Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Bringing Anthropology Back In 3031205243, 9783031205248

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Family Firms and Business Families from the Anthropological Perspective: Concepts, Reflections and Ethnographic Observations
1 Introduction
2 An Anthropological Approach to Family Firms and Business Families
2.1 Doing Kinship, Relatedness, Kinning and Doing Family
2.2 The Business Family and the Kinship Enterprise
2.3 Business Families in Cultural Contexts
3 Overview of the Chapters
4 Conclusion
References
Part II: A Processual Understanding of Kinship
Chapter 2: How ‘Enduring Family Bonds’ Are Made: Insights from Fulɓe Kinship Enterprises in Northern Benin
1 Introduction
1.1 Fulɓe Family Economies as ‘Kinship Enterprises’
1.2 Perspectives on ‘Family’ and ‘Kinship’
2 Economic Projects: Pastoral Systems of Production
3 Social Projects in Fulɓe Kinship Enterprises
4 How ‘Enduring Family Bonds’ Are Made
4.1 Kinning Rituals at Birth
4.2 Marrying Sons and Daughters off: Rationalities and Desires
4.3 Caring for Cattle and People
4.4 Transferring Rights over Cattle and Milk
5 Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Producing and Reproducing the Business Family Across Generations: The Importance of Narratives in German Business Families
1 Introduction
2 The Research and Its Methodology
3 Narratives and Family Business
3.1 The Narrative Approach
3.2 The Role of Narratives in Family Business
4 Empirical Examples of Narratives in Family Business
4.1 Case 1: Survival and Succession: Flexibility, Cooperation, Continuity and Change
4.2 Case 2: The Cleverness of the Family and its Members
5 Conclusion
References
Part III: Family Business after the End of Socialism
Chapter 4: Power, Family and Business: Practices of Oligarchic Economy in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Armenia (Before 2018)
1 Introduction
2 Social and Cultural Specifics of Economy and Kinship in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Armenia (Before 2018)
3 ‘Family Business Empires’ in the Post-Soviet Period of 2000–2018
4 Gender Issues and Matrimonial Practices in Oligarchic Families and Networks
4.1 Matrimonial Practices of Oligarchs: ‘The Oligarch’s Wedding’
4.2 Business Empires and Women: ‘Muk’s Casus’
5 Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Business as a Gift: Family Entrepreneurship and the Ambiguities of Sharing
1 Introduction
2 A Short History of Family and Gender Relations in (Post-)Soviet Russia
3 Gifts, Temporalities of Exchange and Politics of Value
4 A Job as a Gift
5 Property Exchanges
6 A Gift as an Informal Contract
7 Balancing Sharing and Market Risks
8 Conclusion
References
Part IV: The Contet of Family Business
Chapter 6: Rethinking Confucianism: Family Business and the Ritual Construction of the ‘Family’ in Japan and China
1 Introduction: Anthropology in Approaches of East Asian Area Studies to Family Business
2 The Confucianism Conundrum in Cross-Cultural Management
3 Ritual Theory and Family Business
3.1 East Asian Conceptions of Ritual as a Theory of Ritual
3.2 The Ritual Construction of Family Business
4 Japan: Enacting the Family Business as a Family Corporation by Means of Ritual
5 China: Enacting the Family Business as Family Enterprise by Means of Ritual
6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Kinship, Godparenthood and Urban Estates in the Bolivian Andes: The Cultural Production of Business Families
1 Introduction
2 Market Institutions, Firms and Urban Estates
3 Kinship Relationships and Mutuality in the Market
3.1 Andean Kinship
3.2 Mutual Obligations in the Market
3.3 Economic Differences Among Siblings
4 Ritual Kinship
5 Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Anthropology of Family and Family Businesses Is Emic All the Way
1 Introduction
2 An Anthropological Idea of Culture
3 Family in Kinship Order
4 Japanese Kinship
5 The Japanese Ie and the Japanese Kaisha (Company)
5.1 The Kaisha as the Pragmatic Objectification of the Ie
6 Conclusion
References
Part V: Family Business and Historical Change
Chapter 9: The Legacy of the Past in Business Families of Northern Italy
1 Introduction
2 The Importance of Kin Ties
3 Family Work Contribution
4 Land Fragmentation
5 Catholic Cooperativism
6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Family Values, Paprika Production and E.U. Integration: An Ethnography of a Kinship Enterprise in Contemporary Hungary
1 Introduction
2 Focusing on a Family Business and a Family History: Between the City and the Countryside
3 Becoming a Manager and Entrepreneur: The Historical Roots of a Family Business
4 Privatization: Becoming a Family Business
5 Paprika Powder Production
6 The Family Business’s Accession to the European Union
7 Generational Change
8 Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: The Other Side of Succession Issues: How the Decline of Some Family Businesses Allows for the Consolidation of Others
1 Introduction
2 The ‘Sweet’ Origin of Mauritian History—and Family Firms
3 Between Failed and Successful Succession: Franco-Mauritian Conglomerates
3.1 Building Upon the Succession and Financial Troubles of Other Family Firms
3.2 Disentangling Shared Investments
4 Conclusion
References
Part VI: Concluding Remarks
Chapter 12: Conclusion
References
Chapter 13: Afterword
References
Index

Citation preview

Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective Bringing Anthropology Back In Edited by Tobias Koellner

Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-­Cultural Perspective

Tobias Koellner Editor

Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective Bringing Anthropology Back In

Editor Tobias Koellner WIFU Witten/Herdecke University Witten, Germany

ISBN 978-3-031-20524-8    ISBN 978-3-031-20525-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The volume is based in part on a conference held in November 2019 at the Witten/Herdecke University. The conference was called ‘WIFU meets Anthropology’ and was part of a broader initiative at the Witten Institute for Family Business (WIFU) where researchers from different academic disciplines were invited for discussion and interdisciplinary exchanges. There were approximately ten researchers from anthropology and additional researchers from other disciplines such as history, economics and sociology, all of whom shared their perspectives on how anthropology can improve our understanding of family businesses and business families. After the conference, direct requests to contribute to this volume were sent to individual researchers in anthropology and the adjacent social sciences who have worked on family businesses and business families before. The idea for such a research project is based on my own fieldwork in the Russian Federation, where I analysed the relation of post-Soviet Russian businesses to morality, religion and cultural context. From that research, I became very much aware of the discussions and concepts in this theme within anthropology. Therefore, I envisioned opening up family business research to such discourses in order to enrich our knowledge in family businesses. Based on this, a research project began in 2020 with a cross-­ cultural perspective on family businesses and business families. In this line, the current volume is an attempt to look at family businesses and business families from a broader perspective and with the help of anthropological concepts and methods. For this, we address questions such as the following: How are families and kinship groups structured and organized? How v

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are they produced and reproduced within and across generations, and how are such patterns enacted? What do we know about the cultural setting and its influence on values, sentiments, commitments and further characteristics? Keeping these tremendously challenging questions in mind, the current volume thus is the first attempt of its kind to better understand how business families and family businesses are organized and interact with one another by using anthropological concepts and methods. Of course, such a research project would have been impossible without the sincere help and generous support from so many people and institutions. To begin with, I would like to thank the WIFU Foundation for the funding of the conference ‘WIFU meets Anthropology’ and this project that has been born out of it. In addition, I would like to thank all those who gave their input, shared their ideas and contributed their helpful advice. To name just a few, I would like to thank Chris Hann, Heiko Schrader, Heike Ohlbrecht, Joachim Otto Habeck, Andreas Streinzer, Klaus Buchenau, Detelina Tocheva, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Sylvia Terpe, Alessandro Testa and Jennifer Cash. Moreover, I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Riches who helped me to improve the English throughout the volume and who also took care to ensure consistency throughout. This cooperation with everyone worked very well, and the responses were always very helpful and prompt. Thank you all very much for your insightful comments and helpful criticism during the analysis and writing-up process! Third, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Witten/Herdecke University. With their inspiring discussions and insightful criticism on provisional ideas, results and theoretical contributions, they have been very helpful in so many ways. In particular, I would like to thank Heiko Kleve, Tom Rüsen, Rudolf Wimmer, Theresa Arnold, Kristin Beer and Anne Heider. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Graber from Palgrave Macmillan publishers for her confidence in the book becoming a success. Throughout the whole process, she was very helpful with her support and in the smooth and professional production of the book. Moreover, I am also extremely grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for their permission to include the material used in the Introduction to this volume and to the journal Anthropology Today for the permission to reuse some of their material in the Introduction. Finally, my warmest thanks go to my wife, my children, my parents and all my relatives. They have shown almost endless understanding and

 PREFACE 

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patience with me during the last few years. With their heartfelt emotional attachment and their tolerance, they have contributed substantially to the success of the book. In particular, I am grateful and deeply indebted to my wife Sabine. Without her love and cheerful encouragement, this book would have been impossible. Thank you so much! Witten, Germany July 2022

Tobias Koellner

Contents

Part I  Introduction   1 1 An  Introduction to Family Firms and Business Families from the Anthropological Perspective: Concepts, Reflections and Ethnographic Observations  3 Tobias Koellner Part II  A Processual Understanding of Kinship   23 2 How  ‘Enduring Family Bonds’ Are Made: Insights from Fulɓe Kinship Enterprises in Northern Benin 25 Jeannett Martin 3 Producing  and Reproducing the Business Family Across Generations: The Importance of Narratives in German Business Families 57 Tobias Koellner, Britta Boyd, Heiko Kleve, and Tom A. Rüsen

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Part III  Family Business after the End of Socialism   81 4 Power,  Family and Business: Practices of Oligarchic Economy in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Armenia (Before 2018) 83 Yulia Antonyan 5 Business  as a Gift: Family Entrepreneurship and the Ambiguities of Sharing115 Daria Tereshina Part IV  The Contet of Family Business  147 6 Rethinking  Confucianism: Family Business and the Ritual Construction of the ‘Family’ in Japan and China149 Sigrun C. Caspary and Carsten Herrmann-Pillath 7 Kinship,  Godparenthood and Urban Estates in the Bolivian Andes: The Cultural Production of Business Families179 Juliane Müller 8 Anthropology  of Family and Family Businesses Is Emic All the Way197 Heung Wah Wong Part V  Family Business and Historical Change  221 9 The  Legacy of the Past in Business Families of Northern Italy223 Simone Ghezzi

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10 Family  Values, Paprika Production and E.U. Integration: An Ethnography of a Kinship Enterprise in Contemporary Hungary245 Luca Szücs 11 The  Other Side of Succession Issues: How the Decline of Some Family Businesses Allows for the Consolidation of Others273 Tijo Salverda Part VI  Concluding Remarks  293 12 Conclusion295 Tobias Koellner 13 Afterword305 Chris Hann Index311

Notes on Contributors

Yulia Antonyan  is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of History, Yerevan State University (since 2008). Her professional interests are in anthropology of religion and anthropology of social structures with special focus on Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Her fieldwork has been mainly in Armenia and the Armenian communities of Georgia, Syria and Lebanon. Yulia Antonyan has published around 45 articles in English, Armenian and Russian and has edited a volume on anthropology of elites in the South Caucasus (2016). You can find her major articles at https://yerevan.academia.edu/YuliaAntonyan․ Britta  Boyd is a senior researcher at the Witten/Herdecke University. She completed her dissertation on ‘Sustainable Management in Family Business’ at the University of Flensburg in 2007 and was then employed as an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark. There she supervised theses up to PhD level and taught in the fields of international marketing, business marketing, corporate social responsibility and entrepreneurship. Her articles have appeared in international journals and books within her research areas of family business, entrepreneurship and sustainable management. In addition to serving as an editor and reviewer for journals and conferences, she worked on the board of the researcher network IFERA for six years. At the Witten/Herdecke University, she is now responsible for the project ‘Narratives of Survival’ in which longlasting family businesses in Japan and Germany are investigated. Sigrun  C.  Caspary is a senior researcher at the Witten Institute for Family Business (WIFU) at the Witten/Herdecke University. She holds a xiii

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PhD in Japanese Studies, Economics and Political Science from Bonn University (1996). For her thesis on industrial policy in the Japanese aircraft industry, she spent two years as a research fellow in Japan at Hitotsubashi University (fellowship granted by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture) and at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Tokyo. She has held teaching positions at the Witten/ Herdecke University (since 1997) and at Trier University (1992–1993) and lectured at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management (2006–2010). Her main research topics include industrial policy and regional development, and longevity, rituals and female succession in Japanese family businesses. Simone Ghezzi  (PhD, University of Toronto) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He recently co-­ authored with Fulvia D'Aloisio Ethnographies of Work in Italian Industrial Capitalism (2020) and has written various articles on family business, including ‘Familism in the firm: An ethnographic approach to Italian family capitalism’ (Ethnologie française 2016). His research interests include family entrepreneurship, informal economy, artisan production and economic development. He is co-editor in chief of the journal Antropologia. Chris Hann  is Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Between 1999 and 2021, he was director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath  is a professor and Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany. After completing an education in economics, linguistics and sinology at the University of Cologne (1988), he assumed professorships in economics, evolutionary and institutional economics and Chinese economic studies at Duisburg University (1992–1998), Witten/ Herdecke University (1996–2008) and Frankfurt School of Finance and Management (2008–2014) and has taught at many universities, including the Universities of Bonn, Tübingen, St. Gallen, ETH Zürich, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University and Beijing Normal University. His major fields of research are economics and philosophy, ecological economics, institutional change and economic d ­ evelopment, international economics and Chinese economic studies. His publications include 500+ academic papers and 21 books, covering a broad cross-disciplinary range in economics, humanities and sciences, including recently Ecological Economics,

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Journal of Economic Methodology, Economics & Philosophy, Journal of Comparative Economics, European Economic Review, Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies and European Journal of Political Economy. His magnum opus on China was published in 2017: China’s Economic Culture: The Ritual Order of State and Markets. In 2020, he was co-editor (with Jens Harbecke) of Social Neuroeconomics: Mechanistic Integration of the Neurosciences and the Social Sciences and the lead author (with Guo Man and Feng Xingyuan) of Ritual and Economy in Metropolitan China: A Global Social Science Approach. Heiko Kleve  holds the WIFU Foundation’s Chair for the Organization and Development of Business Families since July 2017. Since October 2020, Heiko Kleve has been the Academic Director of the WIFU and supervises the academic activities. In addition, he has been working as a consultant, mediator, coach and supervisor for individuals, groups, teams and organizations/businesses for more than 20 years. In 1998, Heiko Kleve gained a doctorate in sociology at the Free University of Berlin, achieving ‘summa cum laude’ before he was appointed to the Chair of Theory and History of Social Work at the Alice Salomon University, Berlin, in 2002. From 2005 to 2017, he was Professor of Sociological and SocialPsychological Foundations of Social Work at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. There, he was the dean of the Social and Educational Sciences Department from 2013 to 2017, director of the social work course specializing in families and academic director of further training in systemic case management, systemic coaching and systemic structures. Moreover, Heiko Kleve possesses additional certificates as a systemic consultant (DGSF), supervisor and coach (DGSv), systemic and teaching supervisor (SG), conflict mediator and case manager (DGCC). Tobias  Koellner  is an anthropologist and sociologist. He received his PhD in social anthropology in 2011 from the University of Leipzig based on his research on Russian entrepreneurs and their relations to morality and Orthodox Christianity. Prior to that (2006–2009), he was a member of the research group ‘Religion and Morality in European Russia’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. In 2013, he received a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the research project ‘The Relationship Between Religion and Politics in Contemporary Russia’. Currently, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Witten Institute for Family Business at the Witten/Herdecke University and heads his own research group. For

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this, he received a grant from the WIFU foundation which allows him to develop a cross-cultural perspective on family businesses and business families. He is the author of two monographs, several edited volumes and numerous articles. Jeannett Martin  has worked extensively on mobility, kinship, childhood, child politics and belonging. Her work is grounded in long-standing ethnographic studies, mainly in rural and urban West Africa and in Germany. She started her career as an anthropologist with a study on educational mobility between Ghana and Germany with a focus on the process of return migration and research partners mainly from the middle and upper middle classes of urbanized southern Ghana. Later, she worked on changing norms and practices of child fostering among Fée (Mokolle) peasants in rural Northern Benin. Her particular interest in this project was on foster children’s perspectives, decision-making and ways to act in foster arrangements. With time, she came to reflect on and use the concept of ‘belonging’ as a theoretical lens through which she analysed kinship, ethnic and inter-ethnic relations, practices and politics in Northern Benin— again with a focus on childhood and child politics in the wider context of social, economic and political transformations. For this volume, she applied her knowledge in kinship studies to the analysis of family bonds in relation to the economic activity of cattle-herding kin groups in that region by using the concept of the kinship enterprise. Juliane  Müller is a lecturer-professor and Serra Húnter Fellow at the University of Barcelona (Department of Social Anthropology). Previously, she was a lecturer at the University of Munich and postdoctoral scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her areas of interest include the social and moral dimension of economic action, anthropology and sociology of popular markets, transnational trade, infrastructure and global commodity chains. Among her recent publications are ‘The Limits of Corporate Chains and Brand Management: “Loyalty” and the Efficacy of Vernacular Markets in the Andes’. Cultural Anthropology 36 (2): 252–281 (2021); ‘Webs of Fiesta-related Trade. Chinese Imports, Investment and Reciprocity in La Paz, Bolivia’. Critique of Anthropology 40 (2): 238–263 (2020); and ‘Andean-Pacific Commerce and Credit: Bolivian Traders, Asian Migrant Businesses, and International Manufacturers in the Regional Economy’. Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 23 (1): 18–36 (2018).

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Tom A. Rüsen  is managing director of the Witten Institute for Family Businesses (WIFU), honorary professor of the economic and society faculty of the Private Witten/Herdecke University and visiting professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. At the same time, he heads the non-profit WIFU Foundation. His research and teaching activities as well as his publications focus on the investigation of conflict and crisis dynamics in families and companies of family businesses and the development of practical solution concepts for the development of resilience structures within business families. As part of his coaching and consulting work, he accompanies succession processes, conflict and crisis situations, development of family strategies and family-internal (self-) management systems. He also designs and teaches on open and in-house programmes for the development of shareholder competence in business families. He is a member of the Commission for the Governance Code for Family Businesses and the Editorial Advisory Board of the Magazine for Family Businesses and Strategy. In 2020 and 2022, he was recognized by Family Capital as one of the world’s top 100 family influencers in the ‘Academics’ category. Tijo Salverda  is affiliated with the University of Vienna, Austria, where he recently completed a (temporary) professorship in social and cultural anthropology. His research focuses on elites, inequality, moral economy and corporate actors, including how they perceive and respond to counter-­ power. Salverda’s publications include The Franco-Mauritian Elite: Power and Anxiety in the Face of Change (2015), The Anthropology of Elites (co-­ edited with Jon Abbink, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and various articles in high-impact anthropology, geography and sociology journals, as well as other journals in related areas. More information can be found here: https://tijosalverda.nl/. Luca Szücs  (Dr. Phil.) is an anthropologist, sociologist and art historian by training and holds a PhD in anthropology. She pursued her doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Halle (Saale), Germany. Her main research areas are anthropology of labour, economic anthropology and neoliberal transformation in Eastern Europe. In her doctoral research, Szücs focused on the entanglement of historically formed moral concepts, values and entrepreneurial motivations in small-sized (family) enterprises in Hungary. She studied the country’s neoliberal transformation from the perspective of small-business owners and looked at the economic and

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social processes in which petty capitalists emerged after the regime change in 1990. Daria Tereshina  is a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Her doctoral research was on the moral dimension of family businesses in Russia. She is the author of Managing Firms and Families: Work and Values in a Russian City. Heung  Wah  Wong is the founder of the Global Creative Industries Program at The University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology from Oxford University in 1996. His research interest lies in the globalization of Japanese popular culture, anthropology of business and cultural policies in East Asia. He conducts research in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Mainland China. He is the author of Japanese Bosses, Chinese Workers: Power and Control in a Hong Kong Megastore (1999). He is also the co-author of Japanese Adult Videos in Taiwan (2014), The Japanese Adult Videos Industry (2017), Tradition and Transformation in a Chinese Family Business (2020), Censorship in Japan (2021) and various journal articles and chapters.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to Family Firms and Business Families from the Anthropological Perspective: Concepts, Reflections and Ethnographic Observations Tobias Koellner

1   Introduction Although the topics of kinship and economy are central to anthropological analysis, few scholars have brought the two fields together by introducing broader concepts or large-scale comparisons. To date, the topic is gaining importance (Hann, 2018), and there is some solid research

An earlier version of this introduction has been published as Koellner (2022).

T. Koellner (*) WIFU, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_1

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available; however, the results remain disparate and have few links to each other. Therefore, family business researchers with a strong background in management studies currently dominate the analysis of family firms and business families. A better understanding of family business, however, remains both necessary and hard to achieve under these research trajectories. Therefore, the main aim of this volume is to provide a vision of how family business research and anthropology can be brought together, in order to benefit future research in both disciplines and develop a more sophisticated understanding of family businesses themselves. The study of family business has insisted that family ownership and operation distinguishes this business form from others such as non-family corporations, because of the close interaction between kinship and business interests. Such an insistence naturally demands further specification of how the family matters, and family business research has attempted to clarify the influence of the family itself on business activities by developing concepts such as familiness (Frank et al., 2010; Habbershon & Williams, 1999; Zellweger et  al., 2010), entrepreneurial legacy (Jaskiewicz et  al., 2015) or socio-emotional wealth (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2007). As a result, the kinship group behind the family firm has received increasing attention in family business research in the last decade or so (Caspary, 2018; Combs et  al., 2020; Jaskiewicz et  al., 2017, 2020; Kleve et  al., 2020; Kleve & Koellner, 2019; Koellner et al., 2022; Stamm, 2013). Nevertheless, it still is the case that some obstacles to a better understanding of the kinship group behind the family firm remain. A first consideration about the direction of future research concerns the fact that family business research largely focuses its analysis on single persons and not on broader networks of kin or whole families (Jaskiewicz et al., 2017: 313). Therefore, the composition, structure and organization of the kinship group still remain largely neglected, as do the form and quality of these relationships (Kushins & Behounek, 2020). Here anthropology definitely can offer some insights with its detailed ethnographies on kin relations based on long-term research. Nevertheless, some authors have tried to draw attention to conceptualizations of the family as such (Zellweger et al., 2010) and to models of the family outside family business research (Jaskiewicz et  al., 2017, 2020). However, here we are still facing difficulties of how to conceptualize ‘the family’ and its internal processes. Here crucial concepts, recently discussed in anthropology and the social sciences, would be helpful because notions such as relatedness (Carsten, 2000, 2004; Sahlins, 2013), kinning (Howell,

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2006) or doing family (Jurczyk et al., 2014) all emphasize an understanding of the family and kinship as a process. In her analysis, in particular Janet Carsten (2004: 9) highlights how different forms of relatedness are produced and draws attention to an understanding of kinship as ‘an area of life in which people invest their emotions, their creative energy and their new imaginings’. In this way, Carsten shifts our attention from takenfor-granted notions of kin relations to the production and reproduction of relatedness. This is a crucial finding for the business family, which has to engage with issues of involvement, identity and sense-­making over generations (Jaskiewicz et al., 2015; Zellweger et al., 2010). In this way, notions such as relatedness, kinning or doing family enhance our understanding of widely used concepts in family business research such as socio-emotional wealth or familiness (this is very much in line with the findings by Gerken et al., 2022). Moreover, we need to understand kinship and the family as distinct phenomena rooted in the local context. This pertains to notions of culture because the ‘cultural specificity of family … [is a] prerequisite for the understanding of the corporate reality of family businesses’ (Wong, 2021: 258, see also Koellner, 2021 or Koellner & Roth, 2023, under review). Only then are we able to understand the composition, structure and organization of the family in relation to local institutions, values and propositions. As such, there is no single understanding of the family because it is rooted in cultural contexts and differently implemented in different settings. This has a crucial impact on the family firm as such and needs to be taken into consideration. Therefore, this volume follows that route, drawing too on previous research, and argues that the incorporation and engagement with anthropology or other social sciences opens up new avenues for future research in family business and management research (for a similar argument see Stewart, 2003, 2010). While family business scholars have accumulated substantial knowledge about the family firm, the business family and the cultural context have not received equal attention. However, the authors of this volume perceive the integration with other disciplines to be crucial because an interdisciplinary approach to family firms and business families allows us to move the analysis of the family business forward. For this, the next sections discuss some of the concepts developed in anthropology and the social sciences before an overview of the chapters in this volume is given.

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2   An Anthropological Approach to Family Firms and Business Families This volume aims to contribute to a better understanding of family business. For this, the contribution is threefold. New concepts from anthropology will be introduced, discussed, and fresh ethnographic material will be presented. In giving these accounts, our goal is to enhance our understanding of family firms and business families on a global scale. In particular, three different concepts from anthropology and the social sciences will be presented and discussed: 1) notions of doing kinship, relatedness, kinning or doing family; 2) the notion of the kinship enterprise; and 3) a reflection on the production of enduring bonds of relatedness in their relation to the cultural setting because we assume that kin relations and understanding of the family differ in respect to the social, historical and cultural context (see Yanagisako, 1979; also Wong, 2021, 2022). 2.1   Doing Kinship, Relatedness, Kinning and Doing Family In her seminal analysis, Janet Carsten (2000: 1) applied a constructivist conceptualization in kinship studies and shifted the focus considerably: ‘Rather than taking the content of “kinship” for granted, [we] build … [on] the implications and the lived experience of relatedness’. Herewith she draws on earlier critique on a purely biological conceptualization of kinship (Schneider, 1984; Yanagisako & Collier, 1987) and further explained, ‘Kinship may be viewed as given by birth and unchangeable, or it may be seen as shaped by the ordinary, everyday activities of family life’ (Carsten, 2004: 6). The latter understanding, in particular, is important and allows for a better conceptualization of the kinship group behind the family firm, as will be shown in the following section and throughout the volume. Recent family business research, nonetheless, tends to focus on nuclear families or conjugal families but neglects broader kinship associations and other forms of relatedness (Kushins & Behounek, 2020). However, a focus on the doing perspective is crucial for our understanding of the business family, which very often incorporates different nuclear families and larger kinship groups. In this way we are able to move beyond an understanding of kinship as being solely based on descent or marriage, and towards an understanding that may incorporate other forms of relatedness such as care (Thelen, 2015), nurturing (El Guindi, 2020), performative actions or choice (Schnegg et  al., 2010). Focusing on these relations

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among kin within and over generations, then, allows us to better understand how relatedness (Carsten, 2000) is made and reproduced by processes of kinning (Howell, 2006). This is particularly relevant in business families where the inclusion of marriage partners into the kin group seems to be more strategic than is usually assumed in the Western society (see Hamabata, 1991 for Japan or Iyer, 1999 for India). Likewise, the adoption of suitable sons into the kin group for succession in the family business (Mehrotra et al., 2013) or the fulfilment of ritual obligations is also well known (Colli & Rose, 2008). Business families, then, are not static entities but take a processual character where inclusion and exclusion are not fixed but actively produced, and sometimes even managed (for a classical approach to such an understanding, see Schweitzer, 2000). Accordingly, different understandings of kin can be utilized ‘to maximize the number of individuals who can be “made into relatives”’, or the opposite, to minimize affiliation (Stewart, 2010: 292–293). This is crucially important for business families because family members can provide access to information and networks (Goody, 1996) or capital (Hart, 1975) but equally demand a share of the income (Bloch, 1973; Song, 1999). Drawing the boundary flexibly, then, is a feasible way to acquire the necessary resources without having the obligation to share too much of the profits. Later, a constructivist understanding of kinship was adopted in family sociology too and applied in the notion of doing family (Jurczyk et al., 2014). Through this, Jurczyk extended our understanding of how relatedness can be produced and reproduced within the family. For this, she differentiated between the main components of doing family: 1) managing the balance between co-presence and interaction within the family and other tasks such as work, leisure activities or further social relations; 2) constructing and strengthening commonalities within the family; and 3) displaying family (Finch, 2007, Jurczyk, 2014, 61–64). This concept of doing family can be applied in the context of the business family too, and crucially enhances our understanding because it allows us to scrutinize the processes of how relatedness is produced through everyday activities. Balance management is a permanent obligation for the business family because the needs, interests and expectations of the family firm, the nuclear family and further members of the business family all have to be coordinated with other tasks. In the case of extended kin structures, this represents a considerable challenge, since the individuals grow up in different contexts, may speak different languages and spend relatively little time

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together (Felden et al., 2019; Kleve et al., 2020). Similarly important is the construction of relatedness through interaction, joint rituals or in the distribution of shared memories or narratives (Discua Cruz et al., 2020; Koellner et al., 2022). In this way, abstract affiliations are made tangible by relating them to concrete persons, events or places such as the person of the founder, anniversaries of the family firm or the place of foundation (more generally, this has been conceptualized in collective memory studies by Halbwachs, 1985 or Assmann, 2000: 17, 38–41). The last component, displaying family, addresses the performance of relatedness in public. This includes family photos or participation in public events, which makes processes of inclusion and exclusion tangible (Jurczyk, 2014: 62). In this way, the cohesion inside the group is fostered, and the demarcation from others is strengthened. 2.2   The Business Family and the Kinship Enterprise After having drawn attention to a new perspective on notions of doing and kinning, let me clarify my understanding of the business family, which rests on two premises. On the one hand, this includes Carsten’s (2000) notion of relatedness, and on the other, Yanagisako’s (2018, 2019) concept of the kinship enterprise. Consequently, the efforts for conceptualizing family businesses in this volume focus on the processes of how the business family is produced and reproduced, and a relation to the business is upheld. To be sure, kin relations are still a very important basis (Kleve et al., 2020; McKinnon, 2016) for establishing binding ties and enduring bonds of relatedness. On the other hand, however, relatedness is often produced in very flexible ways. Let me add here that I differentiate between the nuclear family and the business family, although there may be considerable overlap in some cases. Moreover, let me emphasize that an understanding of the nuclear family as such does not necessarily rest on any reference to the family firm. In contrast, the business family is based on forms of relatedness, which are construed in direct relation to the family firm, its products, its origins, its founders, the family assets, the employees and other persons from the business family. This may incorporate kinship and conjugal relations; identification with the business family or the family enterprise; feelings of closeness to other members; and individual and collective ownership or attachments to persons, places or products. In this way, the understanding

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of the business family is much broader than the understanding of the nuclear family, and needs to be differentiated from the family firm too. Therefore, I will summarize this and give a definition of the business family, which rests on Yanagisako’s (Yanagisako, 2019: 6) notion of the kinship enterprise. In so doing, however, I move well beyond connections based on ‘enduring family bonds’ only and incorporate other forms of relatedness too: Business families are collectivities of persons who construe themselves to be connected to the family firm (its products, production process, employees, etc.), or the family assets (e.g., olive trees, specific buildings, or places) and/ or to other members of the business family. The enduring bonds between the family, the assets and the family firm rest on shared beliefs, sentiments and commitments attached to these bonds.

As becomes clear from this, the current volume develops an understanding of the business family, in opposition neither to the family firm nor to the nuclear family. Rather, all three phenomena are in constant interaction and deeply related to one another. Nevertheless, it is crucially important to differentiate them analytically because they follow different logics and rest on different premises. Therefore, one of the contributions of this volume is to establish an understanding of the business family as a distinct social entity which may incorporate several nuclear families. Likewise, the business family is related but distinct to the family firm because the family firm includes other persons. Nevertheless, the identity of the business family is closely related to the family firm. This goes far beyond involvement, essence, ownership or identity but includes heterogeneous items such as the products, production processes, assets and anniversaries. It is a very long list of suitable associations, and so it is important to highlight the processual character of the business family because these patterns may change over time for the whole group and for individuals too. Therefore, emphasis is put on the boundary-making process and less on the contents used for defining the inclusion into the business family. 2.3   Business Families in Cultural Contexts Let me now concentrate on the third area where anthropology and family business research can gain from one another. In the economic sciences, modernization theories played a major role until the second half of the

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twentieth century, which assumed a similar path to modernity on a global scale and an increasing differentiation in social value spheres such as politics, religion and economics (pioneering Durkheim, 2004, Weber, 1988). This was particularly significant in research on family businesses, and for a long time, family businesses were perceived as a pre-modern phenomenon combining the two spheres of kinship and economic activity that actually no longer belonged together in the modern economy (Kocka, 1979; Tyrell, 1976). In some cases, this idea gained traction, and it was assumed that family businesses would eventually become obsolete and disappear by themselves (Chandler, 1990). But this is by no means the case: to this day, family firms play a central role on a global scale and even in highly modernized societies (Stiftung Familienunternehmen, 2019). Therefore, no coherent and uniform path to modernity can be found, and hence cultural differences remain. In contrast to such a classical economic position, anthropologists and fellow social scientists across many decades and theoretical persuasions would agree with the proposition that human action in general, and economic action in particular, is grounded in very specific local and social contexts, which differ considerably over space and time. Often, this is supplemented with the notion that acknowledges not only the distinctions between human groups, but also the fact that such distinctions may be either perpetuated or changed over time, thereby demanding that researchers also account for processes of change and continuity as a basic property of culture (recently this has been recognized in family business research, e.g., by James et al., 2020). In anthropology and the social sciences, such positions have become hegemonic and underwrite all understandings of cultural context (Beckert, 1996, Beugelsdijk & Maseland, 2010, Gudeman, 2008, Hann & Hart, 2009, Koellner, 2012: 10–14, Mauss, 1990 [1925], Polanyi, 2001 [1944], Thurnwald, 1932, Zukin & DiMaggio, 1990). Increasingly, the importance of context has been discussed in management and family business research too (Basco, 2017; Bornhausen, 2021; Gupta & Levenburg, 2010; James et  al., 2020; Welter et  al., 2016; Wiklund et al., 2011). In so doing, however, a one-dimensional understanding of the cultural context prevails that associates culture with the nation-state (see Koellner & Roth, 2023, under review). Until today, most research in family business research is based on the works of Geert Hofstede (2001, see also Hofstede & Minkov, 2010). Although popular until today, Hofstede’s approach is biased towards equally popular cultural stereotypes (Behrens, 2007) that do not allow for a truly detailed

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understanding of business families and family firms in their respective contexts. As Hann (2002: 8) noted, such cultural ‘dimensions’ are too broad to grasp real differences and similarities between cultures and instead have the effect of treating culture as a ‘mysterious residual variable’. Consequently, the key problem of a Hofstedian understanding of culture as a set of traits shared by all persons within one nation is its inclination to essentialism. Corresponding research (see Bornhausen, 2021 for a recent example) overemphasizes common characteristics of a national culture, treats them as if they were evenly distributed and in many cases uses statistical average (‘central tendencies’) instead of individual views (McSweeney, 2002: 93). Instead and for several decades already, anthropological research has moved away from trait-based definitions of culture (as they are common in family business research until today) to understand culture as symbolically constituted (Geertz, 1973; Ortner, 1973; Sahlins, 1999). The process as such is characterized in the following way: ‘the signs of cultural distinction represent modes of organization rather than the traits in themselves’ (Sahlins, 1999: 414). In this way, the constitution of cultural meanings and symbols became at least as important as the cultural traits or characteristics as such. Accordingly, the view of culture as a ‘consistent set of representations (or beliefs) that constitute a people’s perception of reality and that get reproduced relatively intact across generations’ (Fox & King, 2020: 1) became highly problematic. It became too clear, empirically, that culture is not automatically produced within a group of people or reproduced across generations. Therefore, attention is given to the fact that the constitution of culture becomes increasingly heterogeneous, multiple and is no longer distributed evenly and passed on to the next generation (Brumann, 1999; Sökefeld, 1999). Nevertheless, it is often enough invoked instrumentally and for ideological purposes. Having said this, however, it also needs to be stressed that not everything goes. Culture is not completely negotiable or manipulable (Sahlins, 1999: 403). Culture is meaningful as long as it is experienced as ‘bounded, reified, essentialized, and timeless’, and therefore some elements do appear to members as remaining stable and immutable (Brumann, 1999: 11). To summarize the discussion on the concept of culture, we may say that cultural notions rest on ‘any set of persons who have specific routines of thinking, feeling, and acting in common’ (Brumann, 1999: 13). Here, however, it is important to keep in mind that we are not talking about organizational or business culture, but have in mind larger entities that

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allow for the symbolic construction of culture. This may include patterns of shared morality and custom, religious notions, social conventions or other common characteristics. All of these routines may be used for the symbolic constitution of culture in a constant process of making and remaking, which has implications for family firms and business families (James et al., 2020 call this the meso and macro context). Based on these explanations it becomes obvious that we still need a better understanding of how family firms and business families operate in different cultural contexts and how the family influences economic decision-­making. It is time to change the perspective and pay more attention to family firms and business families, taking into account the specific cultural and historical contexts (see also Wong, 2022, and 2021). An important point of departure is the work of Sylvia Yanagisako, who understands ‘capitalist action as culturally produced and, therefore, always infused with cultural meaning and value’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 6). From this it becomes clear that culture and capitalism produce each other, so that ‘a model of culture and capitalism as mutually constituted processes’ is needed (ibid.). Deriving from Yanagisako’s work, it could be asked what connections exist between different forms of capitalism (varieties of capitalism) and the different structures, roles and self-images of the family behind the company (varieties of familialism) (Leitner, 2003). This allows for a radical change of perspective in research on family businesses, which makes the culturally embedded and shaped family the starting point for the analysis. Therefore, we aim to show the complexities and challenges when grounding the analysis of economic activity and entrepreneurship in family firms and business families in cultural contexts. For this, the notion of embeddedness has been suggested as an important theoretical concept. The concept of embeddedness allows the emphasis of certain characteristics such as moral notions, religious considerations and ethnic belonging, all of which move beyond Granovetter’s prominent understanding of embeddedness, which focuses on the social networks of the actors but tends to ignore the ‘complex alchemy of politics, culture, and ideology’ (Krippner, 2001: 782). Yet, there are already a number of examples of how ethnographers have analysed economic activity in this way (Burawoy & Verdery, 1999; Hann, 2018; Koellner, 2012; Müller, 2002). These authors have shown convincingly that entrepreneurship; relations to customer, supplier and employee; as well as the modes of production and consumption are strongly related

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to the cultural context. In this way, the cultural and religious context is crucially important for economic activity as a whole and for the evaluation of entrepreneurial activity and the activity in family firms. To sum up, it could be said that social relations, as well as religious and moral underpinnings in their cultural context, are very important because they provide the crucial context where family firms and business families are immersed (James et al., 2020).

