uses the modelling of the (non-)performance of the SME proposed by Crutzen and
Van Caillie (2009) as its organisational framework