Résumé
Entrepreneurship is a notion which has been extensively discussed over the last ten years in French and French-speaking reviews. Much has been written about the process of new venture but the notion of entrepreneurship may be understood to a larger extent as the constant pursuit of new opportunities. We support this definition. It was indeed endorsed in many articles about corporate entrepreneurship which considered that one may assess a firm's entrepreneurial orientation by means of three variables: innovation, proactive ness and risk-taking. Research has generally claimed that the simple structure and the organic structure are better suited to the development of an entrepreneurial behaviour. But smaller businesses face a host of evolutions such as just-in-time, information technologies or globalisation which are likely to upset the characteristics of a smaller firm's organizational structure by encouraging a managerial approach: more standardization, more specialization and more formalization. In such a new context, one question may be raised: is it possible for a small firm to adopt an entrepreneurial orientation along with a managerial framework? Through this contribution, we intend to show that smaller firms working within a managerial framework can also display a strong entrepreneurial behaviour. While conducting our research on the issue, we set up a comparative study of food-processing companies. We chose this industry which may be described as traditional because we believed it would include firms with very little entrepreneurial orientation as well as strongly entrepreneurial and Friesen's research (1982)-we were able to divide the firms into two separate groups depending on their entrepreneurial orientation. We tested the relations between the degree of entrepreneurial orientation and the organizational structure in these firms. We came to the conclusion that in firms with a strong entrepreneurial culture the organizational structure was all but a simple structure. Highly structured activities, more efficient planning and controlling, tools and a more sophisticated external information system characterize firms with a strong entrepreneurial culture. These results enable us to conclude that in a smaller firm, one does not have to choose between a managerial approach and an entrepreneurial approach. They are fully independent and may be implemented together.