3  Overview of the Chapters Throughout the volume we have attempted to establish some thematical overlap and to use corresponding theoretical concepts. Nevertheless, there is quite some variation in the specific topics addressed and the methods used for the collection of empirical material. For this reason, let me briefly introduce the individual chapters. The first two chapters highlight a processual understanding of the kin groups behind the family business and emphasize processes of relatedness, kinning and doing family. In Chap. 2, Jeannett Martin focuses on cattle herders in Northern Benin. In particular, she is interested in the establishment and upholding of relatedness in pastoral Fulɓe wuros, the homesteads where the family economies are located. For this, she highlights context-specific factors such as ritualized practices during ceremonial acts, marriage decisions, daily care work for humans and animals and the transfer of rights over cattle. Herewith she is able to show in great detail similarities with Yanagisako’s characterization of family firms in the northern Italian textile industry in the 1980s, with the heroization of individual men and a description of the modes of production as being particularly rational. Chapter 3 is written by Tobias Koellner, Britta Boyd, Heiko Kleve and Tom A. Rüsen and is based on long-term research with old and large business families in Germany. Specifically, the chapter looks at the production and reproduction of business families within and across generations. For this, the authors delve into the importance of narratives, which contribute to identification and cohesion within the business family, emotional attachment and orientation. In this way, relatedness within the business family is fostered and supports the transgenerational commitment of the business family in relation to the family business, the family assets and other members of the business family.

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In Chap. 4 Yulia Antonyan focuses on post-Soviet Armenia and the particular importance of family and kinship networks in the economic and political sphere. In some cases, these kinship networks function very much like political or business ‘organizations’, based on notions of traditional authority, reciprocity and gender-related practices. This ensures privileges and political support, which are necessary for the profitability of the business and the continued existence of the business family. Chap. 5, presented by Daria Tereshina, focuses on the post-Soviet sphere. She emphasizes the gender aspects of entrepreneurship in Russia and shows the implications for family businesses. The male breadwinner is still the norm, which embraces gendered hierarchies but also long-term responsibilities and obligations a man has to his wife and children. Giving a business as a gift to women, then, implies not only a return of their bodily capital but also includes liabilities to the next generation. In this way, family businesses emerge, which are not intended to but nevertheless have crucial implications for structuring family relations and the transfer of assets between spouses and the next generation. In Chap. 6 Sigrun C. Caspary and Carsten Herrmann-Pillath analyse the ritual construction of the family in Japan and China. Although both countries are sometimes considered to belong to one consistent Confucian culture, the authors show very convincingly that there exist substantial differences. These are mainly rooted in the understanding and application of rituals—Japanese rituals define an inclusive family corporation, whereas Chinese rituals define the family enterprise as an exclusive network organization. This has crucial implications for the organization, composition and structure in the family business and the business family. In Chap. 7, Juliane Müller analyses the cultural production of business families in contemporary Bolivia. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Müller highlights the endurance of small-scale entrepreneurial structures which are based on specific forms of kinship organization and relatedness. In this setting, ritual forms of kinship such as godparenthood or ‘political kin’ seem to be more important than the extended family structures themselves. Consequently, the family is important for the transmission of property but less so as a network of important contacts, which tends to be organized by the individuals themselves with the help of ritual kinship. Chapter 8 by Heung Wah Wong brings us to Japan, and draws another comparison with China. After reflecting on an anthropological understanding of culture and the importance of the cultural setting for the

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structuring and composition of the family, Wong analyses Japanese kinship and its implications for family businesses. In so doing, he notices that the family firm is the actualization of relations within the family, in particular for the relations between successor and incumbent. Nevertheless, and in line with the argumentation presented by Caspary and Herrmann-Pillath, the differences between Japan and China again prevail, although this is not always acknowledged in other research. The last part of the volume addresses historical legacies in relation to family businesses and business families. The first of these chapters is Chap. 9, where Simone Ghezzi focuses on family businesses in Northern Italy. In his analysis, he draws attention to the fact that the very presence of family businesses and their support by the family group have to be understood as a process with significant links to the past. Among other things, the historical articulation of the family, changing patterns of land ownership and Catholic cooperativism are important factors in the regional, institutional and cultural contexts, which have to be taken into account. Family businesses, thus, have to be recognized as embedded institutions, and only if we pay sufficient attention to contextual and historical factors are we able to grasp contemporary notions of entrepreneurship in family businesses adequately. In Chap. 10 Luca Szücs focuses on legacies from the socialist era and current challenges for family businesses in Hungary. Under socialism, the ‘normal’ mechanisms of family businesses were hindered and prevented intra-family succession. Even later on when socialism had come to an end, the legacies were still important because having a professional background in a socialist enterprise was decisive for successfully becoming an entrepreneur. Today, new challenges such as EU market integration and increasing competition have arisen and provide a challenge for family businesses again. The local production of paprika powder, as in the case presented, thus becomes increasingly difficult, although the work put into the business is still an incentive for continuation and intra-family succession. Chapter 11 is the last chapter in this part and is written by Tijo Salverda. He takes us to the island of Mauritius and investigates the changes in family businesses there. Based on long-term ethnographic encounters, he is able to show that despite many changes, some smaller elite family groups remain central to the economy of the island. They are able to preserve their privileges, and even when they ‘fail’, most of them are transferred to another business family and continue their existence in another kinship setting. Thus, Salverda argues that there is a notable consolidation of

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wealth and assets among the Franco-Mauritian elite in the business sector of the island, and for this the very existence of such extended business families is decisive. The volume is closed by a conclusion by Tobias Koellner and an afterword by Chris Hann, where the previous discussions are summarized and reflected. These are intended to indicate ways in which anthropological methods and knowledge can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of family businesses and business families in the future.

4  Conclusion To sum up the findings from this introduction, it is fair to say that anthropological research contributes to a better understanding of family firms and business families in at least three ways, which move far beyond the detailed ethnographic descriptions provided. Firstly, it allows for a more detailed analysis of specific mechanisms for structuring and organizing the business family and its relation to the business by focusing on processes of kinning and doing kinship. Secondly, anthropological research improves our knowledge about family firms and business families with new conceptual tools such as the notion of the kinship enterprise grounded in the long-term ethnographic observations. Based on these insights, this volume also attempts to give new reflections and provide a definition of the business family. Finally, anthropological research highlights that cultural patterns are crucially important and influence economic action and notions of the family considerably. For this reason, we return to the need to rethink how we conduct comparative and cross-cultural studies in the anthropological tradition of Jack Goody (1976) and others. If we follow that route, we are able to enhance our understanding considerably, because we can conceptualize economic action in family business to ‘entail […] heterogeneous capitalist practices shaped by diverse meanings, sentiments, and representations […] all of which are culturally mediated’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 7, emphasis added). With that aim in mind, the following chapters provide new ethnographical observations, new theoretical concepts and critical reflection on family firms and business families from heterogeneous backgrounds in different cultural settings.

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Koellner, T. (2021). Kulturelle Variationen in Familienunternehmen und Unternehmensfamilien: Eine Literaturübersicht und eine Forschungsagenda. Arbeitsberichte des Instituts für Soziologie der Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, 79. Koellner, T. (2022). Family Firms and Business Families: A Field for Anthropological Research. Anthropology Today. 38(6). https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1467-8322.12768 Koellner, T., Haver-Rassfeld, H., & Kleve, H. (2022). Das Doing-Family-Konzept: Eine neue Perspektive zum Verständnis der Herstellung und des Zusammenhalts von Unternehmerfamilien. Familienunternehmen und Strategie, 01(2022), 11–17. Koellner, T., & Roth, S. (2023, under review). Cultural Variations in Family Firms and Business Families: A Literature Review and Agenda for Future Research. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management. Krippner, G. R. (2001). The elusive market: Embeddedness and the paradigm of economic sociology. Theory & Society, 30, 775–810. Kushins, E. R., & Behounek, E. (2020). Using sociological theory to problematize family business research. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 11(1), 100337. Leitner, S. (2003). Varieties of Familialism: The caring function of the family in comparative perspective. European Societies, 5(4), 353–375. Mauss, M. (1990 [1925]). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge. McKinnon, S. (2016). Doing and being: Process, essence, and hierarchy in making kin. In S. Coleman, S. Brin Hyatt, & A. Kingsolver (Eds.), Routledge companion to contemporary anthropology (pp. 161–182). Routledge. McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of National Cultural Differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith – A failure of analysis. Human Relations, 55(1), 89–118. Mehrotra, V., Morck, R., Shim, J., & Wiwattanakantang, Y. (2013). Adoptive expectations: Rising sons in Japanese family firms. Journal of Financial Economics, 108(3), 840–854. Müller, B. (2002). Die Entzauberung der Marktwirtschaft: Ethnologische Erkundungen in ostdeutschen Betrieben. Campus. Ortner, S.  B. (1973). On key symbols 1. American Anthropologist, 75(5), 1338–1346. Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]). The great transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Sahlins, M. (1999). Two or three things that I know about culture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5(3), 399–421. Sahlins, M. (2013). What kinship is – And is not. The University of Chicago Press. Schnegg, M., Pauli, J., Beer, B., & Alber, E. (2010). Verwandtschaft heute. Dietrich Reimer. Schneider, D. (1984). A critique of the study of kinship. University of Michigan Press.

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Schweitzer, P.  P. (Ed.). (2000). Dividends of kinship: Meanings and use of social relatedness. Routledge. Sökefeld, M. (1999). Debating self, identity, and culture in anthropology. Current Anthropology, 40(4), 417–448. Song, M. (1999). Helping Out: Children’s Labor in Ethnic Businesses. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Stamm, I. (2013). Unternehmerfamilien: Über den Einfluss des Unternehmens auf Lebenslauf, Generationenbeziehungen und soziale Identität. Barbara Budrich. Stewart, A. (2003). Help one another, use one another: Towards an anthropology of family business. Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice, 27, 383–396. Stewart, A. (2010). Sources of entrepreneurial discretion in kinship systems. In A. Stewart, G. T. Lumpkin, & J. A. Katz (Eds.), Entrepreneurship and family business (pp. 291–313). Bingley. Thelen, T. (2015). Care as social organization: Creating, maintaining and dissolving significant relations. Anthropological Theory, 15(4): 497–515. Thurnwald, R. (1932). Die menschliche Gesellschaft: Werden, Wandel und Gestaltung der Wirtschaft im Lichte der Völkerforschung. de Gruyter. Tyrell, H. (1976). Probleme einer Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Ausdifferenzierung der privatisierten modernen Kleinfamilie. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 5(4), 393–417. Weber, M. (1988 [1920]). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I– III. Tübingen: Mohr. Welter, F., Baker, T., Audretsch, D. B., & Gartner, W. B. (2016). Everyday entrepreneurship: A call for entrepreneurship research to embrace entrepreneurial diversity. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 41(3), 311–321. Wiklund, J., Davidsson, P., Audretsch, D. B., & Karlsson, C. (2011). The future of entrepreneurship research. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 35(1), 1–9. Wong, H. W. (2021). How the Chinese think about the family: The ‘family’ in Chinese family firms. Journal of Business Anthropology, 10(2), 241–261. Wong, H. W. (2022). Anthropology of family and family businesses is emic all the way. In T.  Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Yanagisako, S. (1979). Family and household: The analysis of domestic groups. Annual Review of Anthropology, 8, 161–205. Yanagisako, S.  J. (2002). Producing culture and capital: Family firms in Italy. Princeton University Press. Yanagisako, S.  J. (2018). Family firms. In H.  Callan (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of anthropology (pp. 1–7). Wiley-Blackwell. Yanagisako, S. (2019). Family firms as kinship enterprises. Economics Discussion Papers, No. 2019–12, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), Kiel.

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Yanagisako, S., & Collier, J. (1987). Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship. In J. Collier & S. Yanagisako (Eds.), Gender and kinship: Essays towards a unified analysis (pp. 14–50). Stanford University Press. Zellweger, T. M., Eddleston, K. A., & Kellermanns, F. W. (2010). Exploring the concept of Familiness: Introducing family firm identity. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 1(1), 54–63. Zukin, S., & DiMaggio, P.  J. (Eds.). (1990). Structures of capital: The social Organization of the Economy. Cambridge University Press.

PART II

A Processual Understanding of Kinship

CHAPTER 2

How ‘Enduring Family Bonds’ Are Made: Insights from Fulɓe Kinship Enterprises in Northern Benin Jeannett Martin

1   Introduction In the Fulɓe wuro (homestead), my place of residence during research periods, I wake up at dawn to the characteristic sounds of women and girls sweeping the wider areas in front of their huts. Around sunrise, two sons of the wuro, twelve-year-old Amadou and fourteen-year-old Habibou, take the smaller cattle herd of the wuro from their nightly resting place to graze in the surrounding area. A daughter of El Hadji Hamadou, the djoŋ wuro (household head), sixteen-year-old Adama, collects the cow dung from the cattle’s resting area and throws it onto the neighbouring fields. Hawa, a pregnant daughter-in-law with her two-year-old daughter on her back, gets the fireplace burning and then starts cooking bouyri (a sorghum-­ based porridge) for her husband and children. While the younger children

J. Martin (*) University of Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_2

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of the homestead are still sleepily looking around, El Hadji Hamadou performs his ritual ablution and morning prayer. Later, he will set off on his motorbike to see his elder sons and the larger cattle herd about fifteen kilometres away, while also keeping an eye on the fields of the homestead. Back at home, his second wife, Hadja Aissatou, gives instructions to her daughters to fetch water and wash the dishes before she turns to prepare the morning meal. It is with these activities that people in this cattle-­ breeding Fulɓe wuro in North Benin usually start their day. Each member of the wuro is supposed to contribute to the well-being and continuity of the homestead in a specific way, especially women and girls, who barely have a chance to rest between chores, before nightfall. In this contribution I examine the social projects of pastoral Fulɓe family economies in Northern Benin in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Starting from the assumption that these family economies can be described as ‘kinship enterprises’ (Yanagisako, 2018), I analyse how people in these socio-economic units initiate their ‘family’ projects and how they uphold the idea of enduring bonds of relatedness. Focusing on the formation and upholding of ‘families’ in pastoral Fulɓe kinship enterprises in this region, my chapter aims to contribute to debates on family businesses and their comparative study, as well as to debates on kinship studies (with particular focus on studies of Fulɓe kinship). I will argue that people in Fulɓe kinship enterprises currently establish and uphold their ‘family’ relations in context-specific ways, such as through ritualized practices during ceremonial acts, by taking marriage decisions, through daily care work for humans and animals and through the transfer of rights over cattle. Instead of starting from the assumption that (only) descent and marriage form the base of Fulɓe kinship, I argue for a holistic approach to the study of kinship, allowing for understanding Fulɓe ‘families’ as the result of particular social practices, of ongoing processes of ‘kinning’ and of their negotiations.1 My empirical data stem from six field research stays in Northern Benin between 2009 and 2021, and of an overall duration of fifteen months, in the context of two research projects financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). My argumentation is based on data from qualitative 1  I would like to express my gratitude to Tobias Koellner for his helpful and critical comments on a former version of this text; to Abiguël Elijan, Barbara Löhde and Nikolaus Schareika for inspiring conversations on the topic; and to Jonathan Riches for proofreading the text.

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research, in particular from (partly participant) observations, from everyday conversations, from semi-structured interviews and from biographical interviews with people of different ages, genders and social backgrounds in rural areas in southern and north-eastern areas of the Borgu region and in the urban centres of Parakou and Kalale. These are complemented by data from a survey conducted in 2010, especially data on 65 Fulɓe wuros in the district of Kalale. In the following sections, I outline my theoretical approach, explaining why I conceptualize pastoralist family economies as kinship enterprises and how approaches from anthropological kinship studies inspired my analysis of ‘the family’ in Fulɓe kinship enterprises. For contextualization, I then give an outline of Fulɓe pastoral production systems in Northern Benin. In the main section, I analyse how people in Fulɓe kinship enterprises initiate their social projects and how many of them uphold the idea of living and working together over long periods of their lives. 1.1  Fulɓe Family Economies as ‘Kinship Enterprises’ Scholars in economic anthropology have described the socio-economic units of West African peasants in general, and of Fulɓe pastoralists in particular, as ‘domestic groups’ (Goody, 1971 [1958]), as household economies (De Bruijn & Dijk, 1994: 101) or as family economies (Bierschenk, 1997; Spittler, 2012). In this contribution, I refer to pastoral households in Northern Benin as kinship enterprises in the sense given by American cultural and social anthropologist Sylvia Yanagisako (2018). Yanagisako describes ‘kinship enterprises’ as ‘projects of collectivities of people who construe themselves to be connected by enduring bonds of relatedness and whose goals and relations are shaped by a dense assemblage of beliefs, sentiments, and commitments attached to these bonds’ (2018: 4). The beliefs that infuse the relations between the members of family firms are the ideas of trust and stability, of solidarity and mutual assistance, as well as the view of family members being ‘more trustworthy and less likely to engage in behaviour that might damage the firm’ (Yanagisako, 2018: 5). According to her, such ideas, in combination with desires and dedication, contribute to the astonishing resilience of family firms. She developed the concept in the context of her research on family enterprises in the northern Italian textile industry during the 1980s (Yanagisako, 2002), and thus in a late capitalist European context.

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Does it make sense to use this concept for a West African rural context in the 2020s, that is, in this case, for pastoralists in Northern Benin? I would say yes, for several reasons. Firstly, peasants, pastoralists and traders in West Africa, at least since the forced introduction of colonial state structures, do not live outside capitalist economic structures. This was shown in detail by Polly Hill in her Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa (Hill, 1970) and by Alusine Jalloh in his analysis of immigrant Muslim Fulɓe entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone (Jalloh, 1999). A rising number of more recent studies point to the growing market orientation of pastoralist economies in Western and Eastern Africa, although this happens in different ways and on different scales and is not necessarily always driven by price (see Catley & Akliku, 2013; Little, 2021; Little et al., 2014; Quarles van Ufford, 1999; Schareika et al., 2021). Data from Benin also point in this direction. Already since the 1970s, a significant growth in cattle herds was observed (Quarles van Ufford, 1999: 12). During the last two decades, the number of cattle in the country increased from around 1.5 million animals in the year 2000 to about 2 million in 2010, further to around 2.2 million in 2013 and to more than 2.4 million in 2015 (Dognon et  al., 2018: 12480, Table  2, ANOPER, 2014: 14). In parallel, national beef production increased from 24,480 tonnes in 1999 to 38,760 tonnes in 2015 (Dognon et al., 2018: 12,480, Table  3). Likewise, the country’s production of milk products increased during the last two decades from 87,196 tonnes in 2005 to 113,816 tonnes in 2016 (Anihouvi et al., 2019: 512). While these figures are low compared to other cattle production systems and although they reveal little about the changing internal logic of pastoral production systems, they allude to a progressive integration of pastoral systems into regional, national and international markets where cattle are seen also as commodities. With this chapter I do not aim to contribute to the debate about whether pastoralists are capitalists or not.2 However, I argue that Fulɓe family economies in Northern Benin today can no longer be characterized as driven solely by subsistence orientation, by pastoralist regimes of value and non-monetary exchange spheres. As their need for income increases, many pastoralist family economies in this region might better be characterized as engaging in a particular form of capitalist enterprise (Yanagisako, 2018: 1) or, maybe more precisely, as being nascent capitalists (Schareika et al., 2021: 56). 2

 For a summary of this debate, see Schareika et al. (2021: 54f.).

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A second reason why I argue for Yanagisako’s concept is that it scrutinizes long-standing binaries and dichotomies between ‘the West and the Rest’ (Hall, 2018 [1992]). Yanagisako claims that family firms worldwide are characterized by a particular resilience. This resilience is based on the exploitation of cheap family labour and the potential for reduced consumption in times of economic instability (Yanagisako, 2018: 5). In a similar way, this has been argued for West African peasant and pastoral family economies (Spittler, 2012). With her understanding of family firms, I see Yanagisako’s concept as contributing to the efforts to overcome long-standing epistemological, (sub-)disciplinary and conceptual binaries and institutionalized divisions: between modern and pre-modern societies, between business sociology and economic anthropology or between concepts like seemingly modern family firms and seemingly pre-modern family economies. As outlined in the introduction of this volume, such binaries can be traced back to the work of Max Weber, Karl Marx and other influential authors. However, since the twentieth century, similarities between family firms worldwide might have become bigger than their differences. In my analysis, I am concerned with the ‘the family’ behind the firm, with its foundations and its making. The concept of kinship enterprise questions essentializing and universalizing understandings of kinship and family, as well as classical functionalist conceptions—this is the third important reason why I refer to Yanagisako’s concept. In repercussions of critiques of kinship as universal biological referents (Schneider, 2004 [1972], 1984), Yanagisako argues for a constructivist reading of kinship and family. Rather than framing it as system and structure, she conceptualizes families not as biologically founded givens but (just like firms) as projects. As with an economic project, the family is driven by goals, beliefs, sentiments and commitment. The author sees sentiments, which are understood as ‘emotional orientations and embodied dispositions’ (2002: 10  f.), as important factors for production (Yanagisako, 2002: 7). Sentiments, as culturally and historically shaped but not determining, may generate particular desires and may incite related social action (2002: 10 f.). The patriarchal desire of a father as firm holder for succession by his son (instead of by a stranger) is a prominent example in this respect (see Yanagisako, 2002: 85ff.). ‘Whether the desire is for lineage continuity or firm continuity’, the author argues, the desire for continuity is not motivated by a system, but rather by ‘the emotionally constituted desire of specific actors’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 85, my emphasis). Therefore, she argues

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for an actor-oriented analysis of family firms while acknowledging that family firms all over the world are shaped by ‘tensions, conflict, and struggles’ (Yanagisako, 2018: 5)—an aspect that functionalist models of kinship and also some approaches in economic anthropology tend to overlook. Yanagisako’s concept of kinship enterprises looks at both sides of the family firm as projects—the firm and the family. According to her, economic as well as family project-practices are ‘infused with cultural meaning and value’ (2002: 31 f.). They are driven by desire, by commitment and by ideas, such as about gender and gender relations. The same can be said for Fulɓe pastoralist family enterprises in Northern Benin. These are the reasons why I describe Fulɓe family economies in what follows as Fulɓe kinship enterprises. I hereby stretch the concept in so far as I also take into consideration family firms where profit orientation and reinvestments play a comparatively small role (compared to most classic ‘Western’ capitalist enterprises). For my case study I include projects which combine economic activities with and around cattle, together with their long-term-oriented social or ‘family’ projects. 1.2   Perspectives on ‘Family’ and ‘Kinship’ Sylvia Yanagisako argued early on that a universal definition of ‘family’ does not exist and that families have to be studied in their historical, social and cultural contexts (Yanagisako, 1979). This is also true for societies on the African continent where this dimension of social life varies widely (Martin & Alber, 2019). Yanagisako’s relativist approach to kinship is rooted in critiques of anthropological kinship studies formulated since the 1970s, especially by American cultural anthropologist David Schneider. Schneider criticized especially biologically based conceptions of kinship as deriving from European or ‘Western’ meanings and assumptions, a critique that led him to even question the usefulness of kinship as an analytical concept for anthropological analysis (Schneider, 2004 [1972], Schneider, 1984). Consequently, kinship disappeared almost completely as a topic from the anthropological agenda for more than two decades. However, several scholars took up Schneider’s critique and suggested fresh perspectives on what ‘kinship’ and ‘family’ might be all about (Stone, 2004). Especially in American anthropology, those efforts resulted in a shift in the comparative analysis of kinship ‘from functional to meaningful relations and from universal biological referents to semiotic systems’ (McKinnon, 2016: 161). A

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new line of thinking emerged, sometimes called ‘new kinship’, of which Yanagisako was one of the first proponents. Together with Jane Collier, she extended Schneider’s critique, applying a feminist perspective and suggesting a unified analysis of kinship and gender (Yanagisako & Collier, 1987).3 Some years later, scholars from this newly emerging line of thinking, in particular Janet Carsten, underlined the cultural variability of forms, the importance of everyday practice and the processual character of kinship (Carsten, 1995, 1997). Instead of conceptualizing kinship as being based solely on descent and marriage, she and others argued that, at least in certain contexts, people create kinship in everyday life, for example, by nurturing, by working together, by residing together or by exchanging valuables (Carsten, 2000). In order to overcome dominating views of kinship, she suggests the concept of ‘relatedness’, defined as ‘the ways in which people create similarity or difference between themselves and others’ (Carsten, 2004: 82). In criticizing static, biogenetic and universalizing models of kinship, she and other scholars from various backgrounds, for example, Catrien Notermans (2004) and Mark Nuttall (2000), point to fluidity, to flexibility, to choice and to people’s creativity in the creation of relatedness (see also Schnegg et al., 2010). While being sympathetic with this line of thinking, I also follow Susan McKinnon (2016), who warns against a focus ‘solely on doing—on choice, intention, flexibility, fluidity’, as such a limited view does not pay enough attention to ‘local understandings of being—of essence, fixity, materialization, and naturalization’ (2016: 161). Furthermore, McKinnon encourages her readers to be attentive to the various materialized ways through which a sense of relatedness can be created and objectified, not the least because such materializations are deeply entangled with structures and processes of establishing and maintaining social hierarchy (2016: 167, 172).4 In relation with this, I follow Peter Schweitzer’s (2000) suggestion to (re-)consider the functional aspects of kinship: not in the sense of classical functionalist approaches but by asking what people do with kinship 3  Yanagisako’s anthropological analysis of northern Italian family firms can be read as one example of such a combined analysis. 4  An interesting example of such materializations is Hans Bertram’s historical analysis of social transformations in nineteenth-century Europe (Bertram, 2019). Here the sociologist argues that transformations in production systems went hand in hand with changing notions of ‘family’ and particular materializations of these models, especially forms of housing (Bertram, 2019: 24–27).

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and how they do it (i.e., the inclusion of some people and the exclusion of others) (2000: 13ff.). For a better understanding of how relatedness in Northern Beninese Fulɓe kinship enterprises is produced and reproduced, I am likewise inspired by practice-oriented approaches that signal the necessity for conscious and collective efforts to establish and uphold social relations framed as kinship or family (Howell, 2006; Schareika, 2010). An analytical concept that is helpful in this respect is Signe Howell’s notion of ‘kinning’, developed in the context of her research on international child adoption in Norway (Howell, 2006). Kinning, according to Howell, is ‘the process by which a foetus or new-born child (or a previously unconnected person) is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people that is expressed in a kin idiom’ (2006: 8 f./63). Her concept helps to illuminate the social groundings of human-human relations, which were taken for granted or more or less solely attributed to biology in earlier approaches.5 Nikolaus Schareika argues along similar lines, while referring to theories of exchange and approaches from transactionalism. According to Schareika, a wider public is needed to acknowledge a relationship between two people, that is, between a woman and a child. The biological act of birth-giving is not sufficient. Only by the acceptance of a wider community can a dyadic relation (whether ‘biologically’ grounded or not) be transformed into a social relationship (Schareika, 2010). Those collective efforts, accompanied by symbolic and materialized acts, are particularly important in societies where the birth of children is not state registered (Schareika, 2010: 108). While these approaches help to better understand how meaningful relationships framed as kinship or family are established, I will also investigate the processes and practices that contribute to upholding those relations. Why and how do people in Fulɓe kinship enterprises stick to the idea of belonging together? Before turning to this question, I describe pastoral production systems in Northern Benin, and I point to some aspects of how kinship has been described in ethnographic accounts of Fulɓe societies.

5  Nevertheless, kinning is not to be seen as a one-way process: processes of ‘de-kinning’ (Howell, 2006: 9, Fonseca, 2011, Edwards, 2014) or ‘undoing kinship’ (Papadaki, 2018) are important social processes as well.

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2   Economic Projects: Pastoral Systems of Production Fulɓe pastoralists and their cattle have formed part of the population in today’s northern part of the Republic of Benin since their immigration in the eighteenth century from northern and north-western directions (Lombard, 1965: 95  f.). Known as specialists of cattle herding, they became one of several professional and status groups in a pre-colonial stratified society. Their pastoral production was used mainly for subsistence and accumulation of wealth in the form of cattle and people. Living in a wider political context of structural instability and frequent raids (see Alber, 2000), Fulɓe pastoralists lived in close relationships with their ‘ethnic’ neighbours (haaɓe) which were fostered through the exchange of products, commissioned pasturing, strategical marriages and institutionalized individual friendships (Bierschenk, 1997: 29ff., 54; Boesen, 1994). At the end of the nineteenth century, the whole population of the Borgu became subjugated to French colonial authority. This was a violent process which resulted, amongst other things, in the pacification of the region, in the introduction of a formal currency (see Guyer, 1995) and in a system of regular tax-paying and forced labour, while Fulɓe pastoralists negotiated their relations with the colonial state in multiple ways (see Bierschenk, 1996). Colonial transformations were also accompanied by a realignment of economic and power relations between former socio-­ professional groups and status groups in the Borgu.6 In their work, French colonial administrators depended on local intermediaries and therefore created the post of a ‘traditional chief’—a novelty for Fulɓe cattle herders and other groups (Bierschenk, 1993, 1996, 1997: 40ff.; 45ff.). With the advance of the colonial project and subsequently with the post-­ independence (1960) nation-building state projects of several governments, Fulɓe pastoralists became gradually more integrated into market economies as they became key suppliers of regional and national markets with meat and milk products. Today, pastoralist kinship enterprises contribute substantially to those markets, although their market integration is

6  Socio-professional groups comprised hoe farmers, pastoralists, traders and a group of immigrant warriors, called Wasangari. People of free descent and people of unfree descent (‘slaves’) were two of multiple status groups in the pre-colonial Borgu (Alber, 2000; Hardung, 2006; Lombard, 1965).

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often less visible than in other cases.7 They produce meat and milk, as well as milk products like a high-quality cheese called Wagashi, and Degue, a fermented milk mixed with millet (see Dognon et al., 2018, ANOPER, 2014, Anihouvi et al., 2019: 511 f.). During the last decades, pastoralist cattle production has further expanded, even into Central and Southern Benin (Houessou et al., 2019). In addition to their pastoral production, Fulɓe kinship enterprises supply national markets with corn and international markets with cash crops like soya, cotton and cashew. Fulɓe pastoral production systems appear in multiple and changing forms. For the sake of orientation, I refer to the typology suggested by Schareika et al. (2021: 59–62).8 This typology applies en miniature also for the Borgu region where three types of pastoral production systems (slightly adapted to the regional situation) can be differentiated: the ‘“classical” pastoralist production system’, the ‘peri-urban pastoralist production’ and the ‘cattle ranching’-type of production. The ‘classical’ system is specialized in the production of cattle as a productive and social wealth, with mobility and extensive pasturing as production strategies and with almost no human interventions to raise productivity. These pastoralists use communal or free land, as they usually do not have access to land titles. They use a variety of types of livestock and family labour, while following a ‘cattle logic’, meaning that cattle owners are mainly interested in ‘ensuring the long-term continuity of the lineages of humans and animals’ (Schareika et al., 2021: 54). They usually combine their pastoral production with other productive activities, especially hoe-farming and small animal husbandry (goats, sheep, chicken), mainly for subsistence and ceremonial exchange, while the market orientation of their production is low. The second type, ‘peri-urban pastoralist production’, is found in the surroundings of larger localities with cattle markets. Here, pastoral production combines a variety of economic activities: animal husbandry (cattle, goats, sheep, chicken), agriculture (maize, millet, sorghum), cash crop production (cashew, cotton) and off-farm activities like cattle trade. These 7  One reason for this is that cattle trade is organized around a system of male intermediaries (called dilani) who search for clients and negotiate prices for Fulbe cattle owners. Likewise, intermediaries (usually female and non-Fulbe) buy the Wagashi cheese often directly from the wuros. 8  The typology was developed on the basis of three regional case studies: in SO-Niger, in the far north of Cameroon and in the Cameroonian Adamawa Region, with the aim to better understand current transformations in pastoral production systems in Central Africa.

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pastoralists invest, to a growing degree, in the intensification of their production with the aim of increasing production and profit. Therefore, they purchase products on the market, for example, cottonseed cakes, to feed to their cattle during the dry season. In order to boost the productivity of the herd, they invest in animal vaccinations and drugs, as well as in fertilizers and herbicides, to improve the outcome of their agricultural production. In this production system, pastoralists combine strategies of extensive use of pastures with interventions for intensification and with trade activities. The latter focus on livestock and trade in cash crops, while some sell products for cattle production (i.e., ropes, animal drugs). According to Schareika et al., this production system is characterized by a growing ‘individualization of livestock ownership’, which results ‘in more exclusive property rights and the concentration of livestock in the hands of one person, namely, the household head’ (2021: 61). So far, I cannot make a statement on whether this is the case in Northern Benin.9 What is more obvious is that this type of production relies, to a large degree, on hired labour for cattle herding, for farming and for the care and transport of animals to and from markets (Djedjebi, 2009: 158 f.). Most herd owners do not own private land for their farms; however, some do. The third type, ‘cattle ranching’, describes a production system where ranchers produce animals on their privately owned land: with large pastures, large numbers of animals, a specialization in one type of livestock, demarcated boundaries and salaried personnel (Schareika et al., 2021: 62). With the exception of a few state-owned farms, which were created to maintain local cattle races or for experimentation with new breeding, and of ranches owned by non-Fulɓe businessmen, private ranches of Fulɓe kinship enterprises are rare in Northern Benin (ANOPER, 2014: 11). Therefore, they are not further considered here. The first two production systems are neither exclusive nor unrelated. They share common traits, especially the wuro. They resemble each other in their economic independence,10 in their rational mode of production (Bierschenk, 1997: 236ff.) and in their male pre-eminence. At the same 9  It also remains to be examined, whether ‘competition between pastoralists has become more important than collaboration’, and whether in this region the practice of exchange of livestock between wuros has declined (Schareika et al., 2021: 61). 10  Pastoralists produce with a high degree of economic autonomy, as they, to a lesser degree, depend on wider forms of economic solidarity than purely hoe-farming systems (Bierschenk, 1997: 5).

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time, they depend on each other, especially cattle herders and traders of the second type. I now turn to the family projects that go hand in hand with these economic enterprises, starting with anthropological accounts of Fulɓe kinship.

3  Social Projects in Fulɓe Kinship Enterprises In most representations of Fulɓe kinship, anthropologists underline the importance of biologically based forms of relatedness as a structuring principle, that is, besides marriage, descendancy is usually described as being important (i.e., Stenning, 1994 [1959], Dupire, 1996 [1962], Boesen, 1999: 33–38, Schareika, 1994, Köhler, 2017: 58). The Fulfulde concept of lenyol is illuminating in this respect. Authors translate it in different ways, usually as ‘lineage’ (or ‘lignage’ as introduced by Dupire, 1996 [1962]), as ‘clan’ (Bierschenk, 1997: 222) or as ‘race’ or ‘line’ (Riesman, 1974: 33). Despite pointing to the polysemous character of the concept and to its context-specific use, Elisabeth Boesen translates lenyol likewise as ‘auf Abstammung basierende Gruppen’ (groups based on descent) (Boesen, 1999: 35). While those translations might more or less closely represent emic perspectives, they fail to explain how such naturalized and materialized social constructions are produced, maintained and reproduced in everyday life. Most scholars of Fulɓe kinship agree that the wuro is the most important social (and economic) unit in Fulɓe societies. In these spatial units, a man, his wife/wives, children (and grand-children) or several brothers with their wives and children, and sometimes further relatives and persons of unfree descent (maccube), all can live together under the authority of a djoŋ wuro (household head), usually the eldest man. Together they reside in the vicinity of villages, towns or cities, often in the form of a gure, that is, a hamlet of several wuros. The number of people living together in a wuro varies: according to my survey of 30 wuros in the Kalale region, the number can range between three and fifty persons, although, most often, it is between eleven and twenty (Martin, 2018: 284). The exact number of people living together changes quite often, mainly (although not exclusively) according to the development cycle of pastoral households (Stenning, 1971 [1958]). People living together in a wuro tend to represent themselves as a unit, as a ‘protective and caring net of intimately related supporters’ (Schareika et al., 2021: 59). Nevertheless, Fulɓe wuros are by no means communities

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of unrestricted solidarity. Tensions and conflicts are part and parcel of daily life in Fulɓe wuros—a fact to which actor-oriented approaches point convincingly. Nevertheless, purely actor-oriented approaches do not explain sufficiently why pastoral Fulɓe kinship enterprises—despite tensions, conflicts and frictions—show an astonishing continuity. What contributes to ‘bind’ people in Fulɓe wuros together, despite diverging interests and frequent conflicts between their members? Why do they stay together, notwithstanding the facts that wives are regarded (and usually treated) as ‘strangers’ in their husband’s wuro; that spouses follow their own micro-­ economic activities and keep their incomes separate and secret; that co-­ wives in polygynous marriages often compete with each other for limited resources; that relations between brothers and especially between fathers and sons are likewise not always shaped by sympathy and comprehension? In the next section, I examine processes, practices and beliefs that contribute to upholding the idea of long-lasting relationships in these family firms. What contributes to maintaining people’s commitment and their belief of belonging together in the face of partly diverging interests, goals and expectations? For my analysis, I first point to the ways in which people in pastoral kinship enterprises establish relations, before I examine more closely how they sustain the idea of enduring bonds of relatedness.

4  How ‘Enduring Family Bonds’ Are Made We start in the wuro, the place where people live, eat, sleep and partly work together and where the most important rites of passage take place. 4.1   Kinning Rituals at Birth As in many societies worldwide, people in Fulɓe wuros perform meaningful ritualized acts in order to establish and/or confirm ‘kinship’ relations (see Caspary & Herrmann-Pillath, 2023). In Fulɓe wuros, a ceremony called lawru takes place after the birth of a child. This ceremony is performed in order to transform a dyadic relationship (i.e., between birth mother and child) into an acknowledged social relationship (Schareika, 2010), but also to acknowledge the child as a member of the living, of a wuro, as a Pullo (sing. of Fulɓe) and as a member of the Muslim community (Martin, 2018: 105). I here describe the first part of this ceremony

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with a focus on some ritualized acts of kinning as I observed them during several name-giving ceremonies. The lawru usually takes place on the seventh day after the birth of the child when members of the mother’s and the father’s wuro, along with neighbours and friends, come together, usually in the wuro of the birth mother’s parents. During one lawru in September 2013, the eldest women in the wuro, Tinou and Bana, surrounded by younger women and children, perform the first important acts of this ceremony. Bana places the baby on a cotton cloth and moisturizes its hair with cow milk before she carefully shaves the hair from its head. Thereafter, the women bend over the newborn while Tinou takes a fingertip of cow butter (neɓɓam na’e) from a small silver cup and rubs it on the baby’s forehead. The women now whisper the names of cattle-owning lenyols into the child’s ears before each woman takes a dollop of butter from the baby’s head to rub onto her own forehead. As Bana explains, ‘passing the cow butter’ is seen as a prerequisite and means for the child’s development of senteene (meaning a sense of decency or modesty), which is seen as an integral part of the wider Fulɓe ethos of pulaaku (see Boesen, 1999: 53ff.). The cow butter is the basis of pulaaku which distinguishes the Pullo from the Gannunkeeɓe (meaning people of unfree origin, J.M.) and the Haaɓe (meaning non-Fulɓe, J.M.). A child which does not get the cow butter (at the lawru) will never have senteene. It will do everything it likes, it will say everything that comes to its mind. (Bana, 12 October 2013)

In Bana’s view, passing the cow butter is seen as a precondition for the child to become a ‘Pullo dimmo’ (a ‘real Pullo’). Pulaaku and senteene are considered as being the result of the social, public and ritualized act of passing the substance of a cow on the body of the child, and explicitly not as an ‘inborn quality’ (Boesen, 2005: 226). Relating the child to cattle via the substance of neɓɓam na’e is complemented by ritually attaching it to cattle-owning groups. While Bana washes, ritually massages and creams the newborn, Tinou cuts cotton threads from a bobbin. Together with Bana she ties them onto the newborn: they wrap one thread around the baby’s head, and one around each of its wrists, its hips and each ankle. The women associate two things with this act: firstly, it serves to establish the child’s bond with its lenyols. Secondly, the threads keep away malicious spirits that could attack the still very vulnerable being. Afterwards, the women wrap the baby in a white

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cotton cloth, and an unmarried girl brings it back to the mother’s hut for breastfeeding.11 These collective acts of kinning are done to establish and acknowledge new relations in a Fulɓe kinship enterprise. While, as Howell (2006) describes, Norwegian adoptive parents dress their Indian-, Korean- or Chinese-born children in traditional Norwegian costumes to socially and symbolically embed them in the community, members of pastoral families use cow butter and cotton strings. They share and consume bouyri and meat of a ritually slaughtered ox with a wider public, thus producing ‘shared memories’ (Schareika, 2010: 97 f.). Those performances are the base for the long-term acknowledgement of the newly established relationship. By swallowing the meat in public, Schareika (2010: 104) argues, the participants swallow the relationship. Later, people will remember this day, talk about it and thereby confirm the relationship again and again. This short description12 points to the ways in which the seeds of the idea of enduring bonds of relatedness (Yanagisako, 2018) are sewn in Fulɓe wuros: by elderly relatives through symbolic, ritual acts where cattle (in the form of neɓɓam na’e and meat) play a decisive role. It is noteworthy that biogenetic relatedness is not emphasized in this ritual.13 The example further points to the important role that women play in these ceremonies in Northern Benin. This is also true for another important way to create relatedness in Fulɓe kinship enterprises: marriage. 4.2   Marrying Sons and Daughters off: Rationalities and Desires El Hadji Hamadou invites me to participate in a ceremony which takes place in the little nearby mosque, which was financed some years ago by a Saudi Arabian organization. In the men’s prayer room, under the ceiling 11  In the meantime, men of the wuro ritually slaughter and dismember a young ox. Under the authority of the elderly, particular parts of the meat are distributed among particular groups of participants. In the afternoon, accompanied by lots of chatting and laughing, the participants share a festive meal comprising a sorghum porridge with fresh milk, which is prepared by women, and the barbecued meat. 12  See for a more extensive description of this ceremony in North-Western Benin, Schareika (1994: 169–173); and for Fulbe Woodabe, Dupire (1996 [1962]: 223–231). 13  Instead, age hierarchy is emphasized by expecting the father of the newborn to stay away from the lawru or (in the case of the mother) to remain in the hut or in the background during the ceremony (see Martin, 2018: 90 f.).

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fan, fourteen elderly men and a mudibo (Islamic scholar, Imam) have come together in order to seal a marriage between two of their children. The men are representatives of the groom’s and the bride’s baabiraɓe (paternal relatives). The event had been preceded by lengthy negotiations between ‘family’ members of both groups. The men of the two groups sit on their mats opposite each other. One man from the groom’s baabiraɓe offers kola nuts to each participant. After the distribution of the marriage kola, the Imam, dressed in white clothes, his head covered by a white scarf, leads the ceremony. Firstly, he explains why they have come together, underlining the importance of this ceremony for the future relations between the two families. He then asks the representatives of the bride-to­be three times whether they agree to give their daughter to the relatives of the groom-to-be, to which the men three times chorus in affirmation. Afterwards, the relatives of the groom-to-be are asked the same question, to which they also affirm. After a common prayer, FCFA 250,000, carefully placed on a tray, change sides from the groom’s family to the bride’s family. After a further long prayer, all men congratulate each other on the newly created union by shaking hands. They chat together for a while, and all kola nuts are distributed before the people leave the mosque to continue their day. The bride and the groom were not present during this ceremony. While the young woman was hiding in a nearby wuro, in the hut of an aunt, the young man had gone out to spend time with his friends.14 In Fulɓe society, marriages are a constant topic in everyday conversations, the object of intense negotiations, debates and conflicts. They are also the acknowledged starting point and ground for the social projects of Fulɓe kinship enterprises. Ethnographers, inspired by theories of exchange and alliance, have described in detail the diverse forms of Fulɓe marriages, consisting of ritualized forms of exchange negotiations in order to create alliances between wuros and lenyols (see Dupire, 1996 [1962]: 232–258, Schareika, 1994: 151–167, Bierschenk, 1997: 227–231, Boesen, 1999: 39–49). Fulɓe marriages have been described as complex and lengthy processes stretched out over long periods of time. The snapshot provided earlier describes only one small element of this lengthy process in a particular regional, sociocultural and historical context.

14  A bride is expected to ‘hide’ from her prospective husband until the latter, together with his friends, would find and bring her to his wuro.

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However, Fulɓe marriage practices do not follow a uniform pattern, even within Northern Benin. Muslim rituals form part of the process in most Fulɓe marriages these days. Meanwhile, since several decades ago, people in some communities in the southern Borgu region have celebrated (evangelical) Christian marriages—a consequence of the activities of American missionaries (see Martin, 2018, Chap. 5). Also, since some decades ago, a few (mostly school-educated) Fulɓe also opt for civil marriages. Furthermore, Fulɓe marriages can be better described as hybrid processes where people usually combine elements from customary, religious and state law in varying and changing combinations. This shows that marriages are definitely ‘(m)ore than conservative institutions that simply reproduce the status quo’ (Reece, 2021: 50). They are flexible practices that can change, but they can also be promoters of social change (see Carsten et al., 2021; Köhler, 2017). I am here concerned with the question of how marriage decisions and the reproduction of kinship enterprises are related in this particular context. Hereby, I concentrate on first marriages (koowgal), which are arranged by elder relatives of the children (see Boesen, 1999: 39ff., Dupire, 1996 [1962]): 232ff.). What I would like to add here to the debates on Fulɓe marriage are two points. Firstly, Fulɓe parents in Northern Benin see marriages—as a sort of minimal consensus—as engines of their children’s social projects, and as drivers for their own economic projects. Usually, young men are only permitted to start their own independent enterprise as married men with children; girls and women are allowed—and expected—to start bearing children and thus gain social status only after marriage. Secondly, marrying off one’s children is understood as a way of ensuring the continuity of the parental kinship enterprise. This is because, on the one hand, the payment of bride wealth in the form of cattle enlarges the herd of the bride’s parents’ wuro and thus its productive capital.15 On the other hand, the groom’s parents gain further manpower for their wuro and can expect new members for their kinship enterprise. Koowgal marriages in Fulɓe kinship enterprises are arranged by elderly kin who often marry their children off after reaching puberty: girls after

15  Cattle remains symbolically as well as economically the most important form of bride wealth. Nevertheless, in a few regions, as in the described case, this element has been replaced by gifts in the form of money.

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they start menstruating, and boys some years later.16 So far, many of the children concerned do not question the marriage decision of their parents—out of senteene (decency or modesty), as some describe it.17 Most Fulɓe prefer endogamous koowgal-marriage arrangements, in the sense that parents more or less strictly exclude non-Fulɓe (Haaɓe) or persons described as being of unfree status (Gannunkeeɓe) as marriage partners.18 There is the widespread belief that those marriages will bring bad luck like disease, barrenness or death of people and cattle. In contrast, cross-cousin or parallel-cousin marriages—although rather rare—are often presented as ideal types of marriage. As Schareika shows, marital arrangements among siblings’ children are valued for long-term economic reasons than for cultural reasons. In his study on Fulɓe in Benin’s Atakora region, Schareika cites Boubou, an elderly man, who explains the point as such: ‘I will tell you a secret: you marry within the family, because you do not want the child but above all the cattle to leave the family circle’ (Schareika, 1994: 137; translation: J.M.). Therefore, parallel-cousin marriage is seen as an ideal marriage as it allows for the concentration of cattle and thus of productive capital. Besides economic considerations, the dimension of parental desires and hopes also plays a role in first marriage arrangements. In combination with having children, marriage is the only socially accepted way of reaching adulthood in Fulɓe society. Therefore, parents regard arranging a marriage for each of their children as an obligation, but also as a desire and source of deep-rooted satisfaction. ‘If I have been able to marry off all of my children, I will be calm. I can then lean back and say: “Well done!”’, says El Hadji Idrissa, husband of four wives and father of twenty-one children. Meanwhile, his desire to allow each of his children to reach adulthood does not exclude long-term strategic considerations as senior kin use 16  However, negotiations between members of the families concerned may start much earlier, sometimes after the birth of a child. I here refer to the stage of the process called bangal, when festivities take place and the girl is ritually searched for and brought to her husband’s (paternal) wuro. 17  It is mostly girls who attended secondary school who sometimes contest or in some cases even oppose their parents’ decision. In some cases this leads to serious family conflicts. In one case I heard of, it became a matter of police intervention. 18  There are a few exceptions to this general rule: some marriages between Fulbe men and women from a neighbouring ethnic group are established for political reasons. Furthermore, some Fulbe with higher education marry partners from other ethnic backgrounds (see Martin, 2018: 120ff.).

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marriages to negotiate their own mutual interests and social status (Parkin, 2018: 3). El-Hadji Idrissa continues: ‘If you have a girl which you marry off well… if your son-in-law brings you a car one day which you will drive, then you [the father of the girl, J.M.] will be happy’. Bana, his second wife, explained one day that she would always carefully watch and intervene in the process of finding an appropriate marriage partner for her children. In the case of her son Salou, she had opted for Gunni, her now daughter-in-law. Why and how did she choose Gunni? ‘I observed her carefully in her parental wuro. I found she was a hard-working, obedient girl. I wanted her as my son’s first wife because I was sure that she would take good care of me when I get old’. Bana and her husband’s comments show that parents’ marriage decisions are based on long-term considerations in which future care work is also included. Although dissolutions of marriages (especially first marriages) or ‘ruptures conjugales’ (Najoum, 2020) do happen, many marriages in my research area and in this particular socio-cultural and historical context continue for decades,19 and in most cases they are accompanied by the birth of numerous children. In sum, first marriage decisions are a powerful tool for elderly relatives to ensure the production and reproduction of Fulɓe kinship enterprises. They do this by including particular persons (e.g., hard-working young women or sons of wealthy men) while excluding others (especially people without cattle or disobedient women). Fulɓe pastoralists thus follow a rather narrow understanding of kinship relations, as members in pastoral Fulɓe kinship enterprises have comparatively few opportunities to choose or ‘create’ relatives. This use might therefore be labelled as more ‘exclusive’ (Schweitzer, 2000: 210 f.).20 What is important here is that this use of kinship is in direct linkage with the Fulɓe’s search for wealth in cattle. 4.3   Caring for Cattle and People Practices of care and nurturing have been described as constitutive for diverse forms of relatedness in numerous contexts (Carsten, 1995; Thelen, 19  In other contexts, that is, in Burkina Fasos’s capital of Ouagadougou (personal information from Barbara Löhde, 1 June, 2022), but also in Parakou, dissolutions of Fulbe marriages seem to happen more frequently. 20  This stands in contrast with more ‘inclusive’ ways of using relatedness. For example, Innuit communities of whale hunters and fishers in Alaska, who own neither land nor animals, include a maximum number of ‘useful’ people in their social networks and declare and relate to them as ‘relatives’ (Bodenhorn, 2000; Nuttall, 2000).

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2015; Viegas, 2003). This applies also to pastoral Fulɓe kinship enterprises, although in context-specific ways. Everyday care practices are infused by assumptions about and commitments to gendered and age-­ related care work: men, especially in their role as husbands and household heads (djoŋ wuro), are seen as capable and responsible for the fulfilment of basic needs for all members of the enterprise, humans and animals: they are expected to provide staple food for their human dependents, and natural pastures and other forms of fodder for their cattle; they are further seen as being responsible for providing for necessary services, such as treatment in case of sickness. Women and girls, in contrast, are seen as being destined for and expected to care for the basic needs of their husbands, their children, and for elderly and sick people.21 They are further regarded as being responsible for cleaning the wuro and the cattle’s sleeping area, for washing the dishes, for doing the laundry, for preparing food several times a day and for several other types of care work.22 Care work is learned informally, and this process starts early on: boys (and sometimes girls) from the age of ten do already take care of grazing animals.23 Girls from even the age of three or four start contributing to women’s care work, and they do it progressively more as they get older. In Fulɓe kinship enterprises, care practices are part and parcel of the production and reproduction of the idea of enduring bonds of relatedness. It is acknowledged that the human-with-cattle household may only prosper when members take care of their cattle and of each other. Consequently, the perceived lack of care (of all sorts) is a regular source of conflict between elder and younger members, between men and women and between husbands and wives. Perceived neglect of care work is frowned upon, often framed as lack of senteene, and may be punished. A young herder, when accused by his father or elder brother of not taking proper care of the cattle, can expect more or less harsh consequences (like verbal abuse, refusal to give food or physical punishment), as can girls, when accused of ‘lacking senteene’.

21  On the association of women’s labour with the ‘domestic sphere’ and the undervaluation of their contributions to livestock production, see Dahl (1987) and Curry (1996: 150). 22  The beauty of women is highly valued and celebrated in Fulbe societies, including in Northern Benin. 23  For detailed ethnographic descriptions of children’s ways of learning and caring for animals in other herding societies, see Spittler (1998) and Klute (1996).

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What I would like to underline here is that while the daily care work of women and men, of girls and boys, is widely taken for granted (including by many anthropologists), it contributes substantially and on a daily basis to producing, maintaining and reproducing the idea of enduring kinship relations in pastoral kinship enterprises. In fact, it is one of the very groundings for their economic and social projects. When there is a lack of care (work), cattle, wives, husbands, children or elders can suffer and conflicts arise. 4.4   Transferring Rights over Cattle and Milk ‘I am fine with herding the cattle of my grandfather. I know that, when I am older my father will hand cattle over to me. Then I will create my own wuro. I will have a large cattle herd and many children. I am not scared of the future’ (Michael, 3 September 2021). This quote from the 12-year-­ old herding boy shows the vision the boy has of his own future life, a vision that is strongly connected to rights over cattle. Cattle are the most important form of property in pastoral Fulɓe kinship enterprises and crucial elements of their economic and social projects. They are the base of their livelihood, a precondition for participating in social life, a sign of belonging to a group and a source of wealth and prestige (Diallo, 2012: 185). Cattle are the most important source of monetary income in Fulɓe kinship enterprises. But how do their members relate to each other through rights over cattle? And in which way does the distribution and the transfer of rights over cattle from one generation to the next contribute to the idea of enduring relationships? Individual property rights over cattle are acknowledged for male and female members, while it is important to mention that rights over cattle in this context are not exclusive: different persons may have different rights over one and the same animal, for example, usufruct rights of milk or rights to the offspring of a cow. Furthermore, rights over cattle are transferred mostly as nominal or prospective rights of ownership, meaning that the prospective owner is not allowed to take decisions over these animals, especially not regarding selling them. Women and men, in their different social roles as daughters or sons, wives or husbands, mothers or fathers, relate to each other in different ways and through different rights. The djoŋ wuro is usually seen as the only person having full property rights over the family herd. As long as he has not yet transferred full rights in the form of a pre-heritage agreement, he

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is—as a widely understood norm—the only one to take final decisions over the use, treatment, sale or purchase of animals.24 Fathers as well as mothers are expected to transfer prospective rights related to cattle to their children at life cycle events. This process may start as early as with birth. During the lawru, where the parental relations are engendered in symbolic and materialized ways, the father of the child (or of his elder male relatives) may be expected to point to a heifer (wiige) in his herd. By doing so, he publicly assigns the prospective rights over this animal to the newborn. While the child grows up in the following years, the heifer also grows up and may calve several times. In this way, children, in particular boys, gain the base for the development of their own future herd, while their fathers keep control as long as the child is regarded as being still dependent.25 Sons relate to their kinship enterprise through prospective rights over cattle. Therefore, according to Schareika (1994: 130), and the case of Michael seems to confirm this, they are particularly motivated to take good care of the parental herd. As boys are seen as being the principal caregivers for cattle, sons get rights over more cattle than daughters. Furthermore, in order to be married, sons can expect their fathers to give wealth to the bride in the form of cattle—the second important way how fathers and sons relate to each other through cattle. Fathers do not transfer the same property rights over cattle to all their sons in the wuro. ‘The rule is: the first sons take care of the cattle and the fields, the last ones you can send to school. This ensures that there are cattle and that the wuro has something to eat’ (El Hadji Idrissa, 30 January 2010). This quote shows that parental decisions over their children’s careers are driven by rational economic considerations to ensure the continuity of the kinship enterprise. Therefore, elder sons often gain more rights over cattle than their younger brothers. Daughters too relate to their families through rights over cattle, although in different ways. A potentially important element of the father-­ daughter relationship is the cogite-cow. According to a widely understood norm, the father of a girl is expected to give her a cow (called cogite) and 24  Nevertheless, some household heads discuss with their sons or wives before taking decisions. Furthermore, in contexts such as in Burkina Fasos’s capital Ouagadougou, where some women are able to purchase cattle with their own money, this situation might also differ (personal communication with Barbara Löhde, 1 June 2022). 25  According to some of my interlocutors, in some regions of the Borgu, this widely understood norm is currently only seldomly put into practice.

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possibly one of the cow’s calves, after the girl’s marriage and after she has given birth. This cow is meant to provide milk for the woman’s children and as a contribution to her sons’ future heritage (Bierschenk, 1997: 157, Schareika, 1994: 136). Nevertheless, in practice, this norm, at least since the 1990s, is rarely fulfilled (Bierschenk, 1997: 155, Table  10, 157, Schareika, 1994: 136 f.).26 When I asked Gunni, a mother of five, for her cogite-cow, she told me that she had not yet received it from her father. Saying this, she did not complain about her father or show any sign of anger or disappointment. Buhl (2016), who got similar answers and reactions from Fulɓe women in her research in Burkina Faso, argues that women’s lack of complaints reflects neither indifference nor submission. By not insisting on the cogite-cow, women avoid straining relations with their fathers and brothers. They do this as one day they might want to return to their parental wuro in case of conflict, failure of marriage or death of husband. Therefore, ‘(w)omen carefully weigh the pros and cons of such complaints. Whereas an additional animal would not secure a woman’s economic security in the long run, good relations with her kin usually did’ (Buhl, 2016: 145). The cogite-cow today represents a women’s economic assurance rather than her (or her children’s) productive capital in her husband’s herd.27 Women in their role as wives have the right to kossam, the milk of the cows, from their husband’s herd. This right is represented by the calabashes (used to transport milk) that women receive from their mothers-in-­ law upon marriage. Milk is seen as a symbol for life, fertility and hospitality; the gift of milk is understood as a means for establishing and strengthening alliances (Kuhn, 1997: 63ff., Schareika, 1994: 97, 99); and the sale of

26  This is also illustrated by the case of a herd owner, Oroji, and his two wives: ‘While (...) Oroji’s herd already comprises 83 cattle, his two wives are still waiting for their first cow’ (Schareika, 1994: 136, my translation). Furthermore, some husbands have the tendency to control their wives’ cattle, as Schareika continues to explain in this case: ‘And should it [the first cow] arrive, it will be taken into the herd of the husband, who will not dare to touch his father-in-law’s cow, but will, even if not rightfully, touch its offspring’ (Schareika, 1994: 136, my translation). Some husbands in Schareika’s study even actively torpedoed their wives’ efforts to build up their own cattle capital (see Schareika, 1994: 138–140). Due to those tendencies, women usually have fewer opportunities for capital accumulation (Bierschenk, 1997: 157 f.). 27  See Dahl (1987) and Curry (1996) on gender- and age-specific control systems on essential resources in pastoral systems of production.

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surplus milk is usually the most important source of monetary income for women in Fulɓe kinship enterprises.28 However, it is men and boys that do the milking and that control the allocation of milk (Kuhn, 1997, Bierschenk, 1997: 213, 173 f.).29 Hereby, abstract norms such as that a married man must give the same amount of milk to each of his wives often turn out to be more complex in practice.30 Essential for a wife is the question of whether her husband takes her along on transhumance, instead of her co-wife. While a wife during this seasonal migration has usually the entire amount of milk at her disposal, the wife who stays in the permanent wuro receives considerably less or no milk (Kuhn, 1997: 75). Overall, the amount of milk available to wives varies greatly, depending on various factors.31 Nevertheless, the allocation of milk plays a central role in everyday social relations between wives and their husbands (see Kuhn, 1997: 64 f., Schareika, 1994: 94–96). To sum up, the transfer of rights over cattle between generations—again in gender-­ specific ways—further contributes to upholding the idea of enduring relationships in Fulɓe kinship enterprises.

5  Conclusion In taking up Peter Schweitzer’s claim for more ethnographies on ‘what is done through kinship’ (Schweitzer, 2000: 2), I have examined the practices and processes of establishing and upholding forms of relatedness in pastoral Fulɓe wuros in Northern Benin. Other than dominant approaches to ‘kinship’ in Fulɓe societies, which take descent and marriage as founding and structuring principles of ‘kinship’, I have suggested a processual, practice-oriented and holistic approach to examine relatedness. With a holistic approach I mean a perspective that attributes the groundings of 28  They sell it fresh, as sour milk, butter or cheese in the villages near their homesteads or transhumance camps. 29  In other pastoral groups, i.e., Fulbe-Woɗaaɓe in Niger, it is women that do the milking of cattle (Schareika, 1994: 92, fn 95). 30  For example, a male relative of the husband may be instructed to allocate milk to his wife, and the distribution of milk does also not always follow uniform and comprehensible criteria (Kuhn, 1997: 65ff.). 31  For example, on the size and composition of the herd, the number and condition of the cows (only cows with calves may produce milk), the productivity of the dairy cows (which, compared, for example, to European dairy cows is low) or on seasonal fluctuations between rainy and dry seasons (Schareika, 1994: 92, fn 96; 93ff.).

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relatedness not to a dominant singular vector, like ideas of either shared blood or practices of nurturing (Carsten, 1995), shared work (Bodenhorn, 2000) or shared experience (Pauli, 2015). Ideas of enduring groundings of relatedness are better to be conceptualized as representations of context-­ specific entanglements of a multiplicity of vectors which need to be deciphered in order to better understand people’s everyday experiences and meaningful ways of acting. Combining emic and etic perspectives and methodologically starting from people’s everyday actions, meanings, beliefs and emotions help to better understand how people in specific contexts establish and uphold forms of relatedness. Without claiming to be fully comprehensive, I have argued that people in Northern Beninese Fulɓe wuros currently establish and uphold forms of long-lasting relatedness through performing meaningful rituals, by taking early and more or less strategic marriage decisions for their children, by caring for humans and more-than-humans on an everyday basis, as well as through the continuous transfer of rights over cattle; all these practices being infused by dominant notions of gender, age, social status, hierarchy and a more or less vigorously uphold patrilineal ideology. Pastoral kinship enterprises in Northern Benin are astonishingly long-lasting and resilient forms of family firms, and this continuity is deeply related to their social projects. The study of such projects helps to better understand why most members of wuros commit their lives to the Fulɓe kinship enterprise and why they stick to the idea of belonging together, even though this can involve structural forms of exclusion, tensions and recurrent conflicts. A holistic analysis of what people do with kinship in order to ensure production and reproduction has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of family firms worldwide in their respective contexts, no matter their degree of integration into the capitalist market economy. Furthermore, the case study contributes to the cross-cultural comparative perspective in this volume. In applying a comparative lens, similarities and differences become visible, for example, how kinship is used in different modes of production. The ethnographic example of Fulɓe pastoralists given in this chapter points to the complex entanglements and interrelations between modes of production, property relations, forms of relatedness and strategic uses of ‘kinship’. By way of conclusion, let me highlight some astonishing similarities between family firms in quite different contexts: pastoral Fulɓe kinship enterprises have been characterized by scholars as having a high degree of autonomy in decision-making and production, demonstrating the

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rationality of their mode of production (Bierschenk, 1997: 236ff.), having male pre-eminence and putting focus on the father-son relationship. These descriptions resemble in many ways Yanagisako’s characterization of family firms in the Northern Italian textile industry in the 1980s. She describes these family firms as, among other things, being shaped by a high degree of ‘individualism, independence, and rationality’, and by their ‘commitments to forms of collectivity, filial loyalty, and patriarchal authority’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 26). Even their origin narratives share particular traits. According to my empirical data, elders in Northern Benin usually frame the formation of their wuros not as the result of a collective enterprise but as the result of their (fore-)fathers’ courage and effort, as the consequence of these men’s ‘intelligent leadership that has given the community the chance to prosper’ (Schareika et al., 2021: 64). Yanagisako describes similar forms of heroization of men. In the great majority of origin narratives of family firms in Como’s textile industry that she collected in the 1980s, the firms were described as ‘the creation of an individual man’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 40) who had ‘used his creative energy to create his own firm, his own family, and his own destiny’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 32). These examples underline that the social and economic projects of kinship enterprises, including their representations and transformations, form a rich reservoir for comparison—the latter being at the heart of the anthropological project. They also comprise the potential to gain deeper insights into how categories such as ‘kinship’, ‘gender’ and ‘age’ are used and negotiated in family firms worldwide.

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Yanagisako, S. (2002). Producing culture and capital. Family firms in Italy. Princeton University Press. Yanagisako, S. (2018). Family firms. In H.  Callan (Ed.), The international Encyclopedia of anthropology (pp.  1–7). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2235 Yanagisako, S., & Collier, J. (1987). Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship. In J. Collier & S. Yanagisako (Eds.), Gender and kinship. Essays towards a unified analysis (pp. 14–50). Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Producing and Reproducing the Business Family Across Generations: The Importance of Narratives in German Business Families Tobias Koellner, Britta Boyd, Heiko Kleve, and Tom A. Rüsen

1   Introduction In the Introduction to this volume, a new understanding of the business family has been put forward, which rests on recent discussions in anthropology and the social sciences (see also Koellner, 2022; Koellner et  al., 2022). To a large extent, this understanding is rooted in discourses that emphasize a shift away from biological notions of kinship (Schneider, 1984), to different forms of establishing and maintaining close cohesion (for an extended discussion, see also Martin, 2023). As a result, emphasis

T. Koellner (*) • B. Boyd • H. Kleve • T. A. Rüsen WIFU, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_3

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is laid on forms of relatedness, as in the observations by Janet Carsten: ‘Rather than taking the content of “kinship” for granted, [we] build … [on] the implications and the lived experience of relatedness’ (2000: 1). Relatedness, then, focuses less on relations established by blood or marriage and can instead be perceived as ‘an area of life in which people invest their emotions, their creative energy and their new imaginings’ (Carsten, 2004: 9). Based on such an understanding, families in general, and business families in particular, have to be seen as social groups that are constantly in the making, as the notion of ‘kinning’ (Howell, 2006) indicates. One implication of such an understanding is that business families as social groups have to be produced and reproduced within and across generations (see also Koellner et al., 2022). This new understanding of kinship also found its way into the anthropological conceptualization of family business. In particular, Yanagisako’s concept of the kinship enterprise took on and highlighted a processual character. In her analysis, she realigns kinship and economic goals when she describes kinship enterprises as ‘projects of collectivities of people who construe themselves to be connected by enduring bonds of relatedness and whose goals and relations are shaped by a dense assemblage of beliefs, sentiments, and commitments attached to these bonds’ (Yanagisako, 2018: 4, 2019: 6). In the introduction to this volume, this notion was taken up and further developed to move beyond family relations only. Such a development is necessary because the relationships in family business are heterogeneous and include many different forms and addressees in establishing relatedness and association. But how could this concept be applied to the analysis of family businesses? In family business research, a family business is described by three different yet interrelated approaches. The first approach emphasizes the components of involvement and describes family ownership, participation in management and the exertion of control in the family firm (Chrisman et  al., 2005; Kleve, 2020; Pearson et  al., 2008). When applying this approach, however, problems emerge over how to set a meaningful threshold for ensuring family influence. Therefore, a second approach that highlights the differences between family and non-family businesses becomes important (Basco, 2013; Chua et  al., 1999). This so-called essence approach focuses on particular behaviour or specific resources that a family may contribute to the firm such as information (de Lomnitz & Pérez Lizaur, 1987), the pooling of resources (Tocheva, 2015: 137–139) or access to networks (Goody, 1996: 120–124). Finally, a third category has

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been added to the involvement and essence approaches: the family firm identity (Zellweger et al., 2010). The family firm identity addresses how the family defines and views the family firm. These three approaches for understanding the family business are indeed important to think with; however, we still need to address the notion of the family in more detail and ask questions such as the following: What is part of a business family’s identity? How are binding social ties established and renewed over generations? How can an emotional attachment be fostered? How is a transgenerational vision developed? How can family-based resources (e.g., knowledge, social capital) be transferred across generations (Zellweger et al., 2010: 56)? These questions are especially pertinent if we take into account the need for new entrepreneurial stimuli, as discussed in the concept of the entrepreneurial legacy (Jaskiewicz et al., 2015). Therefore, the continuation of the family business in following generations needs to be explained adequately because many members of business families today increasingly have career opportunities outside the family business, making family businesses more heterogeneous, and succession more difficult and less likely (Felden et al., 2019). In addition, succession as a shareholder is increasingly problematic because shares in family businesses are often so-called patient capital (Wimmer, 2010; Wimmer et  al., 2018); that is, dividends do not occur at the level that would otherwise be common in the market. Therefore, selling shares of the family business might seem more lucrative than committing oneself to the business and receiving the relatively modest dividends that come with it (Koellner et al., 2020). Consequently, it is fair to say that the continuation of the business in the family is often questionable from an economic point of view, and requires further explanation and justification. Most of all it seems to be the family factor that is the reason why there are numerous old and very old family businesses that are successfully continued over generations (Jaffe & Lane, 2004; Rüsen et al., 2019; Rüsen et al., 2021). Therefore, we propose to use the business family as the starting point for our research, as it provides a very suitable, conclusive as well as empirically accessible social phenomenon for the dynamics and maintenance of the family business (Aldrich et  al., 2021; Combs et  al., 2020; Jaskiewicz et  al., 2020; Kleve & Koellner, 2019). The business family, then, is obviously more than just a resource of the family business: it is the social context which gives the business its specific meaning and orientation (Koellner & Roth, 2023; Wong, 2021; Yanagisako, 2018, 2019). This is particularly crucial for transgenerational orientation, as the business family

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always needs to create a relevant meaning for the family members involved and contribute to their identity (Lubinski, 2010; Stamm, 2013). Based on Yanagisako’s notion of the kinship enterprise, we address how these ‘enduring bonds’, ‘beliefs’, ‘sentiments’ and ‘commitments’ are created and recreated within and across generations. Among other factors, rituals and narratives are important for this (Koellner et al., 2022) because they make abstract affiliations tangible by referring to concrete persons, events or places (for a general theory of collective memory, see Halbwachs, 1985, or Assmann, 2000: 17, 38–41, and the latter’s concept of the memory figure). Because of this, this article draws attention to narratives within the family business as one of the tools that allow for transgenerational orientation and vision. They may serve as a starting point for a better understanding of how business families form and maintain such permanent processes of establishing relatedness and kinning.

2  The Research and Its Methodology The research followed an interpretative approach and was conducted qualitatively. While qualitative research findings have long been dismissed as ‘anecdotal evidence’, in recent years qualitative research has gained prominence in both business research in general and family business research in particular (Bansal et al., 2018; De Massis & Kammerlander, 2020; Fletcher et al., 2016; Gioia et al., 2012; Grodal et al., 2021; Micelotta et al., 2020). Specifically, the research presented here is based on semi-structured online interviews conducted with members of ten established business families in Germany since the research project was initiated in 2020 when COVID-19 was making in-person meetings problematic. To be sure, ‘conducting ethnographic research cannot easily be “circumvented”’, as Salverda (2022: 104) rightly noticed. Having said this, however, it also becomes clear that there exist some differences when conducting research. In our case, for example, the research was part of larger efforts to understand the longevity and transformation of family businesses and business families in the long run. For this, Tom Rüsen and other colleagues followed an action research approach in their previous engagements (Burns, 2007; Moser, 1989), that is, the research was conceived as a shared ‘learning process’ in which the ‘object of research’ and the ‘researchers’ changed roles. This means that there existed already strong contacts with these business families for extended periods of time (mostly more than ten years) when we started collecting the interviews. Therefore, the overall research

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can be characterized by an approach called ‘engaged scholarship’, where ‘research questions, problematizations and theory development are coconstructed with family business stakeholders (rather than respondents) in the fieldwork setting’ (Fletcher et al., 2016: 23). To some extent, there is an overlap with the anthropological approach where the anthropologist becomes ‘her or his own methodological tool’ through long-term engagement (Salverda, 2022: 105). Over the years, this included workshops, lifestory collection, interviews and exchanges in a more colloquial setting. Here we saw some similarities to participant observation as it is practised in anthropology, where such closeness to the interlocutors is also quite common in the business context (Koellner, 2012; Müller, 2002; Yanagisako, 2002). Moreover, we also draw on previous data where we used techniques from the anthropological approach such as long-term interaction, participant observation in different settings and the collection of life stories. The overall procedure thus corresponds to an iterative research process, as is common in qualitative research and ethnographic research (Spradley, 2005). The production of narratives became visible during the research process and was found to be one of the crucial ways in which the business family produces and reproduces itself within and over generations. Therefore, we conducted interviews about narrations with individuals and groups from the ten business families and collected different stories from them. After analysis, we recognized certain patterns of how these stories were narrated and connect to each another. These were the narratives we identified and researched further. Finally, we attempt to also present our perspective to the business families and make them aware of the importance of narratives in their families.

3  Narratives and Family Business 3.1   The Narrative Approach Narratives are written or oral social discursive practices that create a chronological connection between several events or actions and link them to particular understandings (Czarniawska, 2004: 17). In this way, narratives can be understood as giving meaning and a chronological framework based on narrations, which can be understood as concrete stories (see Todorov, 1990; White, 1987). This differentiates narratives and narrations. The latter can include texts and other linguistic elements, gestures

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and facial expressions, but also images (for a classical approach to this, see Barthes & Duisit, 1975: 237). In this way, narratives have a structuring effect on narrations and influence identities as a ‘narrative text that represents and explicates the social process of the development and transformation of a biographical identity […]’ (Schütze, 1983: 285–286). Consequently, narratives do not so much represent the opinion of single persons or their individual attitudes, but are closely connected to the experiences of other persons and are based within social groups, such as a family. As such, the meaning is passed on in stories or other linguistic forms. In the process, narratives give narrations a chronological sequence and explain the relationships to the broader context, to other persons or to institutions. This makes narratives extremely relevant for the personal and social identity of persons and social groups, and for individual as well as collective action (Bohnsack, 1999: 108). Moreover, narrations are social constructs and cannot be understood as being ‘true’ or ‘false’ (Czarniawska, 2002). Rather, it is a matter of reconstructing events on the basis of narratives from the perspectives of the respective actors. This is done against the background of contemporary contexts, so that processes or developments that are currently taking place and are oriented towards the current situation structure the narrative descriptions of the past. Despite this and their constructivist implementation, narratives follow certain patterns and cannot be shaped arbitrarily. This limits their strategic use considerably, as described by Labaki et al. (2019). Among the first to theorize on narratives, it was Fritz Schütze (1987) who pointed to three constraining elements in narratives. Firstly, he states that narratives are often tailored to the expectations of corresponding persons. Secondly, narratives have to be consistent in themselves, which has the effect that once they have been started, they have to be told to the end and have to have a ‘red thread’. Finally, Schütze also points out that narratives must be sufficiently detailed because this is what gives them their plausibility and comprehensibility. In this way, they become viable for others who can follow them easily while listening. In addition, it becomes clear that narratives follow a certain structure. They have at least three components: an initial situation, an action or event with certain consequences and a new state of affairs (Czarniawska, 1997: 2). To create meaning and give orientation, they have to follow a certain plot. Moreover, it is important to understand narratives as social practices that recapture past events from a present-day perspective and do not have to be historically accurate descriptions. Rather, they have to be considered

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as social constructs that may change over time and according to their cultural and historical context (see also Summerfield, 2004) and the audience they address. In this way they are not free floating but need to belong to a repertoire of legitimate stories (Czarniawska, 2004: 5). Only then do they become relevant for families, companies, institutions or individuals. Often they are related to identity issues. In the business context, this may include the construction of identities of individuals at work such as in the case of managers in organizations (Rostron, 2021) or constructions of corporate identities (Brown, 2006, Kleve et  al., 2022, and classically Schultz et al., 2000). 3.2   The Role of Narratives in Family Business As in many other organizations, narratives also play a crucial role in family firms (Labaki et  al., 2019). Narratives and narrations are widespread in business families where they may contribute to longevity, give orientation in times of crisis (Kleve et  al., 2022) and allow for identity creation. However, in order for narratives to be helpful, some challenges have to be taken into account for our research. The first challenge is social change in German society. This challenge pertains to social processes, which can be summarized with the keyword ‘individualization’. For several decades, it has been observed that life choices and opportunities in various situations (work, choice of a partner, choice of residence, etc.) have multiplied, which is also referred to as the pluralization of life worlds (a classic on this modernization process is Beck, 2015 [1986]). As a consequence, the self-realization of individuals is thus gaining in importance and allows for increasing independence from tradition and origin (Bertram, 2013: 9). Thus, the welfare state allows for and safeguards new opportunities that previously involved considerable life risks. For this reason, succession in the management of the business and the continuation of family ownership of the family business are becoming increasingly difficult for business families. The diversification of lifestyles enables many members of the business family to pursue new career paths that are independent of the family business. In this case, the interaction of the business family with the business diminishes and other reference groups and patterns of identification gain importance. Then, the bond with the business is in danger. But if the bond with the company weakens, however, then the associated business family often loses importance as

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well, since the interactions are reduced to a minimum and the aforementioned ‘enduring bonds’ mentioned can no longer have their full effect. Succession as an owner can create new bonds here, but it also requires constant interaction, as financial advantages alone are not enough as incentives for succession (Koellner et al., 2020, 2022; Rüsen et al., 2021). The second challenge for this research relates to inheritance practices, which occur in parallel to the individualization processes and show an interesting trend in society today (Kleve et al., 2020; Rüsen et al., 2019; Rüsen et al., 2021). Classic models, such as the succession of the first-born son (primogeniture) in management and ownership, are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Rather, the shares of the business are distributed in a more egalitarian way among all those entitled to inherit (Kleve et al., 2020; Rüsen et al., 2019). This leads to bigger business families because a number of the family firms today have more than 50 individual shareholders. These large-scale business families have been described as ‘family dynasties’ (Rüsen et al., 2019, Jaffe & Lane, 2004: 82, Rüsen et al., 2021). This increase in the number of shareholders is also accompanied by increasing heterogeneity in the circle of owners (Felden et al., 2019). On the one hand, the shares are often distributed very differently between the individuals, which leads to substantial conflicts (Koellner et al., 2020). On the other, the interactions and relationship building between family members decrease as the number of shareholders increases (Kleve, 2020). As a consequence of the individualization process and inheritance practices, there is a permanent need for business families to produce and reproduce themselves within and over generations. Narratives, then, may contribute to a transgenerational orientation and identification. They play a significant role in business families because they allow for updating and renewing the identity of the business family in its relation to the family business within each generation. In concrete terms, this means that these narratives and the stories they include may help the family members to illustrate their role as owners and family members in each generation. In this way, the significance of the company for the various stakeholders, the business family but also for the employees, the locality and the whole region is visible (Koellner, 2011, 2012, pp. 69–73). Narratives can also provide information on how the tensions between family members, in relation to the company and towards social expectations in the community, can be resolved and brought into a balanced relationship. In concrete terms, this means that it is a matter of remembering what has proven to be beneficial in the past and what needs a modification

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because it is considered outdated now and in need of renewal (Zwack et al., 2016). In this respect, narratives and narrations provide interlinkages between past, present and future. For this, such narratives are cultivated in business families and are passed on orally or, sometimes, in written form. For example, the business family may develop narratives that are told in the company and within the family circle (von Schlippe & Groth, 2007, p. 34). This allows for the transmission of knowledge, emotional attachment and business strategies from generation to generation. In particular for the members of the business family, narratives have a community- and identity-building effect that can support and strengthen the will to continue the family business and to establish family traditions in the business. Before we take a look at narratives in multigenerational business families, let us briefly differentiate between various types of narratives. Particularly prominent are narratives about the foundation of the firm and the founder. In many cases, this takes almost mythical forms because these times and personalities are described as particularly outstanding (von Schlippe & Groth, 2007). Yet another recurrent topic for such narratives is the family’s contributions to the success of the company. In this case, special qualities and characteristics of the business family are stressed, and it is described as being particularly innovative, steadfast or committed to success. A third form of narratives relates to conflicts and times of crisis, which illustrate how they were overcome by the company and the family (Kleve et al., 2022; Kleve & Boyd, 2021; Thier & Erlach, 2013). Finally, narratives about the survival of the company and the family are frequent and can be understood as stories about the resilience of the family (Urban, 2021). Sometimes this also addresses the special role of women and mothers in the survival of the company and their outstanding role when men were missing due to war, disease or premature death.

4  Empirical Examples of Narratives in Family Business In the following section, some examples of family narratives of different types will be introduced. The first case is a narrative that describes the survival of the family and business despite all challenges. In relating this, we follow recent interpretations that depict family businesses to be

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characterized by their ability and flexibility to recover successfully from crises (Kraus et al., 2020: 1075). 4.1   Case 1: Survival and Succession: Flexibility, Cooperation, Continuity and Change The first example stems from a German family business that is currently in its ninth generation of family ownership. The business was founded in the eighteenth century in northern Germany and started as a trading company. Until today, members of the family are involved in the operation of the company and uphold a typical narrative for their survival as a business family and a family business. The premature death of the company owner in the second generation had led to a family crisis in which the wife of the businessman continued to run the company for more than five years. This allowed the two sons and potential successors to complete their education after which they were ready to take over the company. Thus, the widow and mother, who had spontaneously stepped in as the head of the company because of her husband’s premature death, enabled the continuation of the family business and handed over her husband’s inheritance to the two sons. As was customary at the time, the male offspring were to enter the business, while the women were to keep the household or devote themselves to philanthropy. In this family, however, this tradition was at least temporarily changed. The daughter of a merchant family and mother of eight children, who ensured the survival of the family business in family ownership, is therefore described as a particularly strong woman in historical documents and in family narrations up to the present day. However, it also needs to be said that this was an exceptional case. Except for this one case, the ownership and management tasks of the business were traditionally transferred from father to son. Nevertheless, two things are remarkable in that case. First, the crisis was resolved through temporary female succession, and second, and more important, is the fact that the experience was remembered and has survived in the family narrative to this day. The narrative builds in particular on family cohesion and emphasizes that everyone should support each other and flexibly slip into new roles in times of need in order to keep the business and family running. Thus, in an interview with a current member of this business family, the following story was given to us:

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You have to be lucky that someone from the family can always take over. This can be a wife, one time it was two brothers, then one dies and then the other takes over and so on. You just have to be lucky, I think. And then my perception is that when we look at the living conditions of that time or even a hundred years later, the crisis is always just around the corner, yes. One day a sailor is left at sea and the whole family is, so to speak, at the edge of starvation. Or there’s a bad harvest and so on, so the crises, the hardships, they’re much, much closer than they are today. And I think that my family has always relied on that, on cooperation.

To this day, this narrative of the family’s flexibility and cooperation in times of crisis continues to have an effect on the members of the business family and shapes the values and attitudes of the respective generations. In addition, the special role of women is emphasized in this narrative, who can also ‘roll up their sleeves’ for the company in times of need. Thus, since the aforementioned female succession, women in this family are basically also considered as being capable of running the business, which was unusual in society for a long time. Moreover, it also needs to be said that the successful continuation of business and family is considered to be ‘luck’ because flexibility and cooperation are necessary but do not guarantee realization of succession. We heard this in every interview because all of our interlocutors indicated a high degree of uncertainty despite all efforts. To some extent, such uncertainty is inherent in any transgenerational succession. This was very clear to the members of the business family when they explained the challenges to us. Sometimes they were facing multiple challenges simultaneously, which made decision-making even more complicated and urgent. In addition, they were well aware of the family tradition and experienced the pressure to continue what their predecessors had done. With every succession, this pressure was felt anew and had to be solved in a specific way. This is why the topic of uncertainty was also part of the family narrative. Holm,1 a member of the business family in the eighth generation, took over the business with his cousin and very soon realized that the market situation was changing. They had to react and experience this as a break from tradition, even though they consider

1  All names are synonyms but reflect certain characteristics of the originals. In addition, the names of the company, the city and the family have been omitted to protect the anonymity of our interlocutors.

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tradition to be important for the running and continuation of family and business. Here is how Holm described it to us: The most exciting challenge is always the generation change and what you find then. We started out as two people, my cousin and I, and we found ourselves in a situation that we knew to some extent, but not so clearly that we fully grasped the whole situation until we were there. At the time, the production of spirits was our main business. However, it was in a downward trend and there was a need for taking action there. Simultaneously, it became necessary to buy out a co-partner from the family because he wanted to start another business himself. Such a thing had never happened before in the family, so it was also a difficult process, and the negotiation of both processes was extremely tense in the beginning. But then, when we successfully solved both challenges, it was of course a relief because we could pay the price and we also got quite a respectable price for the company at that time. Later, German family businesses that produced spirits had to give away their companies almost free of charge. Nevertheless, I think it was a difficult time, when we had to ask ourselves where we are, what kind of company we are. What kind of entrepreneurship are we pursuing? Are we spirit producers or what are we actually? Are we allowed to change the business model? What would our predecessors say? Why didn’t our predecessors act before now? Because they could well have done so. There were already side businesses back then, but my cousin and I said we wanted to make it our main business because we thought it was more promising. Seen from today’s perspective, that was the right thing to do. But we didn’t know that at the time. In such a difficult situation, suddenly having to deal with a completely uncertain future, and realizing that it doesn’t work with what you have, you need to change a lot. Yes, I think you can say you actually have to, and then being new yourself, not knowing yourself very well, also having to deal with the fact that you are in the middle of a generational change, what new patterns can you find? How does one work together? How do you do that? From my point of view, these were big challenges at the beginning, and that’s when we established our patterns, the patterns between my cousin and me and the current families in business, which constantly expanded, but they still hold today.

Holm is about 60  years old and has managed the business since the 1990s. He is one of about 30 family members, including his two brothers. The family is growing steadily, so they developed a family constitution to secure the participation and identification of all family members.

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Participation and identification are very important for Holm because he feels obliged to continue the tradition. For this reason, he felt deeply emotional about the whole situation, as his wife Maria, who is also about 60 years old, confirmed. Here she describes her experience of that time: Well, I experienced this as a wife. We were young people with three small children, and we come to the city, and the two young successors, Holm and his cousin, think about it in the first four years together with the two seniors: we sell several hundred years of tradition and history. An unbelievable act, an unbelievably huge effort, and I remember it well and feel it in my stomach. Such a huge effort for the two and for us as wives. That was a very decisive point, because we, another entrepreneur told me a few years ago, who literally said to me, he has nothing to do with our company, but he is a local businessman who has observed all this, he said to me: “Maria, when your family sold the company, the city lost its identity. Since then, since you sold, we are no longer a town with a local spirit”. And that, of course, was somehow a strong accusation against Holm and his cousin. When I told this to my husband when I came home, he replied: “Maybe, but my job is not to help the city to gain an identity, my obligation is to run a business, or my job is to run a business, and to do so in the future. For this, that step was absolutely necessary”.

Despite all challenges, Holm and Maria were able to connect their succession to the narrative of the family. For this, they now emphasize that the family was involved in different kinds of business before they started the production of spirits. In this way, they feel at peace and are able to describe the sale of the spirit production company as a return to the previous tradition. This is important not only for the business but also for the family, as Maria, who takes on the role of family manager, described it. As the family grows, she organizes various events and family meetings. This ensures interaction within and across generations and, in this way, helps to produce and reproduce the family by using narrations and connecting to the family narratives. Let us relate that narrative here and listen to Holm again: First of all, let me correct that image. Yes, for quite some time the identity of the family was related to spirits, but there had been another identity in the centuries before. The family didn’t just make spirits because they were founded in the eighteenth century as a trading house for a great many goods. This means that the change we pushed for is nothing unknown, so

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to speak. And that’s what my cousin and I were able to reflect on, and that’s why the change didn’t have any negative effect on us, so, we reflected on a previous identity, if you like, that we said. And our identity is, from my point of view, also characterized by completely different things, and above all by characteristics other than products. Namely, how we did something, how we did our business, how we worked together with employees, or how we seized opportunities. This does not only concern us, but also the responsible persons who were in charge.

In that interview, Maria is referring to the identity of the business family. This has been discussed in the literature (Zellweger et al., 2010) and emphasizes the importance of narratives for the creation of a particular identity. In this way, this article enlarges the notion of the family firm identity to the business family and contributes to a better understanding of how identity issues are dealt with in the business family and in their connection to the family firm. One way of handling identity issues is to connect to a family embeddedness perspective that was introduced two decades ago (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003) and is gaining increasing attention (Aldrich et al., 2021). In this understanding, an emphasis is laid on the tight interconnection between the business and the family, which is also stressed in anthropological approaches (Yanagisako, 2002, 2019). This connects nicely to the broad understanding of embeddedness in anthropology where family and business are deeply related to the local context (Koellner, 2012, p. 10–12). Narratives, then, enable us to fill individual and collective identities with content and make them meaningful to the family members and the wider surroundings. Thus the connection of the business family to the family firm is strengthened. This was also important in the aforementioned interview because the employees and other stakeholders of the family firm had a negative perception of that sale. Creating a new narrative, however, enabled the family to overcome a sole identification with a product and foster alternative identifications such as specific characteristics of the business family like cohesion, responsibility and the proactive seizing of opportunities. As we will see, similar topics are also relevant in the second case, which we will present and analyse in the following subsection.

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4.2   Case 2: The Cleverness of the Family and its Members A second example of a narrative is taken from a business family which is currently in its eighth generation. As in the other cases, we have been in contact with different people from the business family and had access to different generations, too. Here we will draw on material collected from Jens (about 75 years old) and Oliver (about 50 years old). Both of them were pursuing careers outside the family firm but returned in times of need. In the case of Jens, this meant that he quit his academic career and took over the position of manager of the firm. In contrast, Oliver did not enter the company but took up a position on the board supervising the external management of the company and was engaged in organizing the family. In this business family, there is an obvious narrative that emphasizes the cleverness of the business family and highlights the individual skills of members in this family and specific characteristics of the family as such. As has been stated earlier, these narratives are produced in the present but describe the importance of certain events in the past. This also pertains to this business family and certainly has contributed to their longevity and to their continuation as a family business and business family. Here is how Jens described the specific qualities of the family: There is something that distinguishes us [as a family]. We always take entrepreneurial risks and try out new fields. So whether it was built-in-kitchens or kitchen studios, whether it was various kitchen appliances or dryers. I don’t know, what we all did. Later, we also engaged in cosmetics although there was quite an astonishingly high risk, at least in retrospect. But yes it went well and was quite good. So there are always fields where we say “yes, let’s try it out and if it doesn’t work, let’s close it”. And so we did without anyone’s head actually being torn off for it when it went wrong. This is how we are, yes!

In the case presented, the specific qualities of the family were highlighted. In particular, the entrepreneurial spirit for taking risks and trying new fields was highlighted. This was also confirmed by Oliver who gave more examples on top of the evaluation given by Jens before: If you look at the history of our company, we’ve always been open to changes in thinking, I’d say. Or perhaps it’s better to say the focus. Of our business activities. So we started with consumer products and had, let me

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put it bluntly, a small repair workshop. During the war, however, we stopped producing these consumer products and switched to heavy industry, i.e., to the repair or production of metal. Then we switched back to consumer products, then back to the production of war products in the broadest sense, or metal whatever. Then we heavily relied on direct sales, and then it always fluctuated between direct sales and technological advances in production in recent times. So we have always changed the focus, I would say. My grandfather, Jens’ predecessor focused more on the technology of production, Jens focused more on direct sales, then we focused very strongly on technology again and so to say in this whole time we switched our focus. Only when Jens withdrew recently, we have actually lost the focus on direct sales again. This has certainly led to more turbulent times for us in the last ten years. And now we are tilting back a little bit so that we are putting the focus much more clearly back on direct sales.

Switching focus is considered to be normal in that business family and is not perceived as a loss of tradition. Quite the contrary is true because the cleverness and the entrepreneurial spirit are presented as crucial characteristics that allowed for the continuation of the business. This also was relevant during the Second World War, which was yet another challenge where the changing focus was applied again. Whereas this proved to be successful during war times, after the end of the Second World War, new problems occurred. At that time, Germany was occupied by the Allied Forces (US, UK, France and the Soviet Union). As part of the occupation, the occupying powers analysed companies for their involvement in the production of war-related goods during the Nazi era. In this specific case, but also in many other cases at that time, the company was threatened with closure and a lengthy investigation if it had also been found to be involved in the war economy. Today, these challenges are remembered in a narration that contributes to the narrative of cleverness. In particular, the narration describes how the cleverness of Erwin, the head of the company from the family, prevented the closure and secured continuation in the aftermath of the Second World War. Here is how the situation was explained to us: A British officer turned up who wanted to close down the company, so to speak, from now on. My uncle didn’t like that at all and because he had lived in the USA for a long time and spoke good English, he met with him first and then gave him a pretty rough response. Whereupon the officer was probably a bit dumbfounded at the way they were talking to him and started to think about it. And then my uncle took him on a tour of the factory and

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showed him that they only made unimportant stuff, although there was probably material in the yard that was important for the war. In the meantime, he told one of his employees to set fire to old tyres in the yard, and eventually led this officer over a bridge on the factory premises. Through this smoke, it was not possible to see what was stapled there in the yard. So that’s the story, Erwin told us. He was very, very proud of it. That he had this officer wrapped around his finger, and what’s more, he probably started to sell our products to these British occupying troops and their families through this contact. So that at least became an important customer base in the following period.

This example shows very well how a narrative about special qualities, here specifically cleverness, is applied in the business family. The uncle of Jens is seen as the embodiment of this potential in the family, as he used his knowledge of language and his presence of mind to trick the officer into not recognizing the material in the yard of the factory that was important for the war. In addition, this uncle also seems to have possessed important social and entrepreneurial skills, as he used the contact to open up a new group of customers. This not only ensured the continuation of the family-owned business in this postwar crisis period, but also provided important entrepreneurial advantages. Until today, this incident is remembered and retold, and thus shapes the image and self-image of the family as being particularly clever. Let us give a last example for this which relates to how direct sales were introduced. This is the big story of the whole family and is also used as an indicator of the special cleverness: Yes, so the big, the very big story above all is of course the introduction of direct sales. We had the household appliances so to speak after the First World War when the electrical technology came up. We went for electric. At that time, we produced gramophone motors that we electrified. And then the gramophone was actually ditched by the advent of the radio. And the question was, what happens then? Luckily, we had a very clever technician who built this gramophone motor into a household appliance. If I remember correctly, there were already such household appliances, but they were huge and incredibly heavy. And he designed the first hand-held appliance, so to speak. A light hand appliance. And it stood in the shop and no one bought it because no one knew why I should spend 100 euros on a household appliance when I have a broom next to it for one euro. And then Jens’ father came from the USA with the idea of setting up this direct distribu-

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tion. Yes, I would almost say that the idea was an insult to the family at the beginning, wasn’t it? Imagine, that someone from our family should ring the doorbell. That was very difficult!

As becomes obvious in that interview, a specific quality of the members of the family is emphasized. They not only were clever enough to utilize technological innovation but introduced new ways of distribution, too. Although this provided a strong challenge for the members of the business family and their self-understanding (‘insult to the family’), finally, they followed that path and opted for new ways of distribution. This connects well to notions of entrepreneurial legacy as discussed by Jaskiewicz et al. (2015) and shows how narratives may contribute to such an entrepreneurial legacy. In this way, our work on narratives connects to such understandings and contributes to these discussions.

5  Conclusion In this chapter, we have drawn attention to the increasing importance of the production and reproduction of business families through narrative means. Through this, the longevity of the business family and the family business can be secured because it makes the continuation over generations more likely; the narratives contribute to identification, sense-making and cohesion inside the business family. To demonstrate this, we have introduced recent discussions in anthropology and the social sciences and highlighted a processual understanding of relations between kin. In this way, we referred to the concept of the kinship enterprise, introduced by Sylvia Yanagisako, and notions of kinning and doing family. In particular, we emphasized the crucial importance of narratives as one way that business families can be produced and reproduced. Based on long-term interactions with members of business families, we were able to show which narratives exist in these business families and interpreted them as crucial techniques of how business families may foster processes of inclusion and exclusion. This contributes to internal cohesion within the business family and, at the same time, allows for drawing boundaries to outsiders who are often described as lacking specific qualities, attitude or knowledge. In carrying out these processes, the respective business families were able to establish themselves with the help of narratives because they connected the members of the family to each other. Consequently, the links within and across generations were emphasized and highlighted

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the specifics of the business family or contributed to the identification with the family business and other members within the business family. In this way, we also contributed to recent discussions on family business research where identity issues, entrepreneurial legacies or notions of family embeddedness were discussed. To sum our findings up, we conclude that narratives may have five effects for business families: Firstly and most importantly, narratives contribute to relatedness in the business family. By narrating specific contents they give meaning, stress particular characteristics or allow for orientation. This is very crucial because it supports the establishment of the business family in relation to the nuclear families, the family firm and the broader context. Secondly, narratives are very important for the very establishment of cohesion and, implicitly, for excluding others through boundary-­ making. The narration of stories, then, highlights what are specific qualities, traits or characteristics that connect the members of the business family within and across generations. In this way, and thirdly, narratives serve to balance the conflicts that often arise in business families when it comes to handling the different expectations of the nuclear family, the business family, the company and the group of stakeholders (for this, see also von Schlippe & Groth, 2007). Fourthly, narratives transmit knowledge through telling stories (narrations) that describe special skills and techniques which may be useful for future generations and in specific situations. Finally, they can help to overcome uncertainties in the current generation by referring to routines that were developed in previous generations and have shown their success in difficult settings. To conclude, it can be said that these types of narratives provide orientation and practical knowledge for different challenges. In this way, we stressed identification, sense-making and collective orientation as outcomes of the production of narratives in business families and stressed their importance for the existence and continuation of the family business and the business family. For this, we have relied on conceptualizations such as relatedness from anthropology that, in our understanding, provide a new perspective on the production and reproduction of business families and contribute to a better conceptualization of the business family in its relation to the family business.

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Czarniawska, B. (2004). Narratives in social science research. Sage. de Lomnitz, L. A., & Pérez Lizaur, M. (1987). A Mexican elite family, 1820–1980: Kinship, class, and culture. Princeton University Press. De Massis, A., & Kammerlander, N. (2020). Handbook of qualitative research methods for family business. Edward Elgar Publishing. Felden, B., Hack, A., & Hoon, C. (2019). Management von Familienunternehmen. Springer Gabler. Fletcher, D., De Massis, A., & Nordqvist, M. (2016). Qualitative research practices and family business scholarship: A review and future research agenda. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 7(1), 8–25. Gioia, D., Corley, K., & Hamilton, A. (2012). Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research. Organizational Research Methods, 16(1), 15–31. Goody, J. (1996). The east in the west. Cambridge University Press. Grodal, S., Anteby, M., & Holm, A. (2021). Achieving rigor in qualitative analysis: The role of active categorization in theory building. Academy of Management Review, 46(3), 591–612. Halbwachs, M. (1985 [1950]). The collective memory. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Howell, S. (2006). The Kinning of foreigners: Transnational adoption in a global perspective. Berghahn Books. Jaffe, D., & Lane, S. (2004). Sustaining a family dynasty: Key issues facing complex multigenerational business- and investment-owning families. Family Business Review, 17(1), 81–98. Jaskiewicz, P., Combs, J. G., & Rau, S. B. (2015). Entrepreneurial legacy: Toward a theory of how some family firms nurture transgenerational entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing, 30(1), 29–49. Jaskiewicz, P., Neubaum, D. O., De Massis, A., & Holt, D. T. (2020). The adulthood of family business research through inbound and outbound theorizing. Family Business Review, 33(1), 10–17. Kleve, H. (2020). Die Unternehmerfamilie. Wie Wachstum, Sozialisation und Beratung gelingen. Carl Auer. Kleve, H., & Boyd, B. (2021). Narrative in Familienunternehmen als sinnstiftende Erzählungen. Heiko Kleve im Gespräch mit Britta Boyd. Familiendynamik, 46(1), 74–75. Kleve, H., Boyd, B., Koellner, T., & Rüsen, T. (2022). Überlebensgeschichten im transgenerationalen Unternehmertum: Zur Bedeutung von Narrativen und Narrationen in Familienunternehmen und Unternehmerfamilien. In P. Jacob, M.  Borcsa, J.  Olthof, A.  Schlippe, & v. (Eds.), Handbuch der narrativen Therapie und Beratung (pp. 349–359). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kleve, H., & Koellner, T. (Eds.). (2019). Die Soziologie der Unternehmerfamilie: Grundlagen, Entwicklungslinien, Perspektiven. Springer VS.

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Kleve, H., Koellner, T., Schlippe, A. V., & Rüsen, T. (2020). The business family 3.0: Dynastic business families as families, organizations and networks. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 37, 516. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2684 Koellner, T. (2011). Built with gold or tears? Moral discourses on church construction and the role of entrepreneurial donations. In J. Zigon (Ed.), Multiple moralities in Russia (pp. 191–213). Berghahn Books. Koellner, T. (2012). Practising without belonging? Entrepreneurship, religion and morality in contemporary Russia. LIT Verlag, Transaction Publishers. Koellner, T. (2022). Family firms and business families: A field for anthropological research. Anthropology Today, 38(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/14678322.12768 Koellner, T., Haver-Rassfeld, H., & Kleve, H. (2022). Das Doing-Family-Konzept: Eine neue Perspektive zum Verständnis der Herstellung und des Zusammenhalts von Unternehmerfamilien. Familienunternehmen und Strategie, 01/2022, 11–17. Koellner, T., Kleve, H., Simons, F., Schlippe, A.  V., & Rüsen, T. (2020). Vermögensmanagement in großen Unternehmerfamilien: Zwischen individuellem Anspruch und kollektiver Verantwortung. Zeitschrift für KMU und Entrepreneurship, 03(2020), 191–217. Koellner, T. & Roth, S. (2023). (Under Review) Cultural variations in family firms and business families: A literature review and agenda for future research. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management. Kraus, S., Clauss, T., Breier, M., Gast, J., Zardini, A., & Tiberius, V. (2020). The economics of COVID-19: Initial empirical evidence on how family firms in five European countries cope with the Corona crisis. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 26, 1067. Labaki, R., Bernhard, F., & Cailluet, L. (2019). The strategic use of historical narratives in the family business. In E. Memili & C. Dibrell (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of heterogeneity among family firms (pp.  531–553). Palgrave Macmillan. Lubinski, C. (2010). Familienunternehmen in Westdeutschland: Corporate Governance und Gesellschafterkultur seit den 1960er Jahren. C. H. Beck. Martin, J. (2023). How ‘enduring family bonds’ are made: Insights from Fulɓe Kinship enterprises in Northern Benin. In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Micelotta, E., Glaser, V., & Dorian, G. (2020). Qualitative research in family business: Methodological insights to leverage inspiration, avoid data asphyxiation and develop robust theory. In A.  De Massis & N.  Kammerlander (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research methods for family business (pp.  25–48). Edward Elgar Publishing. Moser, H. (1989). Aktionsforschung als kritische Theorie der Sozialwissen schaften. Kösel.

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PART III

Family Business after the End of Socialism

CHAPTER 4

Power, Family and Business: Practices of Oligarchic Economy in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Armenia (Before 2018) Yulia Antonyan

1   Introduction When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the new citizens of the newly formed national states hoped to achieve democracy and capitalism with the triumphant rule of law, fair competition and free market relatively quickly, so that their lives would finally be progressing, as they used to say, in a normal, ‘human-like’ way. However, after having gone through the first ten years of the post-socialist decomposition of the Soviet system of government and economy (Hann et al., 2002: 1–28), an uncertain period of ‘transition’ (Verdery, 1996: 204–228, Verdery & Burawoy, 1999: 4–7) and having witnessed and experienced unexpectedly tough manifestations of ‘wild capitalism’ (Volkov, 1999, Mandel & Humphrey, 2002: 1–16) and restorations of authoritarian regimes (Verdery & Burawoy, 1999:

Y. Antonyan (*) Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_4

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12–13, Eval et al., 2000: 5), people suddenly realized that they were still very far away from the ideal Armenia they had been hoping for. And the truth was that the levers of political and economic power were being gradually concentrated in the hands of a small group of people and their families, who, along with almost unlimited power, accumulated unlimited resources, while the rest became more and more impoverished. In short, the era of ‘oligarchy’ had arrived. In the academic literature, the terms oligarch and oligarchy have been discussed in a historical and contemporary perspective by Jeffrey Winters (Winters, 2011). While he points out the obscurity and incoherence of the term, at the same time he attempts to bring forward a more or less clear definition of the concept, which could be operational for social research. As he puts it, two things matter: the basis of the oligarchic minority power, which is wealth, and the scope of their power, which is resistant to dispersion, is systemic and ‘extends so widely across the space or community that exit is nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive’ (Winters, 2011: 2–4). So, in this chapter I use the term ‘oligarchy’ as a concept describing the social group of persons that have concentrated political, social and economic branches of power in their hands, and whose functional fusion sustains and supports the physical, economic and sociocultural persistence of this group. Put differently, ‘oligarchs alone are able to use wealth for wealth’s defense’ (Winters, 2011: 6). Post-Soviet oligarchies have already become an object of social and political research, mostly focusing on their social and political origins, sources of power and modes of acting (Graham, 1999; Raviot, 2015; Zudin, 2000). I will not do the same with the Armenian oligarchy, because I have already done so elsewhere (Antonyan, 2016), but I would like to analyse some social and cultural mechanisms that have been instrumentalized to secure and multiply oligarchic wealth. Apart from being a historical and academic concept, in post-Soviet reality the word ‘oligarch’ began to be widely used as a vernacular concept by mass media and in everyday conversations. By ‘oligarchs’, mass media of the post-Soviet space mean millionaires and billionaires that accumulated their wealth in an allegedly illegal way under the patronage of the state. Therefore, the term has been endowed with a number of political, cultural and social meanings, and represented in an emotionally coloured, mostly negative or satirical/ironic way (Belyakov & Serebryannikova, 2005). However, particular representations of oligarchs might have been different, depending on the sociocultural or political environment. For

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example, the concept of oligarchy in Russia usually covers the higher echelons of the business elite that prefer not to ‘come out’; only a few of them have appeared in public, using media as leverage to influence public opinion (Raviot, 2015). Nonetheless, those few characters are people that the vast majority of the population of that huge country never come across in everyday life, and only the exceptionally ‘lucky’ can boast about their relationship with, or knowledge about, them. Oligarchs remain unreachable, and even semi-mythological figures nestled on top of power. In Armenia, a small country with still persistent patriarchal family traditions, where social and kinship networks were tightly intermingled, the oligarchic system (pre-2018, before the Velvet Revolution) was embedded in a different cultural reality. Oligarchs were seen as rather powerful ‘chiefs’, exposed to the public and relatively easy to reach/contact through kin, friends and connections. This difference could be observed since the Soviet times, when Armenia was one of the republics with a strongly developed informal ‘second’ economy (Mikaelyan, 2016). As numerous studies have shown, the second economy was greater in the republics with higher birth rates; larger and stronger networks of kin, friends and connections; and family-centred moral codes (Sampson, 1987: 126, see also Mars & Altman, 1983, Mars & Altman, 1992). The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate and prove the social and cultural continuity of informal (and to some extent illicit) business practices of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, which are built on the cultural categories of the ‘big family’ principles, and also to try to understand how this mechanism worked under different political regimes. I argue that political and business families and relations networks in Armenia have always been closely tied with ideas of kinship, community and ‘milieu’, and their social and cultural roles and functions. ‘Big families’ or kin groups in Armenia have also been a subject of customary law, according to which loyalty to the family, kin and friends’ (metaphoric kin) networks is much more prioritized than loyalty to civil law, state or citizenship. This family and kinship-based type of social trust is partly a form of heritage of the complicated relationships between citizens and the state in Soviet times, and partly the product of moral economies, peculiar to insular societies (Shrader, 2004: 401–405). Therefore, members of a kin chain or a ‘big family’ will always have an advantage over everyone else when it comes to work, deals, money and so forth. Actually, this type of ‘relatedness’ (a broader term to replace ‘kinship’) is based on practices whereby the family is ‘being done’, according to Janet Carsten’s term, and which

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go beyond the natural or blood kinship of networking, and include other forms of attachment such as trust, commensality and mutual help (Carsten, 2000; Carsten, 2004). In business terms, the oligarchic big family can be characterized as ‘the more extended group of family shareholders with strong characteristics of a network’ (Kleve et al., 2020). So, I argue that the wealth and the prosperity of oligarchic businesses as sources and targets of their power closely and directly hinge on their family and kin networks and ties, and such a dependence has resulted in a number of cultural and social peculiarities of doing business and politics in Armenia. Anthropological studies of the interconnections of economy and kinship and, particularly, of family business, or so-called familism, show that this form of economic organization certainly exists and can be effective when it meets a number of conditions (usually overlapped and intersected), such as the need to avoid the splitting of property, especially real estate, preserve its integrity, and, along with all this, maintain the social status of the family and protect the secrets of the profession, inherited and bequeathed, that are not subject to disclosure (Aslanian, 2011; Yanagisako, 2019); economic forms of activity in which the greatest financial effect is achieved by the involvement of all family members in the business (through loyalty, economy of resources, etc.) (see e.g., Ghezzi, 2016); or a special form of social existence (e.g., diasporic, migrant or criminal communities), in which it is more profitable to live and make business in families and kin groups for the purposes of security and safety, preservation of cultural or social identity, protection of, for example, special middlemen status and secrecy of information or privileges (see Bonacich, 1973; Mars & Altman, 1992; Marsden & Ibañez-Tirado, 2015). In this chapter I would like to focus on the last of the aforementioned options of the family as a form of economic organization, since it is culturally determined in the Armenian context. An extensive diaspora, considerable seasonal migration flows, as well as a long history and strong traditions of informal, ‘second’ economy have all supported the creation of a cultural, political and social context for the special place and role of family and kinship networks in the spheres of business and politics. It is important here to state that most of the articles are written based on materials gathered before the so-called Velvet Revolution of 2018, and it describes the realities of the heyday of oligarchic power (the period of approximately 2000–2018), albeit with some references to the current developments of the situation. One of the advertised goals of the Velvet

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Revolution was precisely the collapse of the corrupt oligarchic system,1 which, perhaps, has proved to have been partially successful, although some former business families are attempting to integrate into the modern political and economic environment under new, much less favourable conditions for them. In addition, there are already visible tendencies towards the birth of a kind of new, bureaucratic type of oligarchy, which represents rulers of the civilized, ‘Western’ social environment and has a different scope of ambitions. But since the analysis of new processes requires additional research, I will limit myself to the time frame until 2018. The chapter is generally grounded on the materials of the research that I conducted in 2014–2016. Its purpose was an anthropological study of the concept of the elite in Armenia in general, and an ethnographical study of the post-Soviet Armenian oligarchy in particular (Antonyan, 2016). I did not initially aim to study the family business, but the topic arose by itself, as it was impossible to ignore the visibility of the importance of kinship and family in the oligarchic business and ruling styles. Therefore, this chapter is the development of that topic using the available material. The baseline research methodology was very diverse. Due to the specifics of the social group studied, the traditional field research methodologies proved not to be that effective. Due to the fact that direct interviews with the representatives of the big business elite were difficult to conduct, I focused on individuals making up part of the ‘extended’ families of the oligarchic community or close circles of friends and acquaintances. They had been in direct contact with the elite as service personnel, such as domestic servants, assistants, personal drivers, bartenders, waiters and nurses. I tried to select informants of different social characteristics (gender, age), and my questions mostly focused on the specifics of their professional activities with a slightly expressed interest towards their clients. Some of these people willingly mentioned oligarchs or members of their families, as listing them among their clients increased their professional value. Others were rather reluctant to do so, being afraid of possible leaks. On occasion I positioned myself as a curious client. Due to this, I was once invited to celebrate someone’s family event at a resort belonging to one of the most influential oligarchs and frequently attended by his family and friends. While other guests were enjoying themselves, I talked to the service staff, asking them various ‘naïve’ questions about the oligarch, his 1   For a theoretical Hovhannisyan (2018).

analysis

of

the

Velvet

Revolution,

see

Derluguian

and

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family, his social circles, his feasts and his relationships with the other oligarchs. I happened to be with my newborn baby while there, and talkative middle-aged cooks and waiters were happy to entertain me with stories they had witnessed in their time working there. In another case, my own student, who had worked as a part-time bartender in one of the prestigious hotels, voluntarily provided me with detailed information on informal meetings of oligarchs. Conversations with most of the informants were rather informal talks, mostly unrecorded, since people were cautious about giving formal interviews, but when approached in an informal and friendly manner, willingly told stories and anecdotes with interesting details. Fortunately, even the private lives of oligarchs and their families often went public, and thus I was able to use media and social network content. Besides the data collected from my interlocutors, the most effective sources for my research were publications of the Organization of Investigative Journalists Hetq, Radio ‘Liberty’, Fact TV, CivilNet, Armtimes, and other media outlets and organizations that posted outcomes of their investigations on various aspects of the oligarchs’ businesses on their websites. For the purpose of security, I will not name those with whom I spoke, nor those who were discussed in these intimate conversations. The problem is that many pieces of information address some delicate issues and may even sound like accusations; however, my goal was to study the particular sociocultural phenomena and processes to understand their logic and meanings, and not to try to expose people to the law. The chapter includes only the names that can be found in the materials of public access, openly mentioned by various media and social networks.

2   Social and Cultural Specifics of Economy and Kinship in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Armenia (Before 2018) Family and kinship are economic structures in their essence, because they are grounded on concepts of reciprocity, exchange of values and statuses, and property (Stewart, 2013; Strathern, 1985). Under certain social and cultural circumstances, a family may transform into a business enterprise, which exists in temporal continuity frameworks, and where each subsequent generation takes on the obligation of continuing and developing

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the family production or occupation, with all its members expecting to be involved in one way or another. Historically, this type of business was common to the Armenian world, with most Armenians living in colonies, preand post-genocidal diasporas and now the migrant communities dispersed throughout the world. The practice of maintaining family and kinship ties among family members, community members and even different communities has often developed into business connections and network enterprises, many of which still exist today. Taken in the historical perspective, this (or a similar) situation in the Armenian world has existed and been repeated periodically throughout the centuries, and the traditions of family business and trade networks have been passed down from generation to generation, if not physically then in a form of family history and family narratives, which can be identified as an important way of doing family (see Koellner et al., 2023). The role of family and kinship in economic practices was especially intensified and changed whenever certain historical events (the Genocide, wars, revolutions, etc.) occurred, usually resulting in a ‘next round’ in the expansion of the Armenian diaspora communities taking place. Some pieces of historical evidence speak for themselves. The trade networks of New Julfa (an Armenian city located in Iran) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constitute an excellent example of family enterprises and trade networks stretching as far as to the north of Europe and to the Far East of Asia. In his research, Sebuh Aslanian analyses how such networks operated. They were business enterprises organized around ‘the patriarchal unity of the family’, managed by its eldest male representative with a large number of staff including both family and community members (Aslanian, 2011: 164–165). The fusion of family and business interests is comprehensively articulated in the personal letters of merchants, which, although in some politically difficult periods were full of tragic news, managed to maintain their business nature, containing ‘the salt’, that is, important economic and political news that might be useful in business (Ibid.: 86–120). Here, before getting deeper into the topic, I think it necessary to make a small outline of the ethnographic manifestations of the concept of a family in modern Armenia. For the period of the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, the concept of family was constantly undergoing transformation, affected by social, cultural and economic factors, and this process had not been always natural or consistent with the formal realities of the time.

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In the pre-industrial period preceding the 1930s, about 89.2% of Armenians were represented by a rural population busy with the agricultural sphere (Bournoutian, 2018: 22). A big family (a gerdastan) had been a prevailing social unit, which consisted of three or more generations and their siblings and their offspring living in one house. Gerdastan was economically the most effective form of family in conditions of land scarcity, alpine landscape, as well as multifunctional, diversified, extensive and physical labour-based economy. Several related households originating from a common ancestor were (and currently are) considered to be ‘azg’, a lineage group that was larger than gerdastan, although sometimes they might overlap; nevertheless, in any case they both persisted on principles of reciprocity, support and generational solidarity (Karapetyan, 1966). Gerdastan had been a functional form of family and agricultural business organization until the Soviet modernization processes, such as urbanization and collectivization, put an end to the widespread existence of big families within a rather short period of time. For the urban Armenian population (predominantly artisans and merchants), the most common form was an extended, three-generation family, the basis for family enterprises, which had been the main agents of urban economy. Families lived and held their businesses in neighbourhood communities, organized on the principles of mutual support and reciprocity (see e.g., Seghbosyan, 1974). The Soviet urbanization2 and industrialization sharply increased the percentage of nuclear families. The establishment (mostly coercive and painful) of collective farms in the Stalin period of agricultural reforms led to the fragmentation of households and, therefore, to the decomposition of big and even extended families (Vardumyan & Karapetyan, 1963). In a similar way, in the cities, rural migrants were also creating nuclear families. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the second generation of migrants faced a return of the extended, three-generation family, which can be explained by a discrepancy between the rates of demographic growth of the population of industrial cities (especially the biggest ones, like Yerevan, Gyumri and Vanadzor) and the unsatisfactory pace of the construction of housing. Children often simply had to live with their parents, because there were very few viable housing possibilities available. Many young families had been queuing for state-owned apartments for ten or more years. 2  By 1970, more than 70% of the population of Armenia were living in the cities (Karapetyan, 2014: 77).

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As for newly built small industrial cities, although housing was usually provided more quickly there, and initially the nuclear families prevailed in number, over time many brought their elderly parents to the city, since they could not provide them with proper care in the village, thus swelling the numbers.3 Sometimes the composition of some families changed seasonally. For example, in winter, some parents lived with their children in the city, and in the summer, they moved with their grandchildren back to the countryside. Thus, the connections between city and village were constantly maintained at the level of family ties and the regular commuting of relatives. On the other hand, in the same period of time, under the conditions of the Soviet deficit economy, the concept of a big family was restored, but in a different form: a ‘kin and other types of relations’ network, that would be based on the principles of loyalty, reciprocity and solidarity to make survival easier for everyone (see Feldbrugge, 1984; Kim & Shida, 2014; Rodgers & Williams, 2009; Ledeneva, 1998; Sampson, 1987). The categories of reciprocity and support included various practices. Usually, relatives who lived in the village helped the townspeople with food. In return, the townspeople hosted them in their homes, if rural kin needed to stay in the city for a while for the purposes of study, work, bureaucratic procedures and so on. Urban relatives also helped villagers to contact the ‘right’ people, ‘handle’ problems with authorities, get jobs and so on. Kinship structures that were part of such a ‘network’ often sought to be more functional through professional variety. Being part of different professional fields, members of a family/lineage could mediate access to different spheres such as health care, bureaucratic institutions, police, education institutions and nomenklatura4 units. It was important to have representatives of as many spheres as possible among kin and friends, since mediation was needed everywhere. One could not get into a good hospital, get a good job and enter university, buy ‘deficit’ (i.e., being in short supply) food or clothes and so forth, without ‘connections’. The situation was similar in other republics of the USSR and countries of Eastern Europe (Feldbrugge, 1984; Ledeneva, 1998; Polese & Morris, 2015; Sampson, 1987). 3  Family interviews conducted in 2019 during the short research in one of the small industrial cities in Armenia (city of Charentsavan) are very illustrative in this context. 4  Nomenklatura is the system of top positions in government and industry that should be filled exclusively by party members.

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The ‘networks’ did not always include only kin relatives; sometimes they were also grounded in generational solidarity of classmates, neighbours, colleagues and the like. Professional or domestic mobility was hampered in many ways in the Soviet republics, so people sometimes worked together for almost their entire working lives, for 20, 30, 40 years or even more. Changing jobs was suspicious, while loyalty to one enterprise or public institution was praised and even formally encouraged by state awards like a medal ‘for length of service’. People, therefore, developed friendly ties and lifelong connections that could be used at various occasions. All non-kin types of social connections might potentially be developed into kinship relations (through marriage, affinity or religious parenting) and were metaphorically perceived as such through general terms like ‘brothers’, ‘uncles’ and ‘our men’.5 In many ways, such networks were able to help people survive by resisting the state system, creating alternative mechanisms of social and economic interaction and bypassing some Soviet laws and regulations. On the other hand, this often led to the development of informal and dishonest practices such as nepotism, clientelism, corruption, abuse of power and pilfering that usually ended up corroding the economy (Mikaelyan, 2016; Polese & Morris, 2015; Sampson, 1987). The traditional practices of family businesses in the pre-Soviet period seemed to have completely disappeared during the Soviet times, along with the abolition of private entrepreneurship. However, in late Soviet times (starting from the late 1960s and early 1970s), the failures of the Soviet economic planning system began to be supplemented by the ‘shadow capitalism’, or clandestine enterprises acting in the framework of the Soviet ‘second economy’ (Derluguian, 2005; Mars & Altman, 1983; Mars & Altman, 1992; Sampson, 1987). Unfortunately, almost no research texts could be found about the clandestine production in Soviet Armenia (Kim & Shida, 2014; Mikaelyan, 2016). There were a lot of different forms of the ‘second economy’, such as the cultivation of household plots of land, private professional services (artisanry, medicine, tutorship, repair, etc.), seasonal labour migration, informal markets of agricultural 5  In one of the items of media coverage of local elections in 2015 in the city of Artashat, journalists saw a large group of young men dressed in a similar way and driving cars with similar numbers belonging to associates of a son of an oligarch, who was the only balloted candidate for the position of mayor. They asked him who all the young men were. He answered: ‘These are all “my people”, my mates, friends and brothers’ (Argam Abrahamyan, Radio ‘Freedom’, 2015).

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and industrial goods, clandestine (and therefore illegal) markets of currencies or smuggled goods and unaccounted for (also illegal) production units, the so-called tsekhs6 (Mikaelyan, 2016: 62–68). Several interviews with former representatives of this field or those who were related to them helped me to reconstruct the picture of how tsekhs worked. The mechanisms were as follows. An additional unit (tsekh) would be created at a factory or a plant and a ‘loyal’ person (a relative or someone from the production director’s inner loyalty circles) would be appointed as the head of this unit. A part of the raw material for production received by a factory/plant from the state was falsely claimed to be ‘defective’ and allegedly ‘thrown away’, but in reality it was used to make the additional unregistered production, which was sold on the clandestine markets. The raw material claimed ‘defective’ was usually the best quality, so the unregistered production was often of much higher quality. In some spheres, the ‘defective’ raw materials (e.g., those for construction and repair) themselves were the object of illegal sale. One of my informants, G. Y. (born in 1972), told a story about such a tsekh in a public construction agency, operated by his kavor7 (godfather). As the formal construction work plan had to be completed anyway, the building materials for the informal sale were simply withdrawn from the active construction sites by informal reduction of material consumption norms. By paying bribes to the auditing committees and planners, the director of the agency ensured all necessary documents were signed. This general process was much easier when there were kin people among the auditing officials. In this case it turned out to be a business chain. This particular practice later led to the tragedy of hundreds of destroyed houses and thousands of lives lost during the Spitak earthquake in Armenia in 1988. But in the late Soviet period, the goal was to fill in the growing deficit of building materials for private construction8 and the process of the renovation of apartments accelerated in that time.

 Tsekh literally means workshop, a structural unit of a Soviet plant or factory.  The institute of godfather in Armenia is very significant, and relationships between godfather and godchildren are based on principles of mutual responsibilities, obedience and support. Families that are interested in each other often enter into godfather-godchildren relationships. 8  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, small plots of lands (500 s.m.) for private cultivation were distributed among employees of state enterprises. Everyone started the construction of small country houses (dachas), and the construction materials appeared to be in great demand. 6 7

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To make these illegal processes ‘invisible’ to the authorities, a pyramidal system of corruption and clientele was built. Part of the income from illegal sales was given ‘up’ to those who were higher on the power ladder. As A. K. (born in 1935), former head of one of the state construction companies, told me, ‘not paying a bribe to “upper” officials were fraught with sudden audits and arrests for pilfering and state property abuse and in the end bribing the court system to get lighter punishment cost much more’. Such semi-legal structures were supposed to consist of extremely loyal people, ideally of blood or affinal relations, which stimulated the practices of nepotism, important for these structures in terms of economy and security. As some scholarship shows, the most successful ‘tsekhaviks’ (heads of informal tsekhs) existed in the republics of the South Caucasus, where kinship and relations networks were traditionally strong, and the concept of a big family was associated with those of loyalty, reciprocity, solidarity and mutual social obligations (Mars & Altman, 1983; Mikaelyan, 2016). All these cultural specifics appeared to be demanded by, and adapted to, the socialist reality. Besides this, another important factor contributed to the thriving and expanding of informal businesses throughout the country. There was active seasonal labour migration (‘khopan’ in Armenian) from southern Soviet republics including Armenia, Siberia and the Far East to respond to the acute need for working hands. Armenian men used to work in construction or drive trucks. These highly mobile activities allowed seasonal migrants to be an important part of retail networks designed for the distribution of goods made in the tsekhs throughout the Soviet Union without being caught and detained. As one of the informants (M. T., b. in 1956) said, ‘It used to be them, khopanchis (seasonal migrants) finding us. Shoes were a very hot commodity, the glue on them did not have time to dry before they were taken away’. Khopanchis and tsekhaviks could be represented by different collaborating groups, or simply be different functional parts of one ‘kinship-mates’ network. In the late 1980s, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’ reforms, the so-called cooperative enterprises were allowed to be established legally (1988). They were supposed to be the first enterprises based on the capitalist principle of private ownership and self-sufficiency, existing in addition to the state-owned ones (Mikaelyan, 2016: 71). Many semi-legal tsekhs began to be registered as cooperative enterprises, owned sometimes by close friends, and sometimes by family members, mostly men (fathers and sons or brothers), but they continued to benefit from the facilities of

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the state enterprise where they were de facto located: ‘You might have come to a plant or a factory at that time, and you might have seen everyone busy with work, but if you looked closely you might have noticed that everyone was making something of his own and no one was engaged in the plant production’ (G.  Y., born in 1972). If some early cooperative enterprises still continued to leach off state resources, others were switching to more independent forms of existence, although they often could not withstand competition. And even if some cooperatives were owned by relatives, they were not family businesses in a proper sense, but rather different forms of functional cooperation between people who were in relationships of reciprocity, trust and loyalty. However, in the majority of cases, most of those people were in kin relationships and sometimes further forms of relatedness, based on reciprocity, trust and loyalty. Cooperative enterprises existed until the end of the Soviet Union and early post-Soviet years. The transition to the market economy system, the extensive and quick privatization of state enterprises and property and expanded practices of informal retail trade of cheap goods from abroad all negatively affected many cooperatives. The energy crisis, war and the transportation blockade of the 1990s spelled the end of the majority of cooperatives, according to all my informants. However, I believe that the experience of illicit appropriation of state resources and shadow incomes under the cover of family and relatedness networks, accumulated over the years, continued to persist in the new economic and political system of independent Armenia. In fact, after the revolutionary transformations of the economy of Armenia in the early 1990s and the oligarchization of the political structure of the country, the family and associates networks were changed in order to serve the needs of big business and to secure the illegally appropriated property. As previously, enterprises and companies owned (directly or through blood or affinal kinship) by administrative authorities and party leaders (this time the Republican Party ruling from 2008 to 2018 and its satellites) used old tools of clientelism and nepotism to leach off state structures and finances and to maintain informally imposed monopolies; as before, they again needed extended social and kinship networks to ensure security and cover up the numerous breaches of the law. Interestingly, the late Soviet practices of creating retail ‘networks’ based on kinship ties and family connections immediately began to work under the newly introduced capitalism, due to the existence of ramified Armenian diasporas and, particularly, new migrant communities. For instance,

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during my interactions with people, I was told a story in which one of two brothers managed to migrate to a European country. He managed to establish there a trade enterprise through which he would send goods to Armenia, where the second brother would sell them. Such networks worked rather effectively in the first half of the 1990s, and then the growing monopolies on the import of certain goods, shared among several dozen oligarchic families in Armenia, undermined the businesses of many of them.

3   ‘Family Business Empires’ in the Post-Soviet Period of 2000–2018 At the beginning of this section it is necessary to address the differences between family and relations groups in the context of doing business and politics in Armenia. The concept of family business can be related to different types of business families, although these types are closely intersected and intertwined. Most of the classifying definitions in the theoretical literature seem to depend on local context and cultural perceptions of family, kinship and business. In a recent study investigating different forms of the business family, three categories of business families are described (Kleve et  al., 2020; Koellner et al. 2022): business family 1.0 (overlaps with the nuclear family), business family 2.0 (extended business with selective involvement of family members) and business family 3.0 (business is still organized as a family business, but the relatedness bonds are under pressure and internal heterogeneity is increasing). Small and medium businesses in Armenia fit into type 1.0, representing business units based on a specific production or property, and formally owned, developed and operated by members of a nuclear family. Big businesses fit into type 2.0; however, they have their local peculiarities, stemming from their semi-criminal or corrupt nature. Big business in Armenia before 2018 was represented as a kind of corporation uniting both business enterprises and political/ legal support institutions (municipalities, parliament, courts, tax inspection, etc.) owned or headed by members of the same relatedness network, where all of them were bound not only by family trust and loyalty, but also by the group liability. Such networks included blood kins, affinal kins, godparents and godchildren, and different kinds of ‘mates’, that is, members of various generational or territorial male brotherhoods and

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networks.9 I would call them relatedness networks of kin-like10 associates, because the social ties between them are practised and lived as those of metaphorical kinship, and they usually tend to eventually become true kinspeople through marriage, affinity and godparenting. An important specificity of the oligarchic business is that it cannot exist without political or administrative support and resources. This means that the integration of some members of a big business family and relatedness networks into local political and administrative structures was a necessity. Sometimes, the heads of big families and networks (‘oligarchs’ themselves) sought to gain political power personally or through their closest kinspeople (members of their nuclear families like sons, daughters, nephews) to secure their business empires. Such big family business empires were usually interested in the constant expansion (also geographic) of the zones and spheres of business and political influence, the establishment of monopolies and attaining informal privileges. Monopolization of business spheres, informal tax privileges and possibilities of being selected as exclusive vendors of services for the state through fake tenders and competitions were the main sources of vast profits. The exceptional importance of the family and relations networks is indirectly indicated by the fact that almost all the oligarchs of Armenia had been building their business empires in a certain territorial space: their hometown or province (‘marz’),11 or in a certain administrative district of a large city, where, by using their material and social resources to rig elections, they pushed for administrative positions for their relatives (sons, siblings, sons-in-law, etc.).12 Their own business empire usually included sub-networks of other entrepreneurs and officials, who were supposed to act in total dependence from the ‘king’ (as many oligarchs were actually

9  They are usually represented by loosely organized groups and may be known by different names such as kucha, taifa, akhperutyun and be based on different types of affiliation (street and neighbourhood groups, classmates, army mates, criminal or subcriminal circles, etc.). 10  I borrowed the term from Stewart (2010: 5). 11  Marz—the biggest territorial and administrative unit in Armenia. 12  This could be done by bribing or intimidating voters, but more often than not members of an extended family and relatedness networks would outnumber the voters for another candidate.

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called by their subordinates and residents of the region, central to their ‘empire’) (Antonyan, 2016).13 To describe how the system of family business empires of economic and political elites in Armenia had been working until 2018, I shall take the cases of several well-known families, whose names I can safely indicate, since they have appeared in many media publications on political or business issues associated with them. I researched them through various sources and, in addition, through people who were somehow close to them (of course, on condition of total anonymity). First is the case of Gagik Tsarukyan, one of the most famous oligarchs, a former member of the National Parliament (2003–2020) and head of the political party ‘Prosperous Armenia’, which had previously been in coalition with the ruling ‘Republican Party of Armenia’. His empire encompassed the Kotayk marz, where he was originally from, and some communities of the Gegharkunik marz, where he began work as a policeman at the dawn of his career and made close connections. Perhaps old connections were the reason why he launched a number of heavily monopolized agricultural and other businesses there. His son-in-law Karen Guloyan, the son of local businessman Murad Guloyan, was also once a member of the National Assembly, and the mayor of the city of Abovyan, the capital city of the Kotayk Province. According to the residents of the city who I talked to, almost all business enterprises in the city ‘allowed’ to exist were connected with the family of Gagik Tsarukyan, or with members of his large family and associates, that is, personal servicemen (bodyguards, drivers), friends and so forth. The entire administrative staff of the city, in fact, served the interests of this large family empire. Various narratives that could be heard in the city and the whole region often developed around Tsarukyan’s relationship some businessman and were described in terms of loyalty or disloyalty, followed by rewards or punishments. Another illustrative case is Hovik Abrahamyan, also the owner of a business empire. He was in power from 1995 to 2018 as a former member of parliament, mayor, marzpet (head of province), minister of a number of ministries, speaker of parliament and prime minister, whose ‘headquarters’ were in Ararat marz. Thus, his business empire occupied the bigger part of the Ararat valley, the most fertile region of Armenia. His son Argam was 13  Similar relationships between business and the political sector can be observed in Russia (Koellner, 2012, 2013).

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the mayor of Artashat, and numerous members of his family were ruling businesses and administrative positions in the province. The real size of the influence of the Abrahamyan ‘clan’ became clearly visible only when his power became limited after 2018. For instance, I was told that the farmers of the Ararat marz only began to get irrigation water according to the normal legal process after 2018, whereas before it was given only either to members of Abrahamyan’s relatedness network (who owned a number of fish farms consuming large amounts of water) or to those who were ready to confirm their loyalty to Abrahamyan’s family and relations by openly voting for its representatives in local and republican elections. The zones of influence of oligarchic families and their businesses are clearly visible in the example of supermarkets owned by certain oligarchs. If we could look at a map of supermarkets in Yerevan, we would see that the accumulations of supermarkets of a particular chain were clustered in the districts where an oligarch had most influence and social ties. For example, the territory of expansion in Yerevan of ‘City’ and ‘Kaiser’ supermarkets, owned by businessman Samvel Aleksanyan (also a former member of the National Parliament, and a former monopolist in importing certain types of products and in a number of branches of light industry), started in the Malatia-Sebastia district of Yerevan, the zone of his utmost influence, and expanded to other districts, but not to all of them. However, if one looked at the declarations of property and financial means of the oligarchs, one would notice their more than modest size compared to their real scale. None of those who sat in political power formally owned business enterprises, their salaries and funds in their accounts (even with the rough calculations) did not cover the real estate registered in their name and the amount of real estate registered in their name was suspiciously insignificant and did not coincide in any way with the sizes of their real power and influence. What seems to be a riddle is resolved simply. A large number of consanguine or affinity relations were usually actively involved in the formal ownership of real estate and enterprises—parents, siblings, children, mother-in-law, father-in-law, son-in-law, his brothers and so forth. Sometimes, amongst owners of business enterprises, vernacularly associated with the names of an oligarch, one can notice unfamiliar surnames, but upon closer examination, they also always turned out to be people connected by family or network ties. Why does this happen? According to the legislation of R.A., members of parliament, local authorities or

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employees of the executive branches of government cannot own or manage business enterprises.14 The Association of Investigative Journalists has conducted research on the so-called business empire of the aforementioned Gagik Tsarukyan. At the start of his business carrier, he was the owner of the family enterprise ‘G. K. Tsarukyan’, which was later (2003) handed over to the newly created ‘Multi Croup’ business consortium, founded by him. This was done when Tsarukyan became a member of parliament to camouflage the fact that he owned business enterprises. Since then, he has not formally owned or managed any enterprises making up part of the consortium. All of them have been formally owned or managed by his family members or kin-like associates, but Tsarukyan is listed as one of the owners in all of them (Hetq, 2019). To defend the interests of his businesses, his family and his associates, he founded a political party in 2004, which acted in close coalition with the ruling Republican Party. Tsarukyan’s parliamentary fraction was composed mainly of people associated with him (14 of 26 MPs were directly connected to Tsarukyan through his family relations, affinities and business partners). He also had an agreed number of secondary executive positions to distribute among his circles, and he used them as tools to guarantee his people’s loyalty and reciprocity (Media.am, 2020). In fact, the nature of the oligarchic business was such that its owner had no choice but to wield political or/and administrative power, since it alone ensured the viability of his businesses. And, therefore, despite formally not being involved in the ownership and management of the enterprises, the oligarchs did not keep their actual ownership in secret, because only association with their names would guarantee informal privileges given to the businesses. The oligarch used his relatives and associates as a ‘legal shield’ for himself, but he also had to always control and maintain their loyalty and a high level of trust through expanding reciprocity and creating a kind of web of mutual dependence and collective responsibility. If someone broke the trust, not only him, but all his relations might suffer. The loyalty, reciprocity and collective responsibility web pulled in people and their families without any visible ways out. Thus, the family and the relations were a reliable resource that could be used to create an informal business and property system that allowed oligarchs to circumvent the law without technically breaking it. Recently, in the course of post-electoral 14  The corresponding statements can be found in the Constitution of R.A. and the Law on Civil Service (Ch. 5, paragraph 31).

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investigations of alleged electoral abuses in the snap elections of 2021, interesting evidence of such mutual responsibility and forced loyalty was brought to the public attention through the ‘loyalty letters’ to Gagik Tsarukyan, the head of the party Prosperous Armenia. The letters represented a kind of oath of loyalty to their patron, in which those who wrote the letters pledged to be faithful to him, not to enter into opposition against him, not to make any public statements against him and ‘to provide’ him with the necessary number of votes in the elections. To make their oath more impressive, some of them swore on their children and/or parents, that is, as one of the writers put it, ‘on all the holiest things I have’.15 Bearing in mind that some of their children or other relatives are involved in Gagik Tsarukyan’s business and political affairs, such oaths look indeed real rather than metaphorical. Family business empires usually swallowed other minor family or individual businesses, which turned out to be unable to compete (since they did not have the advantages oligarchs had) and were forced to accept the patronage of an oligarch or his family members in exchange for informal pay-offs or even formal shares, which is a known Soviet and post-Soviet phenomenon called ‘roof structures’ or ‘kryshi’ in Russian (Volkov, 1999: 748), and ‘mejk’, literally ‘back’ in Armenian. In the anthropological context of familism, it works like this: in an environment where customary law competes with formal legislation, the ‘big family’ or a relatedness network has a social and physical advantage over the nuclear one, and the social capital prevails over its other forms. So, the big business family as a particular social structure may have the following levels: nuclear family (‘entanik’ in Armenian), that is, the narrow circle of consanguine and affinity relatives (parents, siblings of parents, their children, their affinal relatives, the siblings’ children and grandchildren, etc.); extended family (‘azg’ in Armenian), which includes more distant relatives and representatives of different branches of the lineage; and the so-called ambiance (‘shrjapat’), that is, affinities of distant relatives, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours, private service personnel and so forth—put differently, the family associates, that is, a group of people whose lifelong loyalty is based not on family ties and 15  The photos of those letters were informally spread out throughout the Internet, but I have not been successful in finding the original source. However, I have no doubts about their authenticity, because the authors later made public comments to justify their activities. See, e.g., Armtimes, 2017.

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affection, but rather on reciprocity, liability and interdependence. These extended kinship and social networks are acted out through nepotism, or the so-called system of ‘KCF’ (kinship, connections, friends) as people say in vernacular Armenian. Family ties may have also served as a convenient mechanism for obfuscating the traces of criminal transactions on state or communal property. For instance, investigations of the financial abuse of communal property over the past several years have shown how these transactions were carried out. The usual scheme was as follows: the heads of the community formally alienated some communal property (agricultural lands, communal buildings, even such institutions as kindergartens or houses of culture). At fake auctions, the property would be bought for a pittance by an intermediary (the deal also might be fake), who would resell it to the head of the community or his relations, to be used for personal purposes, or resell it to someone else for real value. These transactions might have preceded the construction of hydroelectric power plants, tourist facilities and so forth, that is, business investments that would bring the owner maximum profit. In this way, for instance, almost the entire city of Tsakhkadzor, a famous ski resort, was privatized, resold and divided between the oligarchs and members of their business families. In 2018 a journalist investigation into the properties of Taron Margaryan, the previous mayor of Yerevan, son of one of the founders of the ruling Republic Party, was carried out. The video coverage of its outcome was published in one of the digital media outlets, and shows the way that the family and relatedness networks acted. Thus, journalists found out that Margaryan’s ‘castles’ (huge mansions), businesses, shops and taxi services were all registered in the names of his mother, cousin, nephew, godson, close friends and assistants and members of their families (fathers, affinities, wives and children). In one of his tax declarations, he mentioned 25,000,000 drams (about 50,000 euro) as a revenue generated from the sale of his car. This amount seemed to be at least ten (or more) millions of drams higher than its real possible cost. The person who had bought the car at the far higher price appeared to be the father of one of his close mates. In reality, the car had never left Taron Margaryan’s garage. The fake deal was to hide some undeclared revenues, and the father of his mate had ‘provided’ him with his name and documents to fake the purchase, pulling himself into the mutually profitable liability and reciprocity bonds with the Margaryan family (Fact TV, 2018).

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Social loyalty, reciprocity and collective responsibility within the network or ‘ambiance’ (shrjapat) needed to be maintained through a number of commensal practices such as feasts, family reunions and different celebrations organized on the occasions of family events and life-cycle rituals such as weddings, funerals, baptisms, birthday celebrations, family and community-related religious events (such as ‘matagh’—a sacrifice ritual). At these gatherings the invited members of the ‘big family’ are confirming their integrity and loyalty to each other.16 The community context was also extremely important for the oligarchs’ business empires because particular communities were the main resources of potential voters during the elections. Each oligarch intended to obtain influence in as many communities as possible that fell within their family and relatedness network. Often the practices of communal integrity and loyalty building in the related communities were embedded in the religious context. As a rule, oligarchs started by building a church in ‘his’ region, village or administrative district of the city. For instance, G. Tsarukyan built a huge cathedral in the city of Abovyan, and oligarchs Hovik Abrahamyan, Samvel Aleksanyan and Ruben Hayrapetyan built the churches, respectively, in Artashat, the Malatia-Sebastia region of Yerevan and the Avan administrative region (Antonyan, 2015).17 Such churches became main venues for family events, and usually were temporarily closed for all other visitors. The circle of those invited to events is clearly limited by the family members, relatedness networks and political patrons or allies. Tabloids often attended these events in order to record the invitees, in order to understand who is with whom in politics and business.18 From time to time, the oligarch who built the church would arrange some community events, with communal feasts and sacrifices open for everybody in the community.19 Community events, celebrations and charity were usually considered a good way to increase popularity, and therefore the loyalty networks, of oligarchs. 16  In the social networks and tabloids, one can find a lot of photo and video coverage of such kind of events. 17  This kind of practice seems to be common for the post-Soviet countries (see Koellner, 2012: 123–133, Koellner, 2013: 83–95, Serrano, 2016: 133–155). 18  There were photos of the baptism of Samvel Karapetyan’s grandchildren on news.am and zham.am, where one could clearly see all the details, including guest arrivals and the closing of the church for uninvited visitors. 19  Thus, I witnessed a number of such feasts and perhaps, and especially, the most outstanding one, held on the occasion of the opening of Abovyan Cathedral, by Tsarukyan.

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4   Gender Issues and Matrimonial Practices in Oligarchic Families and Networks 4.1   Matrimonial Practices of Oligarchs: ‘The Oligarch’s Wedding’ The interrelations between business and family can be analysed anthropologically in the context of numerous social practices, which are, at first glance, far from the business realm. This includes gifts to women (see Tereshina on the case of Russia, 2023) or marriage in general (Strathern, 1985: 197–200, Stewart, 2010: 10–11). Matrimonial strategies and practices have been already theorized in the anthropological literature as practices and tools supporting the gender-based economy of the society, establishing social order and mediating social, political and economic reciprocity and alliances (Bossen, 1988; Comaroff, 1980; Shenk et al., 2016; Stewart, 2010). As I have already attempted to show, consanguineous and affinal kinship may become a steady social ground for mutual security and expansion of the political and economic power of families and relatedness networks. This is why people build specific matrimonial strategies to attach themselves to reciprocal obligations and loyalty by having their offspring married. Matrimonial strategies and practices in big business families are rather easy to follow, simply by learning who married whom and who those people are, all of which are usually widely published in the press. For instance, three of the five daughters of Gagik Tsarukyan are married, respectively, to the sons of oligarchs Hovik Abrahamyan, Khachatur Sukiasyan and a son of the affluent businessman Murad Galoyan. One of the two sons of Tsarukyan recently married a daughter of a prominent businessman, a representative of the Armenian diaspora in the city of Ufa (Russia), with whom he probably has friendly and business ties. Adorned with exclusive photographs, the description of the wedding of the daughter of oligarch Samvel Aleksanyan on 4 June 2017, in one of the media outlets, says that the son of the director of the company ‘Moya Semya’ was rumoured to be the groom, but Aleksanyan himself claimed that the father of his son-in-law worked for him as ‘a manager for “pasta”’(meaning the department of pasta production—Yu.A.). The wedding was held in the ‘family’ church of the ‘Holy Trinity’ in the Malatia-­ Sebastia district of Yerevan, but the wedding party was held in the restaurant belonging to another ‘friendly’ oligarch Gagik Tsarukyan

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(Armtimes, 2020). Other media reported that the nephew (brother’s son) of Samvel Aleksanyan was married to the daughter of oligarch Grigor Margaryan, nicknamed Belaggio Grish (Armblogs, 2015). Once having children-in-law as offspring of their associates, oligarchs seek to integrate them into the family business empire as key officials or managers of enterprises. Thus, the husband of Samvel Alexanyan’s sister was appointed as a manager of one of his supermarket chains. The husband of one of Hovik Abrahamyan’s daughters became the head of the tax inspection of the Shengavit district of Yerevan, and the husband of the other became the head of the custom house (Hraparak.am, 2016). Both positions were considered extremely corrupt, profitable and influential under the oligarchic regime, and they might have facilitated illegal transactions or the violation of tax laws. The marriages of those two young men to Abrahamyan’s daughters may have been a good career start for them, and, most likely, they received the aforementioned positions around the time of the wedding. Matrimonial practices in an oligarchic environment, as we can see, are carried out according to the principle of ‘like marry like’ (Strathern, 1985: 197–200) and have a number of important property and status-related functions, which can also be worked out and understood from various details that seep into the press and social networks. In addition to the merging of political and business interests, income multiplication and career opportunities for the younger generation of the family, it becomes very important to acquire additional support from one’s ‘shrjapat’ (a group of friends and family relations), which is enlarged also through marriage. Some undesirable marriages sometimes do not happen. I was once told a sad story about a daughter of an oligarch, who was not allowed to marry one of the bodyguards of her father, and the young man was severely punished for having dared to even think about becoming the son-in-law of his patron. Sometimes this kind of inter-family support can save lives. For example, during the 2015 elections, Gagik Tsarukyan went into an open clash with the ruling Republican Party of Armenia. As a result of the conflict, the overt public persecution and targeting of Tsarukyan began, and it seemed that President Serzh Sargsyan was determined to punish him, take away his businesses, deprive him of political power and start criminal proceedings for various economic crimes against him. But Tsarukyan’s affinal relationship with another influential member of the party, former Prime Minister and Speaker of the Parliament Hovik Abrahamyan, saved him

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from arrest and ruin. One of my informants (a representative of a family of close acquaintances of Hovik Abrahamyan), told me that, to his knowledge, Abrahamyan had arranged a secret meeting with Tsarukyan and the republicans at his home, and, thanks to this mediation, the reconciliation took place and Tsarukyan was punished only minimally, having just a few businesses taken away from him. The importance of maintaining the strength of family alliances, of course, results in the minimization of divorces in the families of oligarchs.20 Their love affairs are kept in strict secrecy and are not advertised, and remarriages are also apparently not welcome. After all, the fusion of family relationships, business and the legal sphere assumes an intricacy of relationships with kin and affinities with whom it would not be easy to negotiate in the case of a divorce and a new marriage. Emotional or sexual indulgence could entail a lot of social, political and economic complications. In addition, there would be many formal problems associated with the formal ownership of the oligarchs’ properties. Borrowing one’s legal name for the registration of formal ownership of properties is not just based only on seamless trust and loyalty; after all, it is a service that one also has to be paid for. That might assume a certain amount of money, but also some exchange dividends like position, real estate or shares in one of the businesses, which this person formally ‘owns’. Consequently, in the case of a divorce, problems of co-ownership, shares and so forth would inevitably arise. Tensions with the affinal relations would also lead to dire consequences for prosperity of business, political power and social influence. 4.2   Business Empires and Women: ‘Muk’s Casus’ The details of the property of Hovik Abrahamyan’s (popularly nicknamed Muk—‘mouse’) wife, Julietta Abrahamyan, in an article written by the Association of Investigative Journalists ‘Hetq’ (Hetq, 2014), clearly showed that she was far richer than her husband, and had much more real estate, properties, businesses and land, despite the fact that she was not officially working anywhere and obviously didn’t inherit those properties from her parents. This situation was not unique; it could be observed in 20  According to biographical data, almost all oligarchs have life-long marriage partners and numbers of children sometimes far beyond the average. This makes a great contrast with, say, Russian oligarchs, who are known for their scandalous divorces, remarriages and mistresses.

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the cases of other government officials and members of parliament (see, e.g., Armtimes, 2015). So, we seem to encounter quite a strange picture: the female half of the family is formally much more involved in business and much richer than the male one. I conditionally called it the ‘Muk’s Casus’, and it shows something that is obviously in contradiction with the patriarchal structure of the Armenian society, which is mostly male-­ oriented (Ghezzi, 2016: 249, 251). The previous part of the article helped us understand that, in a way, wives, mothers, daughters, mothers-in-law, nieces and other female relatives of the Armenian oligarchs served as just a formal cover for the true owners and managers of business enterprises and real estate. However, the role of female members of a big family was not limited just to performing the function of a legal ‘body’ for a cover or as an object of a prestigious marriage deal. Sometimes they were formally appointed to managerial positions and became heads of some family businesses. For instance, take the case of oligarch Samvel Aleksanyan, now a former member of parliament and one of Armenia’s most successful businessmen: his daughter was the director of one of his light industry enterprises (Arenanews, 2017), his wife was the manager of his ‘Yerevan City’ supermarket chain and his niece was once (in 2013 at least as it was stated in the media article) the executive director of the ‘Kaiser’ supermarket chain, formally owned by her brother, Aleksanyan’s nephew (Slaq.am, 2013). Prior to that, the niece had owned and operated a wedding salon and a flower shop, which might seem to be more typically ‘female’ businesses. Both supermarket chains were in a monopolist position in several of the largest and most densely populated districts of Yerevan, and, in addition, the oligarch himself was a well-known monopolist in the import of a number of important products (granulated sugar, for example), which made it possible to set highly competitive prices for them. Another female kin-­ person, Gayane Tsarukyan, the daughter of the aforementioned oligarch Gagik Tsarukyan, was (and perhaps still is) the owner of another kind of ‘female’ enterprise, the children’s clothing luxury boutique ‘Princes and Princesses’, according to a media article (Arenanews, 2017), although her name has never been seen in the official information about this enterprise. Such ‘formal’ involvement of female family members was widespread. ‘Buying’ a business for a daughter or wife—beauty salons, travel agencies, European brand stores or, less often, private clinics or legal agencies (if they had the appropriate professional education)—was a common phenomenon (see also Tereshina, 2023), but it could form part of the

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manifestation of different aspects of kinship economy: dowry, birthday gifts, investments of savings and so forth. As Stewart states, sometimes business logic was secondary to kinship logic (Stewart, 2003: 386). I was told about the wives, daughters and even secret mistresses of oligarchs, who were given a travel agency or beauty salon that was purchased or perhaps even coercively taken away from someone else. Possibly, a number of these businesses, especially luxury boutiques or salons, existed for money laundering, for many of them were closed shortly after the Velvet Revolution of 2018. For a number of businesses, such kinship or a connection with representatives of the political and economic elite meant strongly favourable competitive conditions: the possibility to pay taxes irregularly or at reduced rates, to have the state or private institutions as permanent clients or obtaining other kinds of privileges. The owner of a travel agency used to complain to me (I was one of her clients) about how it was difficult for her to compete with the agencies owned by the wives and daughters of the oligarchs because of their informal privileges. But sometimes even family ties and connections did not affect the success of a business, especially if it was based on certain services, the demand for which could not be regulated from above. Once I witnessed the whole process of ruination of a successful language school where I took my child to learn English. Prior to emigrating to another country, its founder sold it to a member of the public council of one of the district municipalities (possibly also some oligarch’s relative), who gave it to his wife as a birthday gift (see also Tereshina, 2023). The wife had little idea of how to run the business, and it soon went bankrupt. I was one of the last remaining clients, since the school was located close to my house, and the ‘business woman’ often bemoaned that the costs were not covered, the promised income was not being generated and, in general, she could not understand why on earth her husband bought her this school. Another common practice of expanding the political influence of family and relations in the business sphere is the forced (through political and economic leverage and blackmail) attachment of female kin to profitable newly formed enterprises (especially with foreign capital or management, like IT companies) as support staff such as office managers, HR and secretaries. For a number of industries, this became one of the conditions on which a firm was given a ‘green light’, which meant that no artificial obstacles would be created for them. This was, in fact, corruption in disguise, but also a form of external control of these enterprises. One of my

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informants, a programmer in a big IT company, told me how, after the Velvet Revolution of 2018, such ‘attached’ employees (mostly women) began to disappear from their company. Why, however, were such ‘gender-based’ positions needed? It seems possible that the patriarchal oligarchic system used its women as shields not only for covering up different legal tricks or fraud such as money laundering, but also as objects of corrupt exchange, a kind of a bargaining chip. In the context of a male-dominated and patriarchal economy, women are easier to manipulate, they may be removed or replaced when there is no longer a need for them and they are not expected to manifest any signs of resistance or indignation—they would not take revenge, or feel hurt, at least in public. They would be also given (as a birthday gift or part of a dowry) some secondary enterprises within a ‘non-male’, less prestigious field of activity, which nevertheless might bring a stable income. Put differently, women in the ‘big business family’ context may be the owners of enterprises and properties, make money or carry out some local management, but they are exchangeable, usable as tools, cannot exert power and are rarely or never involved in the decision-making process.

5  Conclusion The fusion of family, business and politics appeared to be extremely resilient and adaptable to the everchanging practices of different political regimes. It seems that the recent economic history of Armenia, a country that has been a consequential part of different empires and different political regimes, may demonstrate the continuity of these forms in different contexts: political, social and cultural. I argue that when these or those political or other factors begin to impede or skew the development and functioning of structures of formal economy, the big business family-based forms of informal economy come to prevail as more competitive, flexible and socially or culturally more adaptive ones. This is a crucial cultural specificity of the situation in Armenia. In Soviet times, the principles of family and group reciprocity, solidarity and loyalty helped to keep structures of the ‘secondary’ or ‘shadow’ economy afloat. In the post-Soviet times, the same kinship and social network structures smoothly flowed in the post-Soviet ‘hybrid’ capitalism, where newly imposed principles of free market, capital and private property overlapped with the long-lasting sociocultural frameworks of political and economic practices. The concept of ‘business’ was expanded to include a

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number of structures of political, administrative, judicial and economic nature, supporting, supplementing and reinforcing each other. Therefore, the concept of ‘big business family’ (in both direct and metaphoric senses) came to provide a solid foundation for oligarchic business empires, since it was able to provide effective mechanisms to hide illegality, expand power and influence and secure money and profit. At the same time, power-­ building and money-making processes, involving the family, kinship and social connections, were fully consistent with local patriarchal tradition and social/gender hierarchies.

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CHAPTER 5

Business as a Gift: Family Entrepreneurship and the Ambiguities of Sharing Daria Tereshina

1   Introduction We were approaching the end of our interview with Katya1 (36), a local entrepreneur from Smolensk, when I brought up the issue of the ‘wives’ businesses’ (biznesy zhyon). By showing my interest in this very specific type of female enterprise, I asked Katya to help me with contacts. Katya looked puzzled and asked me to elaborate on what I meant by ‘wives’ businesses’. I said that I meant a specific type of female enterprise that was normally received as a ‘gift’ from a husband, boyfriend or lover and could hardly survive economically on its own, detached from male support and supervision. My clarification made no sense to Katya as she could not understand how such enterprises were able to remain economically healthy in the long run. A former accountant and a single mother, Katya started 1  A pseudonym. All names of informants and companies have been changed to protect their identities.

D. Tereshina (*) Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Moscow Region, Russian Federation © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_5

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her advertising business over a decade ago; since then, it had gone through many ups and downs and was slowly expanding, the ongoing pandemic notwithstanding. Coming from a working-class background, Katya has made a great effort to reinvent herself as a professional manager and has placed a great value on education and knowledge as key ingredients of any successful business venture. To Katya entrepreneurialism has always been firmly associated with risk-taking, hard work and personal responsibility, so she didn’t take seriously the types of female businesses in which I was interested. Scrolling down her list of phone contacts, Katya identified just one person who met my criteria and shared his contact with me. I will introduce his story, among others, in the ethnographic part of this chapter. The vignette suggests that the wives’ businesses, a type of female enterprise dependent on male capital and support, are frowned upon by the enlightened entrepreneurs like Katya. To her and other admirers of the Western market discourses, this type of entrepreneurialism qualifies as part of the sexual economy and is easily dismissed as having nothing to do with genuine economic rationality and individualistic conceptions of agency. Based on her own challenging entrepreneurial career, Katya would oppose the widely held idea that any female business in Russia is essentially a gift from a successful man. This widespread belief that a woman needs a man and his resources in order to succeed as an entrepreneur echoes the neoliberal discourses on ‘successful masculinity’, which casts any woman’s business as a gift from a successful man and, by doing so, blocks women’s access to ‘the “serious” world of men’s business’ (Yurchak, 2003: 84–85). During the period of transition to the market economy in the 1990s, Russia saw the emergence of new types of gender relations, among which was a relationship of a sponsored woman with her partner, the so-called sponsor (Temkina & Rotkirch, 1997, Pilkington, 1996: 199). This type of marital or extra-marital relationship has been characterized by the economic dependency of the sponsored woman on her male partner and the commodity-like form of exchange relationships whereby the female body and sexual favours are exchanged for material goods. Start-up capital or other forms of material support could be transferred as such favours. It is no wonder that Katya was puzzled by my interest in wives’ businesses inasmuch as this category of female enterprises alluded to the notorious image of sponsorship, female economic dependency and the dominance of quid pro quo exchanges in relationships. None of this would appeal to

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Katya, who supported ideals of feminine success and independence and herself served as a perfect example of a career woman. But the question remains as to what extent this pure instrumental logic of relatedness is adequate for understanding the types of female entrepreneurs that are dependent on male support. As Zelizer (2006) points out, the mingling of economic activities with intimate relations can be found in a wide variety of interpersonal relations, but this does not mean that sex and intimacy necessarily operate as market commodities. Zelizer argues that any sexually related couple work hard to negotiate the ‘right match’ between economic activity and sexual intimacy. She demonstrates that the qualities of intimate relationships, such as their duration and breadth, play a crucial role in the matching and bargaining processes. As a general rule, ‘where the relations are narrow and short term, we tend to call them sex work… Where they are broad and long term, we tend to call them households’ (ibid.: 6). One important implication of Zelizer’s work is that we cannot understand wives’ businesses—a ‘combination of money, power and sex’ (ibid.: 1)—if we study them in isolation from the household economies and social relationships of which they are part. Only a close look at the interplay of economic transactions, their meanings and the relational dynamics among household members will give us an adequate understanding of what it means to give a business as a gift in contemporary Russia. The existing literature on female and family businesses in Russia has little to say on the issue of wives’ businesses (Bridger & Pine, 1998; Burawoy et al., 2000; Salmenniemi et al., 2011). Research by Ratilainen (2016) on media representations of elite businesswomen is one of the exceptions dealing with the subject and provides important insights into the understanding of women’s agency. Ratilainen situates businesses run by newly rich Russian women in the wider context of economic transformations and the processes of class formation in post-Soviet Russia. She calls such economic activities ‘businesses for pleasure’, pointing at their symbolic role in negotiating the class and social identities of the oligarch’s wives. By utilizing the financial and social resources of their husbands to start a business, the newly rich Rublevka2 wives seek pleasure rather than work when engaging in the world of business so as to legitimize their 2  Rublevka is the unofficial name of a prestigious residential area located in the western suburbs of Moscow, where many Russian government officials and successful businesspeople reside.

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belonging to the class of the Russian elite. While business activities are redefined as pleasure, feminine labour is shifted to the work on the body by means of intensive consumption of beauty products and services. Ratilainen is overtly sceptical about explaining such attitudes to work and business by the neoliberal entrepreneurial ethos only. She argues that it is more important to consider the restricted conditions for women’s social mobility in contemporary Russia. A woman’s bodily capital is crucially linked to marriage and being a wife, which in the new Russia remains a more available channel for female social mobility than work and professional career. Therefore, the commodification of female bodies is inextricably linked to uneven access to wealth and power in today’s Russia. Unlike the Russian oligarchs and their wives studied by Ratilainen, my research focuses on the less privileged social groups comprised of small-­ scale entrepreneurs from a provincial Russian city. Following the lead of Ratilainen’s paper to attend to the link between class and gender, I propose to examine wives’ enterprises through the lens of the anthropology of exchange to account for the various forms of exchange and their impact on the construction of social ties. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of economic anthropology, I aim to unpack what it means to give somebody a business as a gift. What form of transactions does this entail? What are the meanings of such transactions? What kind of social relationships are produced through particular acts of exchange? Because the theories of exchange have been developed as part of kinship studies, they are particularly suitable to account for transactions that take place between family members and help us move beyond the perspective that treats entrepreneurialism as a matter of individual agency and volition. Moreover, the detailed analysis of exchange relationships at the level of household economies seeks to contribute to the understanding of the diverse economies of post-socialism, articulated through a variety of economic practices, not reducible to market or non-market relationships (Smith & Stenning, 2006). Since the demise of socialism and the withdrawal of the state from the tasks of social provisioning, the obligation of social protection has been deposited into the sphere of private life, with the family bearing the major costs of social reproduction. My ethnography demonstrates that the wives’ firms address the issue of social reproduction and the precarious conditions of women’s employment. By setting up the firms for their wives, the husbands grant them better employment options which allow them to perform care work. Thus, the job itself is a gift. The gift of a job is deeply

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interwoven into the relational dynamics of married couples inasmuch as the setting up of a new firm is usually related to the birth of a child—an event that gives a long-term significance to the conjugal relationships and creates a new set of obligations, rights, possibilities and expectations among participants of exchange. In this vein, wives’ businesses are deeply implicated in the processes of ‘kinning’ (Howell, 2003). Howell coined the term kinning in her research about adopted children to explain how ‘a foetus or new-born child (or a previously unconnected person) is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people that is expressed in a kin idiom’ (p. 465). But the similar processes that create and sustain the sense of belonging take place in conjugal relationships as well, and this chapter shows how particular economic transactions and particular types of family enterprises3 contribute to the creation of enduring bonds of relatedness. It is important to note that this link between female enterprises and kinning opens up a different perspective on the logic of exchange as compared to the commodification of women’s bodies presented by Ratilainen in her study of ‘businesses for pleasure’. However, the endeavours to ensure social reproduction and facilitate kinning by reliance on entrepreneurial practices create ambiguities, tensions and contradictions between participants of exchange, which I explore by tracing the flow of gifts—money, property and other valuables—within family networks. I will show that the objects identified as gifts take on ambiguous meanings since they are involved in different types of exchanges, including market and non-market transactions, and are structured by contradictory values and moral obligations. Such conflicts and tensions may not only affect a conjugal family unit but involve the extended kindred groups, typically constituted by siblings and/or parents who tend to mobilize an ‘us-centric’ morality of their kin group (Gregory, 2009). Finally, I will discuss the limits of reciprocity to understand how families balance the moral obligation of social reproduction with economic interests and sustaining profits. 3  Although transgenerational succession and intergenerational depth are commonly seen as key features qualifying a firm as a family-based enterprise, the majority of small firms in my sample are owned by first-generation business owners. During my fieldwork, I encountered a ‘transgenerational moment’ (Jaskiewicz et  al., 2015) in just one case when a firm was passed down from a father to his two children (see the case of Olga and Oleg in this chapter), and a few cases of potential succession. For this reason, I do not equate family business with ‘transgenerational entrepreneurship’ or ‘entrepreneurial legacy’, which have been extensively studied in the contexts of the Global North (e.g., see Yanagisako, 2002).

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The empirical data for this chapter draw upon four case studies, which have been selected from a more extensive collection containing over 50 interviews with business owners, their family members and employees. The data were collected in the city of Smolensk during 11 months of fieldwork in 2015–16, and follow-up visits in March 2017 and November 2020. Smolensk, with a population of circa 330,000, is located on Russia’s western border, 360 kilometres west-southwest of Moscow. Compared to other Russian regions, Smolensk Oblast (the wider federal territory) ranks among the relatively poor peripheral provinces and cannot balance its budget without federal subsidies. In Soviet times, the region was heavily industrialized. After 1991, with the implementation of the market reforms, most state-owned enterprises were privatized. Many factories closed entirely, while the surviving ones underwent massive layoffs, declines in production and the comprehensive degeneration of working conditions. The austere environment of the 1990s prompted many Smolensk residents to abandon state employment and enter the realm of petty trade. Since the 1990s the private sector has been the source of employment for a growing number of people. In 2015, small firms employed approximately 83,000 people in Smolensk Oblast, or 16% of the working-age population of the region (Shunin, 2015: 119). The overall number of active small and medium-size businesses in the region was approximately 23,300 in 2015.4 The majority of small enterprises were engaged in trade, public catering, real-estate services, construction and manufacturing.5 It should be noted that statistics provide rather approximate numbers because of the high levels of informal work in the private sector.

2   A Short History of Family and Gender Relations in (Post-)Soviet Russia This section aims to contextualize family businesses in Russia by situating them against the backdrop of recent historical transformations in gender and family relations. The issue of gender was central to the Soviet project of modernity which sought to achieve women’s liberation from the oppressive structures of family life. Under socialism, this liberation was executed mainly by the increased participation of women in the labour  http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/ru/statistics/accounts/  http://sml.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_ts/sml/ru/census_and_researching/ researching/statistic_researching/ 4 5

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force. But while women were redefined as workers, the domestic realm was still seen as women’s ‘natural’ responsibility (Ashwin, 2000: 11). Women were deemed to have a demographic duty to the state to reproduce, and they were supported primarily as workers and mothers. While the state guaranteed working mothers reliable jobs, free childcare facilities and child support enforcement provisions, it simultaneously discouraged men’s participation in housework and child-rearing and thus strengthened the long-standing pattern of men’s detachment from family life (Utrata, 2015). Ultimately, the Soviet state did not challenge male dominance as a norm but encouraged men to perform their masculinity primarily in the realm of work and public life. Even though there was a shift in gender policies in the late Soviet period when the state attempted to discipline fathers and husbands so as to reintegrate them into the Soviet family, these measures could not resolve the existing gender crisis. The crisis was manifested in an imagery of weak men criticized by women for their irresponsibility, heavy drinking, infidelity, or lack of commitment to children and family life. This vehement criticism of Russian men continued into the post-Soviet era and was accompanied by a contrasting image of a strong, self-sacrificial woman, heroically raising children on her own and not giving up on her professional career (Utrata, 2015). The collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism have exposed and exacerbated the ‘frailty of heterosexual relationships’ (Rotkirch, 2000, Chap. 4) and the decline of the institution of marriage in post-Soviet Russia. Much like weak or absent men, the state was perceived as weak and unsupportive by many Russian women once it slashed its support for families in general and mothers in particular (Utrata, 2015: 4). In the present-day Russia, there is an increased pressure on men to be good providers, even though to provide in a market economy requires them to work multiple jobs or do temporary work for higher pay in big cities. Those men who failed to find a well-paid job and perform the role of main breadwinner (kormilets) were particularly vulnerable as they tended to end up in a double marginalization, from both work and household (Ashwin & Lytkina, 2004). But even those men who succeeded to live up to the new gender ideal of male breadwinner, like successful Russian businessmen, were exposed to stress and violence since they participated in the economy characterized by ‘continuous economic, social and physical risk-taking’ (Rotkirch, 2000: 265, see also Volkov, 2002, on violent entrepreneurs). Rather than seeing

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a new ideal of male breadwinner as a sign of male dominance in capitalist Russia, Rotkirch prefers to talk about ‘anxious masculinization’ to highlight the social costs and frustrations inflicted on post-Soviet men by the new ideology of successful masculinity (ibid.: 267–272). Paradoxically, while many men failed to perform the expected role of a reliable family provider, there were women, and especially single mothers, who turned to neoliberal ideals of self-reliance by shaping a new discourse of feminine heroism and successful single motherhood (Utrata, 2015, Chap. 3, Morris, 2016, Chap. 4). The two-parent nuclear family remains a normative expectation and cultural ideal in today’s Russia, but in fact the pattern of matrifocal families dominates in everyday life. In matrifocal families, husbands and fathers play a marginal role, while family life relies heavily on ‘cross-generational help and caregiving relations, taking place mostly between women’ (Rotkirch, 2000: 112). Matrifocal families are structured around practices of ‘extended mothering’ based on women-centred networks, in which grandmothers (babushki) play an important role (see Chap. 4 in Utrata, 2015, on grandmother support). The matrifocal type of social reproduction renders men redundant and makes it easier for women to estrange and divorce husbands. Divorce had become quite common by the late Soviet period, and Russia continues to have one of the highest rates of divorce today (Utrata, 2015: 6). Household economies were pivotal for survival in socialism and its aftermath. Under socialism, households and social networks compensated for the economy of shortages by ‘developing a counter-system of production and exchange’ (Burawoy et al., 2000: 60). After the demise of planned economy, households served as ‘the dominant organizing unit of survival’ for many Russian families suffering the immense decline in national agriculture and industry—the major ‘involutionary effect’ caused by the rapid marketization of the country (ibid, 60 see also Caldwell, 2004, Seeth et al., 1998). Small-scale entrepreneurial activities were often pursued as a survival strategy, especially among the poor working-class segments of Russian society. The families that succeeded in exploiting the possibilities of the market—for example, the husband transforming into a successful businessman—tended to recast the limits of their family units and redraw a boundary between old friendships and more distant family relations (Rotkirch, 2000: 247). Although the main focus of this chapter is on the conjugal family unit and dyadic exchange relations between marriage partners, I also consider

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other family members by tracing a circulation of money, property and favours within the wider networks of kinship. Among my Smolensk interlocutors, many marriage partners constituted a separate household, but it was not uncommon to find entrepreneurial families residing together with in-laws, usually a mother of one of the spouses. The ‘modern’ nuclear understanding of a family unit was not taken for granted but was open to negotiations between marriage partners and their close kin, typically parents and siblings, who might reject the limited understanding of kinship and the related obligation to share resources as its defining feature.

3   Gifts, Temporalities of Exchange and Politics of Value In this section, I will lay out conceptual grounds that inform the analysis of my empirical data. Since the classic works of Malinowski and Mauss on the gift in big-men societies, further theoretical debates have complicated the early formulations of gift exchange as based on a universal moral obligation to give, receive and repay a gift. For a long time, gift exchange had been conceptualized as inherent to non-monetary (‘traditional’) economies and was opposed to commodity exchange in monetary (‘modern’) economies—a dichotomy famously formulated by Gregory (2015). Gregory defines the gift-commodity distinction as based on different social statuses of objects: ‘commodities are alienable objects transacted by aliens; gifts are inalienable objects transacted by nonaliens’ (ibid.: 41). This opposition between commodity systems and gift systems echoed the classic work of Marshall Sahlins (1972). To Sahlins, the span of social distance between the parties of exchange served as a key variable to account for various types of reciprocity, ranging from sharing between close kin to negative reciprocity, that is, utilitarian exchanges between strangers. This neat distinction between gift and commodity has come under much criticism in economic anthropology. Parry (1986) critiqued the gift-­ commodity dichotomy as being grounded on a romantic idealization of gift exchange seen as a non-exploitative and disinterested type of transaction. The gift, according to him, had been idealized by those social theorists who constructed it as a complete opposite to market exchange, which was perceived as impersonal, amoral and calculating. ‘Our ideology of the gift has been constructed in antithesis to market exchange’ (Parry & Bloch, 1989: 458).

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As an alternative to the gift-commodity paradigm, Parry and Bloch (1989) put forward a different conceptualization that distinguishes between two separate transactional orders: short-term and long-term exchanges. These two types are usually guided by contradictory moralities and value-orientations: short-term exchanges are ‘the legitimate domain of individual—often acquisitive—activity’, while long-term exchanges are ‘concerned with the reproduction of the social and cosmic order’ (ibid.: 2). In contrast to the gift-commodity dichotomy, the two temporalities of exchange are not mutually exclusive and antagonistic but rather interdependent, since the reproduction of the encompassing order is hardly possible without individual short-term acquisitive endeavours. The particular articulations between these two temporal orders of exchange vary in different contexts, and their dynamics and tensions are an object of ethnographic analysis. Temporality plays a key role in the theory of commodity developed by Appadurai (1986). Unlike Parry and Bloch, he puts an object, not particular moralities of exchange, at the heart of his analysis. Economic objects move between various social actors and across different social arenas, and by doing so they are imbued with meanings. Consequently, it is only by following the trajectory of an object—its biography or social life—that one can identify its status as being a gift or commodity, which is not fixed and stable but a subject of constant negotiations, or politics of value, realized by different social actors and groups. As a result of such dynamic re-­ evaluations, the same object may acquire properties of the gift or commodity at different phases of its ‘social life’ or in different exchange situations. In light of these more dynamic and processual understandings of gift and commodity, the question arises of how human actors navigate the multiplicity of meanings of transactions in their daily lives. In his ethnography of the social life of a bear skin in Siberian Russia, Ssorin-Chaikov (2000) traces the numerous acts of reevaluation of this particular object in a chain of transactions. By changing hands between local actors, the bear skin took on contradictory meanings, being treated as ‘barter’, ‘gift’, ‘tribute’ or ‘commodity’. Ssorin-Chaikov shows that the same transaction may have different meanings for its participants and evoke different aspects of their social identities (a relative, a friend, a boss, etc.), so that in the end it is difficult to disentangle one form of exchange from another: an act of gift-giving had the connotations of paying tribute, barter exchange showed the properties of gift and so forth. This ambiguity of ‘exchange meanings’

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was a crucial resource that allowed social actors to play on the lack of clarity between gift, tribute and trade, and participate in transactions that otherwise would be morally questionable. The bribe is another good example of ambiguity in exchange meanings given that this sort of ‘commercial gift’ usually thrives in the grey area between a gift and commodity (Gregory, 2015: xxxix). Drawing upon the aforementioned theories of exchange discussed, I aim to disclose the meanings of gift-giving in those families where husbands are willing to share their money-capital, social networks, advice and legal expertise with their wives. To understand these practices of sharing, I will explore the structures of moral responsibilities and obligations— both short-term and long-term—that frame the flow of money and other resources between spouses and regulate their matrimonial relationships beyond the realm of formal contract. Finally, I will study how ambiguous logics of exchange allow social agents greater flexibility in realizing their tactical needs in both matrimonial relationships and economic activities. To start with, I will reveal the meanings of a wife’s business as a gift of work.

4   A Job as a Gift Alexey (60), a commercial director at a manufacturing factory in Smolensk, set up a beauty clinic for his wife Anna (60) in the early 2000s. Before that, Anna had been employed at the local university. A lecturer with a degree in philology, she initially felt enthusiastic about pursuing an academic career, even if the teaching job was poorly paid and the workload was enormous. Alexey, the main breadwinner in the household, did not support Anna’s commitment to a job that demanded a lot of sacrifice and did not yield significant material rewards: She was constantly preparing all these lectures, endlessly rewriting them. Although I told her, “You wrote them once, like everyone else. Why the hell do you revise them every week?”, she would say “I’ve learned something new”, “I want to…”. She used to stay up late until 2–3 am revising something, then she gave lectures in the morning, then she had headaches.

It was not only Anna’s individual well-being that was at stake but that of the whole family, too. By working long hours, she could not devote much time to childcare and used to outsource it to paid services. Alexey

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sighed, saying that he and his wife had been constantly busy with work and could not look after their first child properly. But having a second child was a game changer. Their daughter was born when Anna was in her forties. At that point, her commitment to work completely ceased, and although she didn’t quit her job, she placed more emphasis on her maternal role. It was not until her daughter was seven that Anna decided to give up her dissatisfying academic job: ‘In a word, she decided to give up this job that did not bring money … she decided to start her business’. However, Anna’s exit from academia and her social upgrading would not have been possible without her husband’s support. At that point, Alexey, a highly paid professional in the manufacturing sector, was planning to invest his income in starting up his own business. This new asset was supposed to function as a ‘safety cushion’, securing family income in case Alexey lost his job. Since his factory specialized in electrical equipment, Alexey planned to open a trading firm which would sell the factory’s products. Anna endorsed the idea of having a family firm but refused to trade in equipment. It was more appealing for her to set up a beauty clinic. Her motivation to work in the beauty industry stemmed from her own predicament in finding good beauty professionals in the city. Alexey approved her choice, echoing the popular view of the beauty industry as a ‘natural’ domain of female labour. Alexey stressed that his wife became an active consumer of all the beauty products and services offered by their clinic, ranging from hairdressing and nail polishing to cosmetological procedures and Botox injections. This emphasis on feminine beautification suggests that creating an asset in the beauty industry acted simultaneously as an investment in the bodily capital of Alexey’s wife. These investments— both in the new asset and his wife’s bodily image—created the conditions for Anna’s social upgrading and facilitated her remaking from a poorly paid intellectual suffering from sleep deprivation to a successful businesswoman practising self-love and indulging in the consumption of luxurious beauty products. Alexey emphasized that the beauty clinic was a result of their collective effort since they both contributed to making it a successful enterprise. Yet their individual inputs from the very beginning reproduced the general patterns of the gendered economy in Russia. Each of the partners performed what was symbolically marked as female and male activities. Anna was mainly involved in the emotional labour side by managing everyday practicalities and dealing with clients and personnel. Her husband acted as a provider of capital, financial manager, protector and problem-solver. It

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was his earnings that were injected into the elite beauty clinic, which targeted wealthy clients as its main customers. Alexey’s social networks were another valuable asset that enabled the firm’s viability. When purchasing expensive cosmetic equipment for the clinic, Alexey tapped into his connections with people of wealth and power for informal loans. His assistance was indispensable in warding off the acts of extortion from the local authorities, including their attempts to solicit money in the form of ‘donations’, or simply to demand beauty services free of charge. When rejected, they used intimidation tactics to hamper the business. Any time Anna faced this type of pressure, she immediately contacted her husband and he ‘solved the problem’. To do this, Alexey would rely on his contacts in the city administration that he had accrued over decades of work in the industrial sector. When dealing with such perpetrators, he acted in a characteristically masculine tough manner: I called my wife back and asked, “Who called you? Tell me exactly”. Well, she named who called her (…) And I knew her (the caller), we encountered each other all the time with regard to my job. I went to her, went to her office, swore at her, said that I would write everywhere if you arranged at least one more check-up on my business. Done!

Alexey acted in a similar ‘tough’ manner when dealing with demands for a pay rise from employees at the clinic. If a worker persisted in such requests, Alexey would fire her. He said that such ‘tough’ decisions caused significant emotional distress to his wife, whereas he did not think twice when firing workers. The market economy in Russia was gendered first and foremost as a masculine project, and female entrepreneurs have been constantly facing the dilemma of how to navigate this masculine realm without crossing a gendered boundary (Yurchak, 2003, Salmenniemi et  al. 2011). While some women had no choice but to learn how to run their businesses in a ‘masculine’ manner, others tended to outsource the tasks associated with masculinity to their husbands or reformulate their engagement in more gender-appropriate terms (Salmenniemi et al., 2011). I encountered similar preoccupations and tactics with regard to crossing a gendered boundary among female entrepreneurs in Smolensk. The concerns about gender were particularly visible within the contexts of production, such as garment manufacturing, where female entrepreneurs, not uncommonly, had to perform tasks associated with typical masculine labour, for example,

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loading goods onto trucks for shipment. Therefore, these production sites were not conducive to performances of middle-class femininity, as these workplaces were typically dominated by blue-collar workers. Their working-­class otherness encouraged stricter forms of managerial control and justified the women shouting and swearing as a means of governance. This type of behaviour was seen by many female bosses as a withdrawal from femininity. In contrast to the production contexts, the beauty industry has a distinctively female gender profile. Running a beauty clinic did not pose any threat to Anna’s femininity given that the majority of ‘masculine’ tasks were outsourced to her husband. By sharing capital with their marriage partners, the husbands granted them access to better employment opportunities and helped them escape low-paid or low-prestige jobs. Furthermore, the transition from salaried work to self-employment allowed women to perform caring roles without losing focus on professional achievements and career. The scholarship on gender in Russia has demonstrated that the post-socialist constructions of femininity were based on a set of contradictory dispositions since women were encouraged to be active and submissive subjects simultaneously: ‘In Russian self-help books, women are effectively called to inhabit two contradictory subject-positions: the position of an autonomous and self-­ sufficient woman, and the position of a maternal care-taker responsible for the emotional support of her male partner’ (Salmenniemi & Adamson, 2015: 95). Morris (2016) argues that this controversial expectation has reinforced an imperative of ‘ultra-flexible femininity’ which prescribed women to take on caring roles not only within the household but also in the workplace. He demonstrates how ‘the double-bind of ultra-flexible femininity’ devastated the lives of female blue-collar workers in their bids for upward mobility; such women strived to reinvent themselves as good flexible subjects of Russian capitalism but failed to balance their upwardly mobile aspirations with the ethical obligations of care. Their striving to realize the ideal of successful femininity was often accompanied by feelings of guilt and physical exhaustion (ibid.: 139–145). In contrast to the upwardly mobile experiences of the working poor, Anna’s trajectory of social mobility was free from such sacrifices. In her capacity as administrator, she was free to adjust her working hours to accommodate childcare and domestic work. The flexible working arrangements enabled her to move between work and home several times a day due to the proximity of the beauty clinic to her home (the distance between them was around 500 metres). Such flexibility allowed Anna to not

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compromise on care for her daughter, who was just a young child at the time the clinic was founded. At the same time, Anna’s orientation towards professional achievement and career had not waned after her exit from her salaried employment at the university. Even if she had never provided beauty services herself, she learnt the nuts and bolts of cosmetology and was constantly searching for new procedures, methods and materials to introduce them into their high-end beauty clinic. Thus, Anna’s managerial position at the family enterprise was key to her successful realization as a feminine subject whose caring roles did not come into conflict with orientations towards career and professionalism. With its emphasis on maternal care, it is not surprising that this type of female enterprise is usually linked to motherhood: all the women in my sample who turned to entrepreneurial careers requiring the resources of their husbands were mothers of young children. The story of Maxim (38), an owner of a construction firm, makes the connection between motherhood and the entry into entrepreneurship particularly salient. Maxim set up a beauty salon and gave it as a ‘present’ to his wife to celebrate the birth of their child. Until that time, his wife had been a hairdresser, but after having a child, she escaped wage work and became the manager of her own beauty salon, the time of becoming a mother being a reference point for her transformation into a businesswoman. It is important to note that Maxim, Alexey and other husbands who supported the entrepreneurial aspirations of their wives all refused to see them as housewives. The common rationale behind this idea was that a woman’s narrow focus on household, together with her disconnection from wider networks of sociality, would inevitably affect the emotional well-being of her husband: A woman sitting at home… she starts… she goes nuts as she always needs communication. It could be communication at work, in your own firm or somewhere else. Because in a confined space a woman turns into… My wife stayed at home for two months to take care of a baby after giving birth (…) She, I thought, would rip out my spine. (Maxim)

Olga (33), a mother of two and owner of a small garment workshop, made a similar point about the importance of work for her sense of self-­ worth. Although her firm was in decline and she considered closing it down, she could not imagine herself in the role of a housewife, even if her husband was the main breadwinner and there was no economic pressure

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for her to keep working: ‘do you know how many times I wanted to quit and fuck off everything for a long time, to live a quiet life, wake up, take the children to school, then go to bed again? But I know that this will last for two weeks maximum, and then I would like to do something again. I just won’t be able not to’. This denial to see the figure of a housewife as a valuable subject is in line with the studies that demonstrate the centrality of the concept of labour to the construction of female personhood in Russia (Salmenniemi & Adamson, 2015). The idea that a woman can become a socially valuable subject only through labour has been endorsed by neoliberal discourses of capitalism, but the similar ‘cult of labour’ has a longer history rooted in Soviet gender politics and the past experiences of female participation in the labour force. However, the idea that a family enterprise is to provide a stable job for a wife with a flexible schedule so that she can perform care work is not free from ambivalences arising from the contradictory logics of exchange and moral obligations. On the one hand, the wifely enterprise operates within the logic of long-term exchanges concerned with social reproduction and the regeneration of a household. On the other hand, such firms participate in market competition and are supposed to generate profits. In what follows, I will explore further the ambivalences of exchange meanings by focusing on household economies and studying what type of transactions accompany the obligation to share capital.

5   Property Exchanges In the previous section, I introduced Maxim, who gave a beauty salon to his wife, Marina, to celebrate the occasion of childbirth. So far, I have discussed this act of sharing with regard to Marina’s upwardly mobile aspirations: her desire to exit wage work and start her own business. Here I will demonstrate other meanings of exchange by looking at the transfers of money and property that accompanied this act of gift-giving. To finance the beauty salon, Maxim purchased a piece of non-­residential property by taking out a mortgage with a bank. Thanks to this purchase, his wife Marina became the legal owner of the property, which constituted the core content of Maxim’s gift. Marina started the business, but all her entrepreneurial activities were conducted in an ambiguous grey area, between legal and illegal, licit and illicit. Marina’s firm was licensed alongside the construction company licence of her husband, both of which had been registered in the name of his sister. Formally, Marina acted as a

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landlady who only rented out the premises to Maxim’s sister, Oxana, and therefore in theory did not undertake any other economic activity and was registered as unemployed—in reality, however, she ran the business. Thus, in light of this situation, neither Maxim nor his wife had any legal entrepreneurial status since their business rights had been transferred to the nominal owner, Oxana. While, from the state’s perspective, this type of economic behaviour would be seen as illegal, the dispersal of assets between family members allowed Maxim to reduce risk and secure the accumulation of capital under unsecured economic and political circumstances: ‘History moves in a spiral. 1917, if you know what I mean… (DT: What are you getting at?) I mean a revolution. Because in the revolution, those who suffered first of all they were… what if… what if something happens all of a sudden, then it will be too hard to pull it all together. And here I am—nothing could be taken from me’. To secure his assets, Maxim relied first and foremost on the family network. To him, friendship and other forms of relatedness would not guarantee the same level of trust. Since the early 1990s, when Maxim started his first endeavours in money-making, he had faced numerous acts of betrayal and breaches of trust among his friends-cum-business partners. Over the years, the circle of his ‘genuine’ friends had shrunk dramatically to the size of two people, and Maxim came to draw a clear-cut boundary between friendships and business relationships, the former guided by the ethos of caring and sharing and the latter by self-interest and ruthlessness (‘partners are always about division of money’). The relations of trust were possible only within the narrow circle of ‘genuine’ friends and family, whereas outside of it, within the business milieu, Maxim acted based on the assumption that everyone would deceive him. The informal means to secure property included the distribution of assets among family members. The practice was guided by a certain principle, which, according to Maxim, was widespread among business people. As he explained, all ‘finished’ assets, such as real estate or cars, are transferred to a marriage partner, whereas business entities—‘shaky things’— are registered in the names of other close relatives who take on the role of nominal business owners: Normally the assets registered in the name of a wife are those… in my case, everything is transferred to my wife… These are the finished assets (gotovye aktivy). This is not some kind of production, which is… a shaky thing (zyb-

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kay vesch) but some real estate. The cars, for example, all of them are all registered in the name of my wife. All production is (transferred—DT) to individuals, not LLC.  Everything that would not be sold and that is not related to taxes is (transferred—DT) to private individuals. Not in my name… (DT: In whose names then?) Relatives.

As a result of this division of wealth within the family group, Marina had consolidated the finished assets, including the real estate and expensive cars. In contrast to Maxim’s shaky business projects, these assets were finished in the sense of being the end point of capital accumulation. They were removed from circuits of capital and therefore were risk-free. To secure them further, an owner had to obfuscate the linkage between himself and the asset. Once possessions changed hands within ‘us-centric’ networks of kin, they formed a reserve of value oriented to livelihood, not profits. One can assume that the real estate property, the subject of Maxim’s gifting, followed the same logic of exchange rooted in social reproduction. It was this piece of property, not Marina’s business as such, that was intended to secure her livelihood in the long-term. Maxim was overtly sceptical about the economic efficiency of Marina’s enterprise, saying that it generated very modest profits. Yet, its low economic performance was not an issue. It was Maxim’s responsibility to hedge his wife’s enterprise against any risks associated with doing business (‘as long as I’m around, she has no need to take risks’) on the condition that Marina, herself, would keep a low profile and not mingle within any suspicious circles: ‘She doesn’t violate anything and doesn’t mess with… anyone, she doesn’t communicate with anyone at all’. It was unlikely that Marina’s enterprise would survive economically if it was cut off from the business infrastructure and capital of her husband, whereas having the property secured her domestic livelihood in a more predictable way. These rearrangements of property rights between Maxim’s family members entailed a complex structure of ownership that would be better described as a piece of ‘collective property’, inasmuch as the ownership of each member would be incomplete without their reliance on each other. This system of collective ownership was predicated upon the structures of mutual dependencies embedded into the norms of kinship morality and

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existed largely beyond the realms of formal contracts, even if sometimes it was harmonious with formal rules. Moral obligations underlie the transfers of property between Maxim and his wife. Like many other entrepreneurs in Smolensk, Maxim was against formal marriage agreements to govern matrimonial relationships and believed that he could sort out any property issue informally, without a contract. He said that, in the event of divorce, he would not lay claim to the property transferred to his wife. Therefore, the differentiation of assets, along the lines of consanguineal kin and affines, mapped out the future division of property in case of divorce. Maxim framed the giving of property to his wife within a larger reproductive perspective, which went beyond individual acts of exchange and embraced the long-term logic of social reproduction. From this long-term perspective, the ultimate receiver of his material resources would be not his wife but their common child: She (the wife—DT) has my child. Let me put it clearly: she is the person who is raising my only child. So why should I worry? In any case, everything will go to my child. She is an honest and decent person. As for me, I’ll easily earn money for myself.

Thus, Maxim’s gift to his wife was laced with ambivalent meanings, as it operated within multiple exchange logics. The property and business rights were transferred to family members to secure capital accumulation, when navigating the uncertain and risky domain of the Russian economy. These transfers of assets took on the meaning of a gift exchange within the realm of a moral domestic economy, where such transactions were connected with sustaining the family. It is important to note that the transfers of assets extended beyond the nuclear family unit and involved Maxim’s sister. While Maxim’s wife has accumulated the assets oriented to household reproduction, his sister secured entrepreneurial assets oriented to making profits. This line of differentiation within the family group was not incidental and mapped out the future division of property in case of divorce. The stories of the local business owners who went through divorces show that the transfers of assets to blood relatives played an important role in those cases when business owners sought to circumvent the division of assets, in accordance with the matrimonial law which prescribed dividing the property in half between ex-spouses. Some male entrepreneurs resorted to this non-institutional pattern to secure their assets even before marriage, by transferring their real estate or firms to

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parents or siblings as a kind of pre-emptive measure to remove these assets from any possible disputes over property in the future. The meanings of transactions cannot be understood in isolation from social relationships, which are made and unmade through particular acts of exchange, or lack thereof. In the case of Maxim, his manipulations with property resulted from his involvement in the web of social relationships that included the members of his close kin group—his wife, their child and his sister—but also stretched far beyond the realm of domestic economy and embraced state-level actors, whom he strived to mislead by acting as an unregistered business owner. But Maxim’s account lacked any information about the hierarchies and power configurations among his family members, whom he represented and with whom he shared the common goal of social reproduction. In the next section, I will detail the story of Igor, who had more to say on the issue of family tensions and the emergence of divergent, us-centric moralities that divided family members rather than united them. His account about intra-household tensions will help to specify the additional meanings of gift exchange.

6   A Gift as an Informal Contract The owner of a firm specializing in transportation, Igor (34) gave capital to his wife, Inna, to help her open a retail kiosk. Before they got married, Inna had worked as a pizza delivery girl. Drawing upon the informal support of her husband’s network of kin, Inna moved from her unskilled, low-paid job in delivery services to work in retail. After she had gained some experience working as a sales representative, Igor suggested that she start her own small venture in commerce and provided her with financial capital to this end. At that point, Igor wanted to expand his business in transportation services, and he was seeking out additional ways to make money, retail business being one of them. Like Marina, Inna did not have any entrepreneurial status, since her retail kiosk had been registered under the licence of her husband. But she acquired formal employment status, being registered as one of the employees at her husband’s firm. To set up an ostrovok, a 6-square-metre retail kiosk in the biggest shopping mall in the city, Igor invested over a million rubles, but his retail business did not take off. Igor called it a ‘cripple’ (koryavyj biznes) and explained its failure by the prohibitive cost of the rent which consumed the vast majority of the kiosk’s profits. Ironically, it was the recent pandemic situation that improved the economic performance

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of his kiosk, since the shopping mall had significantly cut its rental fees and the state had allocated some funds to the retail sector. Due to these measures of support, the kiosk had been thriving for some months, but Igor, nevertheless, intended to close it down, realizing the momentary effect of this sudden economic viability. To provide access to trading capital for his wife, Igor gave her a credit card and covered her expenses from his bank account. With this credit, Inna could replenish the stock when needed. She also used the credit card to pay for family and household expenses such as food and clothing. The credit card introduced a lot of ambiguity into their relationships since Inna’s access to her husband’s capital combined the properties of a gift, a market transaction, familial mutuality and material interest. On the one hand, this money was interpreted as a gift, and Igor claimed that he controlled neither the business of his wife nor her spending: ‘I almost never interfere there at all, that is … I only help her deliver goods, because I have a car in Moscow’. On the other hand, Igor did control and supervise her expenditure, and this often led to conflicts over money. As Inna’s transactions by means of the credit card were visible to her husband, he held her accountable for her spending and occasionally suspected her of concealing money. Any time when Igor was suspicious, he would threaten to cut her off from access to his capital and turn her into an independent entrepreneur: So I ask her a very specific question, the kiosk has a turnover of half a million per month … of which the marginal profit is… roughly 200 thousand … the cards show that around 120 (thousand) entered the account, let’s say. And I say, where is 80 thousand? She’s like, you have it. I kind of spent it to buy the goods … I say, you spent a maximum of 20 (thousand) on the goods. Well, that is an example. I can trace it, because everything is easily calculated there. I say, you … if you want … and she says, you have everything on your account. I say, if you want this, I’ll register you as an individual entrepreneur, I’ll transfer everything to you and you’ll stew in your own juice, you’ll pay yourself for ordered goods, you’ll pay the rent yourself, things like that. And she… well, she calms down.

Family money was a frequent subject of Igor’s quarrels with his wife. These conflicts revealed the hierarchies in their relationships but also hinted at existing tensions within the wider circles of belonging that included Igor’s and Inna’s respective kindred groups. In particular, Inna

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complained about the way her husband distributed money among family members which benefited Igor’s close relatives, especially his brother. Like Inna, both Igor’s parents and his brother were given credit cards tied to Igor’s bank account. This act was not free of the same kind of ambiguities as in the case of Inna. On the one hand, providing close relatives with access to Igor’s capital was an act of sharing motivated by filial loyalty and the ethics of brotherhood. Igor said that he had succeeded his father in the role of family provider and now it was his turn to share his income with kin and help his brother with housing, just like his father had purchased a one-­ room apartment for each of his sons earlier: ‘Now I am doing quite well, that is to say, I am carrying (a load—DT) … I bought myself an apartment, now I am doing repairs there. I’m building a house for my brother, I helped him to buy … well, to pay off his loans’. On the other hand, giving a credit card to his brother was not only an act of sharing but was also part of their wage relations since Igor’s brother worked informally at Igor’s business supervising the car repair services—another stream of Igor’s entrepreneurial activities. Even so, it was impossible to draw a clear-­ cut boundary between wages and gifts, as Igor avoided setting a precise wage for his brother’s labour and instead put an emphasis on his sibling’s needs to determine the amount of material rewards: ‘Well, we don’t have such a clear-cut amount, that is, he comes to me and says, I need that much money’. To Igor, part of his kin responsibilities was to help his sibling pay off a mortgage and other outstanding debts, but his regular acts of sharing within his kindred group bothered his wife. Inna demanded her husband limit his sharing practices to their nuclear family unit. Yet Igor actively objected to her demands to cut back on support to his brother and set up a separate ‘family budget’ to prioritize the interests of his household. By defending his extended notion of family unit, Igor reminded his wife of her subordinate position and his central role in the allocation of money flows: I say … forget the concept of a family budget. We don’t have a family budget. What we have is my money and that’s it … You have your own budget, I don’t know, which I don’t control, I don’t meddle in, roughly speaking. You have a (credit) card, so use it. Don’t you have enough of everything? Why do you want to create some … a family budget?

Igor criticized the lack of mutuality on the side of his wife’s circle of close relatives. He resented the fact that Inna’s parents gave up their

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responsibilities towards their daughter once she got married and denied her entitlement to a share of parental property. To Igor the only plausible explanation of this predatory behaviour was the feeling of envy. He believed that Inna’s sister envied her for marrying a businessman who provided her with material needs and ensured her upward social mobility. He contrasted the presumed lack of solidarity in Inna’s family to the manifestations of mutuality and generosity in his own kin relations and could not understand why Inna tolerated such behaviour and did not object to the consolidation of the parental property in her sibling’s hands. These tensions, based on the opposed us-centric moralities of the two kindred groups, aggravated the disputes over money between Inna and her husband and threatened to produce a rupture in their relationship in the long run. Against this backdrop of tensions and ambiguities underlying conjugal relations, let me clarify the specific meaning or ideology of the gift in conjugal exchanges. The objects called gifts are supposed to function as inalienable possessions in the sense that the giver should not reclaim objects previously given or divide them in the event of divorce. It is not incidental that gift exchanges of valuable objects are typically linked to the moments of procreation: having a common child, a new element of value, added a larger reproductive perspective and new temporality to exchange interactions between marriage partners. Since in most cases the recipient was a woman, her long-term attachment to a gift was typically justified by her maternal responsibilities and the fact that the gift would eventually pass down to the common child. In the case of Igor, this logic of gift exchange applied to an expensive car, which he had given his wife to celebrate the birth of their child. The car was registered in the name of his wife, and Igor claimed he would never attempt to divide this asset in case of divorce. Similar to Maxim, Igor highlighted social reproduction as key in defining the ultimate meaning of this transaction in the longer term: ‘After all … well, a family is created not for nothing, not just … well, in any case, something should remain, not even for her, but at least for a child. Well, a child would remain with the mother anyway, so they should have housing, a car’. But the ideology of the gift as a type of informal contract between two parties, a wife and a husband, is not free from ambiguities. First, since gift-­ giving is a matter of social relations, the meaning of the transaction could change over time because of the dynamic and fluid nature of matrimonial relationships. Estrangement, alienation of kin and othering were not

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unknown in Smolensk. Consequently, an object treated as a gift in marriage could change its meaning in the event of divorce. Second, as mentioned earlier, the same object could operate within multiple exchange logics and by doing so take on different meanings. The car that Igor gave to his wife as a gift was later turned into collateral for a loan for his transportation business. By using the car as collateral, Igor blurred the boundary between gift and commodity in relation to the same object. By the same token, the real estate which Maxim called a gift to his wife was not just a gift. This transaction overlapped with a different exchange logic which was part of Maxim’s relationship with the state. These ambiguities opened up possibilities to play on different exchange meanings and to adjust moral obligations of care and household reproduction to the actor’s tactical needs.

7  Balancing Sharing and Market Risks In this section, I discuss the limits of reciprocity by studying how the moral obligation to give interacts with market constraints and risks associated with money-making activities. In their interviews, the husbands frequently articulated their responsibility to share capital in accord with the norm of breadwinning. Money-making was seen primarily as a male responsibility, whereas the wife’s money was supplementary to the husband’s income. My male interlocutors frequently evoked this norm when articulating their principles of organizing family life and domestic budgets: ‘My business is to make money, and her business is to spend it’ or ‘I always say (to my wife): my money is our money while your money is your money’. Following Zelizer (1989: 366), one might say that wives’ money fell into a category of special monies, which retain a ‘separate identity as a gift, not as real money’. Sharing this cultural assumption, the husbands did not expect their wives to build businesses which would yield ‘real’ profits. ‘Real’ incomes could appear only if the husband would closely supervise and control the wife’s venture (consider the story of Alexey and his beauty clinic which he considered a success story). The retail kiosk of Igor’s wife generated only modest profits and often required additional injections of money to keep its head above water. To boost sales, Inna strived to come up with creative solutions, but the real boost happened only after Igor introduced a new product for sale—a spinning toy that was in high demand for a few months but then quickly lost its appeal. Thanks

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to Igor’s fast response, in just two weeks, he had earned an amount equal to the annual profit made by his wife. The question remains as to how such attitudes towards female businesses together with the moral obligation to share based on ideals of ‘successful masculinity’ interact with market constraints and risks inherent to market exchange. What if a wife’s business incurs serious losses instead of generating profits, however modest? To understand the limits of reciprocity, I draw on the story of Oleg (34) and Olga (33). Oleg ran a firm specializing in car inspection services. This was a family enterprise which he and his sister inherited from their father. Upon succession, Oleg took the leading position in the firm, while his sister continued to manage the books. Olga did not have any connection to her husband’s business whatsoever, pursuing a managerial career in various companies. Her wage work was relatively well paid, but her managerial career ended up in a burnout because of overwork and never-ending work-related stress. When Olga got pregnant with her second child, she started a small venture together with a Moscow-based female friend, producing babywearing coats, an item that was growing in popularity among metropolitan mothers. To start the business, Olga and her friend ‘borrowed’ money from their husbands. As the first batch of clothes had been successfully sold, the friends decided to reinvest the profits in purchasing equipment and setting up their own production facilities instead of placing orders at other factories. The production was organized on the premises of Oleg’s firm in Smolensk. Olga was in charge of production, while her friend in Moscow did marketing and sales. But their further attempts to develop the garment enterprise failed to bring success, and soon enough they started to make losses. The financial crisis in 2014–15 deepened their debt. Just before the crisis, Olga and her friend took out an informal loan in dollars, and their outstanding debt increased after the ruble lost value in 2014. Having an outstanding debt of four million rubles and uncertainty around prospects of repaying it dismayed both women. Eventually Olga’s friend quit the business. Olga did not give up and was determined to reinvigorate the enterprise. She switched to fulfilling orders for other companies, even if this type of job was poorly paid and usually only covered the costs of production. Given that her firm generated almost no profit, Olga hesitated over whether she should close it down or give it a second chance. In the latter case, if she decided to continue the production of the babywearing clothes, this would demand considerable investment, again coming from

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her husband’s pocket. Oleg was supportive of the idea to develop the garment business further, but the prospects of yet more debt made them both reluctant and indecisive on this matter. From the very beginning, Oleg had subsidized his wife’s business. He provided the start-up capital but also bailed out the garment workshop in its most critical times. Having set up the workshop on the premises of Oleg’s firm, Olga was eligible to pay rent at a discount. After her enterprise ran into difficulties, the rental payments were cancelled completely. Moreover, Oleg lent her money to avoid wage arrears whenever Olga’s subcontractors deferred payments and she could not pay wages to machinists on time. Besides that, she had access to free accounting services provided by Oleg’s sister. Last but not least, Oleg consulted his wife on financial matters and helped her settle the substantial debts. By granting his wife access to capital, Oleg highlighted his role as family provider as his main motivation to invest money into his wife’s sewing business. He refused to identify their transactions in terms of debt, as this would inevitably override the reciprocal nature of their matrimonial relations and shift them into the realm of market exchange. Oleg said he never expected his wife to return him the money and just hoped that one day she would stop asking for it. In terms of social factors, their social identities had more aspects than just being a husband and a wife. Apart from being marriage partners, each of them represented different legal entities: Olga was an individual entrepreneur (IP), and Oleg owned a closed-stock joint company called Smolservis. When Oleg talked about Olga’s debt, he evoked their legal identities and framed such exchanges as not occurring between two persons related by the bonds of marriage but as between two legal entities, saying, for example, that ‘IP Ivanova rented the property of CSJC Smolservis’ or ‘IP Ivanova owed money to our company’. Switching to this legal language allowed him to go beyond the realm of morality and apply market logic to their transactions. By reframing exchanges between them in this way, Oleg also shifted the boundary between ‘we’ as marriage partners as opposed to ‘them’ (kin, partners, friends, etc.) to a new configuration of identities: ‘we’ as a kindred group, the owners of Smolservis, as opposed to ‘her’ as an individual business owner. The decisions made by Smolservis in relation to IP Ivanova were represented as made collectively by the owners of the firm and its shareholders, that is, the members of Oleg’s kindred group including his sister and their father. Accordingly, the transactions between Olga and her husband moved up from the level of

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individual exchanges between spouses to one that embraced a wider circle of kin. Similar to the cases discussed earlier, the effect of such simultaneous workings of the two logics of exchange—the market and the gift—created ambiguity between different meanings of transaction. As a wife, Olga had no obligation to pay back the money received from her husband since it was identified as the gift. However, as a business owner, she was indebted to the firm, which included not only her husband but the wider circle of in-laws. Such ambiguity was not just an isolated case but permeated Oleg’s account in general, reflecting his two identities: the one of a generous husband and the other of a ‘successful’ entrepreneur. As a husband, Oleg vividly opposed the idea of having a marriage contract and claimed that if they divorced, he would never compete for a share either in Olga’s garment business or in their cottage, recently renovated, in which they lived together with their two children and Olga’s in-laws. However, when saying that, Oleg switched to the language of market rationality which rendered such an act of generosity as risky and extravagant: ‘This is also wrong, because if we divorce, she will be left with a house, a business, and I will be left with nothing but debts’. From the market perspective, the whole idea of supporting Olga’s loss-making enterprise was ‘wrong’. Oleg calculated that if they had closed down the garment workshop and rented out the area at a market price, his company would have earned almost half a million per year, just ‘doing nothing’. Because of this recurrent sliding into the logic of money-making, his initial emphasis on reciprocity and moral obligations became more ambiguous, and the fact of the debts only strengthened this ambiguity. Olga did not share the meanings of gift exchange articulated by her husband. She acknowledged his help with her failing business but did not take it for granted and intended to settle her debts. Olga perceived the transfers of money, identified by Oleg as a gift, as coming from the pocket of his family firm. The fact that she could not pay rent to Oleg’s father’s firm meant that she took away their potential profits. This case provides a good illustration that the parties of exchange do not necessarily share the meanings of exchange in which they participate. To Oleg, the moral obligation to share was sustained by his role as the family provider, which encouraged him to be generous in sharing resources with his wife; yet as a business owner and a head of the family enterprise, he could not just write off her debts, which were recorded on the balance sheet of his firm. Olga rejected the meanings of the gift to be applied to

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their exchanges with her husband and acted as a responsible debtor, even if she was uncertain about how she could repay her debts without getting into more debt. The solution was found in a new type of entrepreneurial activity for Olga. Her husband helped her to set up a new business, a small retail shop trading in sewing machines and parts. In contrast to the garment workshop, the shop did not demand large investments, was of low risk and generated modest but regular profits.

8  Conclusion The scholarship on Russian capitalism has a tendency to focus more on the state-business relationships analysed in isolation from household economies and the realm of provisioning. This chapter has brought to the fore household reproduction, which is an important dimension to understand the broader dynamics of the reproduction of capitalism in today’s Russia. By studying wives’ enterprises and practices of sharing in marriage, I have shown that this type of family business relies on market institutions to ensure social reproduction rather than seek profits. In contrast to the case of rich Indian merchants when the sharing of capital among brothers facilitated the processes of accumulation (Gregory, 2009: 148), familial enterprises of Russian wives have not produced the same economic effect due to their weak market orientations. By sharing money-capital, expertise and social capital with their wives and connecting them to the already existing business infrastructure, husbands engage in the process of kinning by providing their partners with more stable and less exploitative employment conditions to facilitate their care work in the household. As it has been demonstrated, sharing is underlain by the male breadwinning norm that embraces long-term responsibilities and obligations a man has to his wife and children. Having children complicates the dyadic exchange interactions in marriage and infuses them with new reproductive meanings and long-term significance. Moreover, transactions between marriage partners do not form a closed exchange system but are entangled in the wider circles of kinship sociality. The domestic economies that I investigate in this chapter represent the non-autarkic type of household embedded into market exchange. But apart from the market, relationships with the state are important as they motivate husbands to transfer property to their spouses as well as other

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family members in an effort to secure business assets. By operating at the intersection of kinship morality, market logic and informal economy, family firms co-opt multiple exchange logics and responsibilities that allow actors to have a greater amount of flexibility when realizing their tactical needs in both matrimonial relationships and economic activities. In the Russian context in which the practices of divorce and remarriage are widespread, my Smolensk interlocutors unanimously avoided marriage contracts and chose to heavily rely on the language of moral responsibilities and commitments towards their families and households. By identifying a particular object as a gift, a male donor simultaneously maps out the future divisions of assets by making claims to not alienate a gift from the owner in case of divorce. But such claims based on mutual obligations of care are part of the dynamic politics of value and therefore can be revoked in the processes of negotiating and remaking of social identities of the parties involved in exchange. While this chapter is mainly concerned with the processes of kin-making and the creation of enduring bonds of marriage, I will briefly delineate here the patterns of de-kinning and unmaking of family ties. As my interviews with divorced businesspeople and their ex-spouses illustrate, the unmaking of matrimonial ties can lead to radical re-evaluations of the longterm morality of exchange. The moral responsibilities towards children can be suspended, or even cancelled, depending on the dynamics in relationships between ex-spouses. The group of close kin provides an important resource to protect property and other assets by removing them from divorce proceedings and blocking access for an ex-spouse to lay claim to the assets in accordance with matrimonial law. While my male interlocutors claimed they would never act in this predatory manner in relation to their wives, they did tell many stories about their fellow entrepreneurs avoiding paying alimony and child support, thanks to the cunning manipulations with property or business rights that freed them from any further material responsibilities towards their ex-wives and children. By excluding their ex-spouses and children from sharing, entrepreneurs resorted to the same strategy of transferring assets to kin as they did in hiding their property from the gaze of the state. This is not to say that any divorce turns former marriage partners into strangers, but to show possible directions in revaluations of moral obligations to share that take place after the dissolution of marriage ties.

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PART IV

The Contet of Family Business

CHAPTER 6

Rethinking Confucianism: Family Business and the Ritual Construction of the ‘Family’ in Japan and China Sigrun C. Caspary and Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

1   Introduction: Anthropology in Approaches of East Asian Area Studies to Family Business In this chapter we aim to demonstrate the key role of anthropological perspectives in advancing our understanding of the ‘family’ in East Asian family business. We make reference to two dimensions that are especially

S. C. Caspary (*) Witten Institute for Family Business (WIFU), Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany e-mail: [email protected] C. Herrmann-Pillath Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt, Germany Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_6

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salient in anthropology: kinship and community. We argue that the key medium in constructing family and community is ritual, another concept that looms large in anthropology, though also reaching beyond into general sociology (Stewart & Strathern, 2016). Our argument is based on research conducted in Japan (S.  Caspary) and China (C.  Herrmann-­ Pillath). Since 2019, following up a WiFu team interviewing long-living family businesses in Japan, a series of additional in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the cultural factors that explain the exceptionally large number of such family firms in Japan (due to the pandemic, these were conducted by video). In China, since 2015 continuous collaborative fieldwork on lineages in Shenzhen explored the relationship between kinship structures and economic organization, combined with a series of interviews with family businesses in other regions. Anthropology is an integral part of East Asian area studies, but it is underdeveloped in the field of family business research, thus reinforcing the neglect of anthropological perspectives in general family business research (Stewart, 2013). As elaborated in the introduction to this volume, family business research in management sciences is shaped by a bias towards European and North American companies, and on a more fundamental level by the corresponding conceptions of family and kinship (Zellweger, 2017: 430). When it comes to East Asia, in the Japanese case, the neglect of family business in management studies reflects a focus on large companies on the one hand, and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) on the other hand, side-lining the family as a special conceptual frame. In the Chinese case, the suppression of family business before 1978 casts a long shadow, resulting in a conflation of family business with the newly emerging ‘private business’ as a generic term. At the same time, however, family business is seen as the paradigmatic case of ‘Confucian capitalism’ with reference to Hong Kong, Taiwan and other overseas areas where Chinese business operates (Redding, 1990). But the connection with research in Mainland China is still weak (for example, the recently published ‘Companion on Asian Family Business’ (Yan & Yu, 2021) does not contain a full chapter on Mainland China, but five on the other regions). In Japan and China, business anthropology has been launched as a distinct scholarly project, with Japanese scholars in the lead (Nakamaki et al., 2016). However, even in this context, family business is only slowly emerging as a distinct field. Our chapter explores whether anthropology offers a vantage point from which to assess the role of Confucianism in understanding family

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business in East Asia. It starts out with a critical reflection on approaches in management sciences towards Japan and China, which highlight the role of ‘Confucianism’, often subsuming the two countries into one category. Confucianism is important for our topic because of its emphasis on the family as the bedrock of society. However, the common approach often overlooks the distinction between Confucianism as a worldview and Confucianism as manifest in the day-to-day practices of family, community and ritual. Debunking the notion of ‘Confucianism’ in management research shows us the very substantial differences between Japan and China with regard to the notion of the ‘family’ in family business. This reflects different conceptions of kinship and community salient in the anthropological perspective. These differences are at the centre of our chapter. At the same time, though, despite these differences, Confucianism as a worldview is a philosophy that governs human relations, and as such is relevant for both China and Japan. In this sense we can reinstate its role as an interpretative framework. If we take ritual as the key concept in the Confucian theory of society, we can refer this to general theories of ritual in anthropology and sociology, and hence even as an indigenous anthropological theory with universal claims (Fei, 1947; Herrmann-Pillath, 2017). Hence, the case of Japan and China is also important to strengthen research on ritual in general family business research. This, in turn, emerges as an area where family business research and anthropology can join forces.

2  The Confucianism Conundrum in Cross-Cultural Management In current cross-cultural management studies, it is commonplace to refer to East Asian business systems as ‘Confucian’, a view endorsed by influential value studies. The Hofstede system of cultural dimensions was enlarged with reference to a supposedly ‘Confucian’ long-term orientation and work ethic, after applying the original approach to Hong Kong (Hofstede et al., 2010). The GLOBE survey of leadership went so far as to identify only the East Asian region with reference to a specific  worldview, namely Confucianism (House et al., 2004). The World Values Survey presented a cultural map of the world in which Confucianism is treated on par with religions such as Protestant Christianity or Islam (Inglehart, 2018). As a result of these influential studies, the two countries that this paper

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focuses on, Japan and China, are included in the same analytical framework, informed by the key idea that Confucianism defines a unifying cultural core. We must, however, highlight that the Confucianism reference is somewhat problematic, even though there is no doubt that Confucianism diffused early in the region, was often actively adopted as the official ideology of the state and was an important contributor to the intellectual and civilizational achievements of East Asian societies (for a seminal discussion, see Rozman, 1991). Yet, we notice that even today in China, Confucianism is not included in the official list of five religions that are recognized by the constitution, and it is mostly conceived as a philosophy, though it certainly does constitute the backbone of conceptions of traditional Chinese culture. Positioning Confucianism as a ‘religion’ was mainly a project of Western scholars who created religious studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas in the East Asia region, the concept of ‘religion’ was simply unknown (Sun, 2013). The term in Chinese characters was created in the 1880s in Japan, later adopted in Chinese, and was a response to Christian missionary programmes (Josephson, 2012). Religious studies have always had trouble identifying what ‘religion’ is in the East Asian context. The vast majority of East Asians would not assign themselves to an exclusive denomination, such as in Japan, where people would define themselves as ‘not religious’ but are classified ‘Buddhist’ (84%) or ‘Shintōist’ (87%) in official statistics due to their visits of Buddhist temples and Shintō Shrines (Horii, 2018; Kavanaugh & Jong, 2020; LeFebre, 2015); or people would say that they are not religious at all, such as the majority in China (Chau, 2019). However, the same individuals would regularly practise many seemingly religious rituals, with a wide range of sacred places visited and related activities carried out, which, however, are not constrained by denomination or even a clear identification in terms of a coherent belief system (Nelson, 1992; Sun, 2019). For the case of China, this has brought about the term ‘popular religion’ as a catch-all term for religious studies (Clart, 2012), which, in China today, is more politically neutral and is even officially endorsed via the treatment of popular religion as ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘local customs’. In Japan, the domain of popular religious practices is partly accommodated by local Shintō or simply accepted as general practices of everyday life (Kawano, 2005). These observations raise important and difficult questions regarding the cultural categorization of East Asia in cross-cultural management

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studies. The most important channel by which Confucianism might have had an impact on economic behaviour and business organization would be via the beliefs and practices widely held in the lay population and among businesspeople. Indeed, after the Meiji reforms, Confucianism was received in Japan as a guide to business ethics by influential business leaders (foremostly the ‘father of Japanese capitalism’, Shibusawa Eiichi (Fridenson & Kikkawa, 2017)), which bears similarity to an earlier tradition of what Rozman (1991) has labelled ‘merchant Confucianism’ of the great ‘houses’, such as Mitsui. Today, we can observe a movement of ‘Confucian entrepreneurs’ in China as a form of ‘popular Confucianism’ (Billioud & Thoraval, 2015). Yet, the question is how far this notion encompasses the wide variance across factual behaviours. For example, in China, many businesspeople would not refer to Confucianism as the worldview that gives meaning to their lives, but to Buddhism, and some would even expressly reject Confucianism (Herrmann-Pillath et al., 2020). Confucianism centres on the family as a nucleus of wider social order; accordingly, family business has been always identified as the archetypical form of business organization in the Chinese cultural sphere, that is, including Southeast Asia and Chinese diasporas and emigrants (Redding & Witt, 2008). However, this relationship is much less salient in Japan. The ‘house’ (ie in Japanese) as a corporate entity has often been suggested as a template for the Japanese model of corporations (Iwata, 1992). Yet, although using the same Chinese character 家, ie and jia (‘family’ in Mandarin) manifest clear differences (Pelzel, 1970). Accordingly, our first research question is whether this can be accommodated by the ‘Confucianism’ paradigm at all, and whether the roots of the differences lie in radically diverging conceptions of kinship and family. This observation brings us to our second research question directed at the Confucianism puzzle, in which we would like to advance a theoretical category which has so far been neglected in most research on family business: ritual. This neglect reflects a deeper intellectual phenomenon, which has been diagnosed as ‘excarnation’ by philosopher Charles Taylor (2007). In modern sociology and philosophy, ritual does not have the status of a central theoretical term, but has been relegated to specific social domains, especially religion, or to a certain range of practices in everyday life (Stephenson, 2015). This differs fundamentally from the Confucian view: If we approach Confucianism as a philosophy, then certainly ritual is the foundational concept (Wong, 2020). However, Confucians have always distinguished this view of ritual from what Western scholars and East Asian

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modernizers refer to either as ‘religion’ or as ‘superstition’. Beginning with Confucius himself, ritual appeared to be a core concept in what is a paradoxical view of ‘transcendental secularism’ in the Western confrontation of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’. We suggest taking the Confucian view as a serious contribution to social theory and social science, and we highlight family business as the proof of the pudding. We explore and compare the role of ritual in Japanese and Chinese family business, with a slightly stronger emphasis on Japan, for reasons of limited space. The important result of this exercise is that we posit ‘ritual’ as the common theme in East Asian business systems and interpret Confucianism only as an intellectual stream in which this is clearly and explicitly recognized. But we go beyond this in claiming that ritual must become a generic analytical category in research on family business in a global scope. Indeed, confronting ‘the West’ with East Asia also reflects a Western-Eurocentric view that even sometimes ignores other European contexts (for instance, the role of ritual in Eastern Christianity and its successors, in particular the Russian Orthodox Church, where ritual is a key element (Koellner, 2020)). The failure to recognize the true core of what defines ‘East Asia’ reflects an analytical bias in Western social theory, marginalizing ritual in social theory.

3  Ritual Theory and Family Business Let us first present a rough and preliminary definition of ritual, which follows the synthesis of the two traditions in the sociology of ritual, going back to Durkheim (1915) and Goffman (1967), respectively, which was formulated by Randall Collins (2005). The semantic field is spanned by notions such as ‘ceremony’, ‘habit’, ‘rite’, ‘convention’ and ‘routine’. We must emphasize that we do not refer to a ‘system’ of ritual, but to ritual as a specific type of action, both individual or in groups, which can, in turn, be coordinated in groups or simply involves physical co-presence. A ritual action is a standardized behavioural pattern that is repeated through time, with a wide range of temporal schedules, from irregular to daily. Ritual action mostly involves the handling of artefacts which embody affordances to enact the ritual in a specific way, such as prescribed movements. Ritual action is only partially imbued with meaning or can even be devoid of it, hence allowing for a multiplicity of interpretations by the actors and observers. The difference between ritual and other forms of habitual action is that, referring to both the actor and observers, violations of

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standards or failure to act raises feelings of estrangement, moral outrage and even ostracism of the deviant actor. 3.1   East Asian Conceptions of Ritual as a Theory of Ritual Recent thinking about ritual has revealed its deep significance for understanding cultural differences, salient in the East Asian context. The Western view emerged during the Reformation and was further systematized in the Enlightenment (Asad, 1993): Increasingly, ritual was not only seen as ephemeral, but even as authoritarian and ‘mind-dumbing’. In modern societies, ritual is often derogated as a manifestation of tradition blindly followed, which therefore must be shaken off for the sake of individual autonomy and the freedom of expressing one’s true inner self. This view of ritual has also deeply influenced the scientific approaches which mainly divide into two strands: one is the functionalist, the other is the interpretative (Bell, 1997). Both project an idea of coherence and systematicity on ritual: The former highlights the function of ritual in sustaining the fabric of society and giving certain performances utilitarian efficacy (represented by Radcliffe-Brown, 1952), whereas the latter puts ritual actions in the wider context of a universe of interwoven meanings (represented by Geertz, 1973). In recent debates, a view has emerged that is much closer to the Confucian view (Feuchtwang, 2010; Seligman et al., 2008). Here, ritual is seen as a mere action with incomplete meanings, and working from outside to inside, that is, having no expressive function at all. This view sees ritual as a transformative power of its own, as already emphasized by Confucian views on ritual being the medium in which the social community comes into being and reaffirms itself. There is no ‘inner self’ that believes in ritual meanings, but ritual is constitutive of the social self as an evolving, growing state of becoming an interdependent person. This view is important when we consider the relationship between ritual and religion. Since Durkheim (1915), this is one domain where Western sociological theory recognized the centrality of ritual. Ritual refers to the sacred, and in doing ritual the community achieves states of effervescence which constitute and refresh its coherence and identity vis-­ à-­vis others. However, the notion of the sacred remains tied to the notion of religion as a set of authentic and sincere beliefs as inner states of individuals. When the Jesuits met with their Confucian counterparts at the Imperial Court, they gradually recognized the important difference: Even though the Confucian cult invoked the notion of the sacred, it appeared

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to involve a rationalist stance in emphasizing the immanence of ritual and its role in sustaining social and even cosmological order (Lagerwey, 2010). With this attitude, the Jesuits joined Confucians in condemning ‘superstition’, and eventually clashed with the Holy See over interpreting the meaning of Chinese ritual. Indeed, the Jesuits understood that Chinese ritual was decoupled from true belief, implying that Chinese Christians might continue with indigenous ritual practices (Mungello, 1999). Similarly, when Western powers pressed the Shogun and later the Emperor to adopt ‘freedom of religion’ as a legal principle, one reaction was to keep Shintō rituals out of the domain of religion, and initially Shintō was even claimed to be a ‘science’ on par with Western science (Josephson, 2012). In other words, in East Asia there was a deep awareness that the Western concept of religion did not capture the essentials of ritual in the East Asian understanding. Since there is no space in this paper to dwell on the fascinating details of these cultural encounters and theoretical implications, we will simply present a congenial interpretation of the second strand in Western theory which takes ritual seriously, Ervin Goffman’s (1967) research on everyday rituals (inspired by Seligman et al., 2008). Everyday rituals such as standards of politeness do not have much in common with Durkheim’s concept of the sacred. However, they do involve strong emotional responses when they are not happening. If we politely ask our friend to pass the salt when eating together, and thank her, apparently there is no deeper meaning involved, the act is almost automatic and certainly not a part of a larger set of transcendental beliefs. But if we coldly demand the salt, this can destroy the entire fabric of the communal dinner. In this sense, Goffman’s analysis of everyday rituals bears much in common with East Asian views (Nelson, 1992). There is no deeper meaning in rituals as the default action, but not doing ritual raises what we might call ‘negative effervescence’, that is, feelings of anger, disappointment or outright hostility. This builds the bridge to Durkheims’s view, while removing the alleged necessary correlation between ritual and religion. Hence, the problems in dealing with ‘religion’ in East Asia result from misunderstanding ritual. Ritual is the more fundamental notion, and indeed the Chinese term of ‘ritual’ (li 礼) explicitly merges the religious and the social, and hence the Durkheim and Goffman views on ritual. It has been noticed that practices of worshipping in China bear much resemblance with social exchange, to the degree of including a utilitarian dimension (Chang, 2010; Chau, 2019). In the same way that weaving ‘guanxi’

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is an open process in search of opportunity in the widest sense, ritual practitioners engage in many interactions at many places, creating their own, individualized network with many and various entities, such as ancestors, Buddhist gods or local deities. Worshipping means to send gifts, and to expect gifts in return, such as divination, curing from illness or success in examinations. This type of ‘polytropic’ ritual does not align with the Western notions of religion, and we can even argue that East Asian ritual is individualistic, in contrast to the community-based rituals of the Abrahamitic religions which draw narrow lines of ritual propriety as marking the boundary between ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ (Chau, 2012, 2014). 3.2   The Ritual Construction of Family Business In considering the role of ritual in family business, we focus on Japan and China. For Japan, we show how ritual defines the nature of the firm as a social entity and produces its organizational boundaries. A key means is the ritual determination of kinship, with ancestor worship as a core element. At first sight, this is true for both China and Japan. However, with closer examination, it is clear that ritual defines radically different kinds of family as community. In the Japanese case, this is the ie as a corporate unit; in the Chinese case, this is the extended kinship group as a backbone of networked family enterprise (similar to Yanagisako’s, 2019 concept of ‘kinship enterprise’). In management science, the role of ritual is at least implicitly recognized in theories about corporate culture (classically, Schein, 2017), but relegated to a secondary position, thus representing the Western tradition in mainly understanding culture as shared beliefs and values. We refer to this as ‘rituals of familiness’, that is, ritual practices of the family firm that are transmitted across generations, and which mediate the relationship between family and firm, especially when it comes to its identity (Bruess, 2011; Harrist et al., 2019; Lumpkin et al., 2008; Ponroy et al., 2019). Recently, this has been recognized in theories of ‘imprinting’ the family business (Erdogan et  al., 2020; Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Such ritual practices may involve the history of the family business, the relationship with the local community and its imaginaries, or religious motives, and they involve certain material manifestations, such as artefacts, certain locations and connected myths and narratives (Labaki et al., 2019; Parada & Dawson, 2017). Most significantly, such practices may be actively created

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by the family business, thus overcoming the alleged contradiction between ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ (Massa et al., 2017, Ge et al., 2021). As suggested by the term ‘familiness’, an essential point is the specificity of ritual practice for the individual family business, although ritual practices may also involve participation in generic rituals, such as community rituals. We also relate ritual to socio-emotional wealth (SEW). Ritual is the medium in which emotion is generated, sustained and reflected in strong valuations of the family business as a going concern (Humphrey et  al., 2021). Indeed, in research on SEW, the emotional dimension is clearly recognized, but remains under-researched, given the methodological difficulties (Berrone et al., 2012; Jiang et al., 2018; Labaki, 2020). In recent attempts at further validating and specifying the SEW concept, rituals are conspicuously absent, even when it comes to contributions that centre on the emotional significance of SEW (such as the REI scale developed by Hauck et al., 2016). Against the background of ritual theory, research on rituals can offer a new empirical strategy for exploring emotions in various contexts. Indeed, the issue of emotions is particularly salient in the context of kinship. Family business research is often biased towards the Western notions of family and kinship (Zellweger, 2017, is a case in point). We posit that kinship is created and maintained by ritual, independent from ‘essentialist’ notions such as biological relatedness. This view corresponds to the state of the art in anthropological theory, after the deconstruction of the category of kinship in the 1980s as ‘relatedness’ (Carsten, 2004). What is central to kinship is the constitution of a ‘dividual self’, that is, the creation of a self that is interdependent with the other, sustaining sources of empathetic relations, and overcoming obstacles to joint action, sharing and mutual support (Sahlins, 2013). Rituals and practices of kinship create this dividual self, and not the other way round, as typically assumed in Western conceptions. We argue that ritual creates kinship, and reject the view that kinship is just expressed in rituals. Accordingly, certain emotional features of kinship are not determined by ‘natural givens’ but emerge from ritual practices. One important question, rarely raised in family business research, is what constitutes the distinction between ‘family’ and ‘extended kinship’, taking into consideration different degrees of altruism (Anderson et al., 2016; Karra et al., 2006). As our comparison between Japan and China reveals, rituals can define radically different conceptualizations of what marks the borders of the ‘community’ of the family. In Japan, the community of the ie includes

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non-kin in a substantial way, and even excludes some kin, hence constituting the family as a corporate unit, with ‘descent’ defined in terms of the cross-generational continuity of the ‘house’ (Shimizu, 1987). In China, extensions of the family beyond the nuclear or stem unit follow the lines of extended kinship ritually constructed as ‘bloodline’ that connects the agnatic group to a common ancestor. However, this is a cultural construct as well, in fact independent of authentic consanguinity (Chun, 2000; Freedman, 1967). In our comparison between Japan and China, we look at two specific cases in more detail: for Japan the long-lasting family firms (shinise, literally ‘shop of long standing’), and for China the collective hybrids of business and village self-government, the shareholding cooperatives in South China and related forms of kinship-based business networks. Taken together, we claim that ritual is central to understanding the family business in general, and in East Asia in particular. This also resolves around the Confucianism conundrum: What counts is not whether ‘Confucianism’ is followed in the doctrinal way (as it certainly is sometimes), but whether ritual is understood and practised along the lines of the Confucian theory of ritual, in which case we can strip off its Confucian nomenclature and reinstate the terms of general social theory.

4   Japan: Enacting the Family Business as a Family Corporation by Means of Ritual In Japan, roughly 96% of companies are family businesses (Goto, 2019). Among them there are many centuries-old companies. Their number is larger in Japan than in any other country in the world. The Research Institute of Centennial Management, Japan, lists more than 33,259 multi-­ generational companies which are 100 years and older, and their number is steadily rising (Goto, 2019; Nikkei Book, 2019); 1341 family firms are older than 200 years, 636 older than 300 years and 153 even 400 years and older. The oldest firms date back to the early eighth century and operate in the 46th generation as the traditional inns (Koman) (founded AD 717) or (Hōshi) (AD 718). Many of these family businesses today are small-scale or medium-sized, operating in areas like traditional hospitality, food or the beverage industries like sake breweries, soy sauce breweries, confectionary or green tea, but there are also listed companies like Matsui

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Kensetsu (construction, founded 1586), Sumitomo Metal Mining (1590) or Okaya Co.Ltd. (1669). Historically, family business as an organizational unit emerged from the family system ie. Until the end of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), family businesses remained small as the Shogunate’s policy restricted mobility and heavily controlled contact with foreign countries. After the opening-up of Japan to the West in the second half of the nineteenth century, technological imports triggered rapid modernization and industrialization. Capital was held in the hands of a few former landlords and wealthy merchants. The latter developed their family systems into big conglomerates. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and so forth were tightly intertwined with the political elite. After the end of World War II, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) accused the large financial cliques (zaibatsu) of having supported the militaristic system that had led Japan to war. As a consequence, the zaibatsu were dissolved and holding companies were prohibited until 1997 (Thorson & Siegfanz, 1999). Since then, the term ‘family business’ was negatively connotated (Goto, 2019). When in the late 1980s and 1990s family business research increased in the US and Europe, interest rose in the old multi-generational family businesses. In Japan, research on shinise (literally ‘shop of old standing’) has recently developed into a field of management studies. One reason for the longevity of family businesses in Japan is the specific conception of kinship that underlies the family system ie (Kuwayama, 2001; Shimizu, 1987). Perceived as an economic unit for tax collection, in this conception, ritual is central, and biological relatedness marginalized. Family tradition is passed down from ancestors to following generations, and the family members include not only the household head with spouse and their children, but also the deceased (Drixler, 2019; Hamabata, 1990; Hendry, 2019). They must be worshipped with appropriate rituals to guard the well-being of the house and the family. These rituals strengthen the community of those living under one roof; shared practices enhance feelings of belonging that demarcate the community vis-à-vis the ‘outside’. These rituals are rooted in Shintō, the endemic belief in Japan (Hardacre, 2017; Pye, 2020; Teeuwen & Rots, 2020), and were complemented with rituals of Buddhist ancestor worship after its introduction to Japan in the eighth century (Horii, 2018; Pye, 2013; Reader, 1991). Confucian ethics has been precepted as a concept complementary to the Shintō rituals for state affairs, with distinct interpretations of key concepts such as ‘filial piety’ (Hsu, 1971).

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The ie system has been widely regarded as the organizational blueprint for Japanese company organization in Japanese multi-generational companies (Goto, 2013; Goydke, 2016). Traditionally, the ie comprises the family head (toshu), his spouse, their children and all related persons living under the same roof. The ie is passed down from the ancestors for a limited time (lifespan of headship): the utmost obligation of a household head is to hand over the ie to the next generation; ancestors monitor him on this performance. To secure success of continuity, the resources are under the control of the toshu. Historically, to avoid the splitting of resources, in many cases there was only one heir to the house, and other children had to leave the house while receiving some compensation. In return, a toshu has the obligation of ensuring succession and ancestor worship. Performing ancestor worship in a proper way is essential to make sure that the ancestors will be pleased and hence help to bring good luck and welfare to the house. Further, the (local) community judges how a toshu performs in this task, as status and rank in the society are derived from the performance of an ie and its members (iegara) (Kuwayama, 2001; Roberts, 1991). Hence, long-lasting family businesses are institutionalized in the community (Sasaki et al., 2019). Household heads inherit ritual leadership from the ancestors for the family and the business. Buddhist rituals of ancestor worship relate to the individual’s afterlife and take place at household altars (butsudan) and at temples with family graves (Hamabata, 1990). Shintō rituals are rituals performed for guarding the well-being of the living in their daily work. Literally, Shintō means ‘the way of the kami’, with ‘kami’ translating as gods or spirits (Pye, 2020). Kami descended from heaven and became the ancestors of the Japanese people. Kami also created the world and provided the living with what the living would need: the surrounding nature. Kami inhabit sacred places and constitute an expression (shintai) in various forms, such as a specially formed rock, a volcano, a tree or a beautiful landscape. Such shrine territories are marked with a gate (torii) and are equipped with a water basin (temizuya) for ritual purification of hands and mouth before visiting the shrine. Kami are capable of performing both benevolent and malevolent deeds. The link between the living and the kami are rituals and ceremonies. If not worshipped properly, kami may bring bad luck to those responsible for the unproper behaviour. The addressee may be the individual, but also the family (business) or by extension the local community. To satisfy ghosts and kami or to prevent enraging them, it is important to conduct the appropriate rituals properly.

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Rituals of kami worshipping are especially salient in traditional craft businesses including sake and soy sauce brewing or metal working. On the site of the family business, small shrines (kamidana) are placed either at a dedicated space in the main building, on the factory’s site or on top of the building. Shintō rituals relate to purification, mostly involving water, rice wine (sake) or salt, and are performed as worship to the house kami for protection of the (living) family and the family business. An impressive example is sake breweries like Gekkeikan (company visit to Gekkeikan on 23.04.2019; see also ‘The Making of Shimizu-no-mai Japanese Sake’ 2020). The kami of rice will be worshipped before production of the sake begins. Such rituals already start at the paddy when planting the rice. At the location of further processing after harvest, the sake brewery, there is another ritual carried out when the rice arrives at the site: a ball made from fresh cedar branches (sugidama) is placed over the entrance. All members of the family business attend this ritual as it signals the start of the brewing process, thus also reaffirming the emotional aspect of belonging to the ie for the entire community of the family business. A kamidana is fixed high on the wall to protect the work through the entire process, always treated with fresh water, green leaves from the Sakaki tree, salt and sake. The kami should guard the outcome of the work, which determines the well-being of all members of the family business. As the head of the ie is usually also the head (toshu) of the family business, his (the head is usually a male) responsibility includes the well-being of employees. Only well-treated employees will do a satisfying job and support a family business’s reputation, which, in turn, will secure good standing in the community. Family businesses have always relied on establishing relationships of trust with suppliers and customers to secure continuity. Hence, the family shrine is the guardian of the household and of the local community. Frequent harm caused by earthquakes, fire or famines throughout history made it important that one could rely on support from community networks. This philosophy of care of both the company community and the local community has been often documented as a family precept (Sasaki et al., 2020). Family precepts (kakun) are rules written by founders or owners of family businesses for successors on how to behave, as they feel a need to write down their principles of living and risk management (Goto, 2019). These precepts comprise rules for daily behaviour as well as how to educate children and employees and sometimes also how to manage finances. Many of them start with advice to be attentive to Buddhist and Shintō

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rituals including ancestor veneration and continue with advice for frugality and diligence. Most precepts have been written by merchant families, as the merchants were regarded as the class with the lowest status in the Japanese four-class stratification of the (Tokugawa) society. Well-known are the merchants from the Ohmi district who ‘were not only passionate about their business, but they were also deeply religious’ (Suenaga, 2019: 88). In this context, ‘religious’ means Buddhist and Shintō. Confucianism would only be mentioned in relation to the study of Confucian classics, if ever. The merchants’ management philosophy was based on trust in the successor as well as trust in the community: ‘What was good for the seller would be good for the buyer and good for the world’, hence a ‘win-win-­ win situation’ for the family, the business and the region (Suenaga, 2019). The respectful attitude towards the employees and the local community has been transported also into contemporary company culture (Dore, 1987), as Okura Kazuhiko, president of Gekkeikan, teaches in a lecture (Okura at Globis 2014). Management scholars have emphasized that the long-term perspective regarding employment and business philosophies is one key factor of successful longevity (Nikkei Book, 2019; Shinato & Kato, 2018). As mentioned earlier, one child remains in the ie to secure continuation. Usually, the eldest son should succeed the family head and the father’s business. In case there is no son, adoption of sons-in-law (muko yōshi) has been a regular means of securing family continuity and the continuity of rituals to ancestor worship. Hence, we notice that consanguinity was sacrificed in order to secure the continuity of the ie. Adoption of relatives like second-born sons of a family side-line (bunke) is common, but we also find adoption of capable company managers to succeed the ie. Almost all long-lasting family businesses report to have adopted a son-­ in-­law for maintaining the continuity of the house and the family business. Famous examples include the oldest family business in the world, the Kongō Gumi, founded in 587  AD (Kongō, 2013), traditional inns like Koman (717) and Hōshi Ryokan (O’Hara, 2004), but also the car maker Suzuki. Since its foundation in 1909, all four successors of the founder Suzuki Michio were adopted sons-in-law, and hence the management of Suzuki was dubbed ‘muko yo ̄shi management style’ of family business (Arimori, 2020). However, the next successor will be a ‘real’ son of the present-day honorary Chairman Suzuki Osamu. What is crucial is that the adopted son would inherit not only the name of the family but also the ancestors of the adopting family. It must be highlighted that the construct

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of adoption has effects on the performance and commitment of sons, hanging like a sword of Damocles over their fate as successor (Mehrotra et al., 2013). Family business heads report that they continue the service of ancestor worship. Some of them extend the rituals to employees by performing the respective rituals of ancestor veneration for the ancestors of the company members as well (interview with Okaya Tokuichi on 22.04.2019). Other companies offer company graves to ensure veneration by members of the company, which partly releases the family from ancestor worship obligation (Yamada, 2016). Another important ritual still practised widely today is the visit to a Shintō shrine for a New Year prayer (hatsumōde). The ritual is to ask the kami for good performance in the upcoming year. For traditional family businesses, the common way to conduct this ritual is to gather all members of the family business for worship at the local Shintō shrine, thus showing that the kami is venerated as a deity for the community as well. Family businesses like Suntory (founded 1899) arrange such visits to local shrines; others like Gekkeikan (1637) or Idemitsu Kosan (1909) also have a small shrine on-site and hold such rituals, with the company community also attending (interviews with Gekkeikan 23.04.2019, Suntory 24.04.2019). The worship includes the well-being of the individuals and of the company. For special rituals, a Shintō priest would be invited to hold a ceremony on-site. One example is again Gekkeikan, where a Shintō priest holds a ceremony on-site in the winter period to call back the sun (o-hitakisai). Another prominent example is the initiation ceremony at Idemitsu Kosan, one of the largest energy companies in Japan, which was founded in 1911 by Idemitsu Sazō (Shimamoto, 2013). The ceremony is held for freshmen to the company in April every year at Munakata Grand Shrine, close to the original site of the company.1 Munakata Grand Shrine is dedicated to the daughters of the sun goddess and hence is one of the most important shrines of Shintō, an Important National Property and also a UNESCO World Heritage site. To receive protection also for company members on other sites, he built a 1:10 replica of the Munakata Shrine on the company’s site, south of Tokyo. The respective ceremonies at New Year and on 1  Idemitsu Kosan to Idemitsu Sazō, https://www.idss.co.jp/enjoy/history/idemitsu/ founder/movie/mov1.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLj1zIHzA1o, retrieved Oct. 29, 2020.

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April 1st for the welcome of freshmen can also be held locally there. Idemitsu Kōsan fully accepted the ideal of regarding employees as family members. He never laid off employees, and none of them had an official retirement time. They remained company members literally until their death. This practice was changed only after the founder Idemitsu Sazō passed away in 1981: It was found inappropriate by international stakeholders. However, the principle of deeming employees ‘family members’ persists, as we discovered from several interviews with shinise CEOs. So does the succession practice in handing the family business to the eldest son, even though the Civil Code was changed in 1947, legally ensuring the equal right of succession among genders and birth order. To summarize the gist of our observations, Japanese ritual is a key determinant of kinship relations and thus defines the family business as a corporate unit that essentially refers to descent as defined by the continuity of the ‘house’. This differs fundamentally from Chinese notions of descent and kinship.

5  China: Enacting the Family Business as Family Enterprise by Means of Ritual In pointing out differences between China and Japan, we must pay attention to the widely divergent political developments in the twentieth century. Whereas in Japan Shintō was even elevated to a state cult from 1871  until 1945 and today remains closely tied to the Imperial family, Chinese ritual came under ferocious political attack after 1949, and had been highly contested before, in the context of modernization programmes that were aimed at catching up with Japan  (Goossaert and Palmer, 2011). Here we cannot pay due respect to the vast complexity of these historical conditions but can indeed discuss selected aspects related to recent fieldwork extensively reported elsewhere (Herrmann-Pillath et al., 2020). In doing this, we must also emphasize that the Chinese situation is in flux. Before 1978, almost all existing family firms were destroyed, and owners even sometimes killed. After 1978, private business resurged, but if we employ standard definitions of family business, relatively few can be counted as genuine family firms, since intergenerational transition is only just underway today. In other words, in Mainland China, we encounter family business in the (re)making stage, as is true for family and kinship

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in general (Kipnis, 2017). The important question is to what extent this resurgence of family business interplays with the revival of ritual practices. Until 1911, the governance of ritual was a central concern of Imperial rule and defined ‘orthopraxy’ in arranging the wide and complex range of practices and beliefs in an officially recognized Pantheon (Feuchtwang, 1992; Sutton, 2007). With the political adoption of the Western definition of religion as part of the modernization efforts of the twentieth century, this integrative approach was given up, relegating most popular practices to the domain of ‘superstition’, which was ruthlessly suppressed in the 1960s and 1970s, only to experience a strong resurgence after 1978. Since then, the integrative approach has been revived, though not under the umbrella of ‘religion’, but ‘local customs’ and ‘cultural heritage’ (Feuchtwang, 2010). In the context of family business, we notice several substantial differences to the role of Shintō in Japan. We begin with the pivotal role of ancestor worship in Chinese ritual, which historically even precedes the emergence of Confucianism. In the traditional Chinese village, ancestor worship is a form of ritual distinctly different from popular religion, ideal-typically embodied in the two village architectural artefacts: the ancestral hall and the temple at the centre (Lagerwey, 2010). This differs radically from the ideal-typical traditional Japanese village, where the Shintō shrine outside the residential area is a projection into transcendence (Sonoda, 2019). Chinese temples bear many functional resemblances to Shintō shrines, in the sense of being devoted to specific gods and deities, though often only of local significance, and strongly tied to the identity of the local community (Chau, 2006). In Imperial times, these local temples were conceived as being integrated into the Imperial pantheon representing a metaphorical bureaucracy which established hierarchical relations, with the Yellow Emperor at the apex. Worshipping deities at the temples differs from worshipping the ancestors of the particular family, as documented in the genealogy and iconically present in the tablets at the altars of ancestral halls that also show the genealogy with the ‘high ancestor’ on top. In Japan, worshipping high ancestors is mostly associated with Buddhist and Shintō rituals, as we have seen, and this implies that there is even a connection to the belief that all Japanese are descendants of Amaterasu. Worship is not exclusive to the descent group, but is inclusive, as seen, in relation to the employees of the family firm. Chinese ancestor worship evolved in the context of recurrent and wide-ranging migration events (Zheng, 2001). That means, if we look at the conditions in South China,

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the major destination of large-scale migrations, ancestor worship traces the descent of families as being different from other families in the area, even manifesting in competition between lineages, often erupting into violence or, as in nineteenth-century South China, even internecine war. This explains the duality of ancestral hall and temple: there is a fundamental difference between village community and family. However, this is different when, as is often the case in South China, villages are single-lineage villages (or with one very dominant lineage). In this case, ancestor worship of the lineage also expresses the community of the village (for a more nuanced picture, see Chun, 2000). After 1978, anthropologists documented the persistence of pre-1949 patterns of land use and ownership in this type of village (Potter & Potter, 1990). In our recent fieldwork carried out in Shenzhen, this is still salient in the hybrid organization of the shareholding cooperative, which operates as a real estate company of the village (Po, 2008). The shareholding cooperative follows the template of traditional lineage trusts as shared ownership by the kinship group. In the domain of real estate, this type of cooperative is the core organizational unit of the ‘urban villages’ of Shenzhen, which are networks between family-owned real estate (mostly apartment blocks, so-­ called handshake buildings on the private plots of villagers) and the collective projects managed by the shareholding cooperative (Wang, 2016). This is visible in the ‘cultural squares’ of many urban villages, where the ancestral hall, closed to the public, marks the local descent group among the other resident population alongside a temple open to public worship (Herrmann-Pillath et al., 2020; compare with Trémon, 2015). The shareholding cooperative as a kinship enterprise is closed to outsiders, with some exceptions, and shares are inherited according to traditional patrilineal rules. Chinese ancestor worship involves complex genealogies, involving shared descent among a large number of individuals belonging to the family tree or a branch of it (for a detailed contemporary Shenzhen case, see Guo & Herrmann-Pillath, 2019). This leads us to identify an important difference between the Japanese and the Chinese cases. In the past, this difference was often colloquially referred to as the supposed ‘clannishness’ of the Chinese. The grain of truth in it is that the notion of ‘family’ (jia), different from the ie, defines more open and flexible borders, as in the transition from nuclear family to lineage (Fei, 1947 speaks of inflating or deflating ‘circles’). In other words, whereas certainly both in China and Japan the nuclear family is the basic unit, which also becomes embodied in

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the organizational form of the small-scale family business, the two cases differ when it comes to the extension of the family, in Japan moving towards corporatization, in China towards a kinship network. This is, for example, reflected in the clear differences between traditional kinship terminologies (seminally, Pelzel, 1970). This is salient in the differences in the ritual affirmation and production of these divergent structures. Ancestor worship in China can only involve the male descendants of the shared ancestor, and thus is exclusive, whereas the family shrines in Japan can be inclusive, in relation to members of the corporate entity of the family business, that is, the employees. This is reflected in the organization of the family firm. The model of the Chinese firm, developed in the 1980s, based on empirical data from Taiwan and Hong Kong, is that of weak organizational coherence and resilience of family business across generations, but of strong networking capacities (Redding, 1996). We can grasp this distinction by referring to the Chinese family business as ‘family enterprise’ and the Japanese as ‘family corporation’ (following Herrmann-­ Pillath, 2017). One ritual artefact that highlights the difference between China and Japan is the role of ‘family precepts’ (often written with the same Chinese characters 家训 or 家訓). In Imperial China, lineage rules have been directly promulgated by Confucian scholars, thus undergoing a ‘Confucianization’ (Faure, 2007). They are experiencing a revival in China today, even endorsed by President Xi Jinping. These family rules are mostly commonplace norms of propriety and ethics, and assert the spirit of cooperation, but also of subordination, in the family. The meaning of family, however, is the descent group, implying that ‘family precepts’ may effectively address huge numbers of people with shared descent in a distant past, and are ritual affirmations of a spirit of mutuality and cooperation among lineage members (again, see the case reported in Guo & Herrmann-­ Pillath, 2019). In other words, there is no direct relation to governing the family in the context of a specific business organization. In contrast, family precepts in Japan refer to the ie as a corporate unit, often with ‘families’ as members, but not being identical to the ie (Goto, 2019; Suenaga, 2019). Accordingly, they include sections on business practices and organization, which are mostly lacking in China. The same applies for the construction of kinship, such as in the context of adoption. Although Chinese kinship practices have always been much more flexible than those dictated by strict Confucian standards promulgated in Imperial China, adoption across surname groups was seen as

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deeply problematic, since an adopted son would potentially show divided ritual loyalty to two fathers: the biological and the adoptive fathers (Waltner, 1990). Chinese ritual, in its construction, erects high obstacles to practices which were easily adaptable in Japan, thus producing the inherent fragility of the intergenerational transition in family business endemic in China (Wong, 1985). The most fundamental difference, as already emphasized by Pelzel (1970) and confirmed by others (e.g., Shimizu, 1987), is that in China consanguineal descent defines the kinship system, whereas in Japan the entity of the ie incorporates and subordinates descent to the continuity of the ie. This also results in a different pattern of ‘lineage’ or ‘clan’. The Japanese dōzoku 同族 (template of the zaibatsu, the family conglomerates before dissolution in 1949) is a corporate group of ie, whereas the Chinese zongzu 宗族 is a potentially very large network of individuals and lineages who share the same ancestor and participate in shared rituals. In our Shenzhen case, the corporate identity of the shareholding cooperative is partly rooted in the shared ownership of land, as defined by Chinese property law, but also partly rooted in Hong Kong, where lineage trusts persist until today (Watson, 2004). Another manifestation of the family enterprise is therefore the business network built on kinship ties. The cultural imaginary of ancestor worship allows for a much more diffuse, but also much more widely encompassing form of enterprise. In the network of individuals sharing just the same surname, kinship as consanguinity is eventually diluted. Intermediate degrees of relatedness include concerted business projects of individuals sharing the same native place and hence descent in the case of single-lineage villages, or the build-up of systems of shared control of enterprise groups, often hidden from the public (Rithmire & Chen, 2021).

6  Conclusion Summarizing the main results of the previous two sections, we notice: • In both Japan and China, rituals play a significant role in demarcating boundaries of specific types of family business, determining membership and even identifying relationships of kinship. • However, there are substantial differences. Whereas Japanese rituals define an inclusive family corporation, the Chinese rituals define the

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family enterprise as an exclusive network organization, which is manifest in distinct phenomena, such as the high incidence of longevity among Japanese family firms versus the pronounced cross-­ generational instability of the Chinese family firm. • These differences are rooted in distinct ritual repertoires. In Japan, these are mainly Buddhist and Shintō rituals, whereas in China, ancestor worship and popular religion are open repositories of ritual practices. Ancestor worship in China exclusively highlights agnatic descent, whereas in Japan the continuity of the ‘house’ ie is emphasized, for which agnatic descent is just one prerequisite. Coming back to the initial question about the Confucianism hypothesis in cross-cultural management, we reach two conclusions: one negative, one positive. First the negative result. Confucianism can cover neither the differences nor the commonalities of ritual practices in Japan and China, and certainly does not adequately describe the specific role of ritual and religious beliefs in Japanese family business. One reason for this is that we must take Shintō seriously, in the sense of an autonomous intellectual, spiritual and social domain which covers much of what has been always excluded from Confucianism in China, that is, the vast field of popular religion in China. Even if Confucianism is explicitly referred to, it is just treated as one of several important sources of values and spiritual orientation. By implication, with reference to the current conditions, the continuity of Shintō in Japan and the deeply broken and fragmented modernization process in China mark essential differences until today. However, even for China, the Confucianism hypothesis is problematic, precisely because of the distance from popular practices and beliefs (Ebrey, 1991). Japanese kinship clearly shows that ritual does not generate a ‘Sino-­ Confucian’ conception of family, which emphasizes genealogical descent, but a corporatized conception, which is reflected in the management of the family firm. In other words, even though ancestor worship is a core ritual domain in Japan and China, this does not imply that it takes the same ‘Confucian’ forms in both. The positive result is that we can approach Confucianism as an East Asian theory about ritual, and therefore diagnose ritual as the concept that unifies the two cases. In both cases, ritual is generative in creating and maintaining social patterns, and is important in enacting family and kinship, though in clearly different ways. In the Chinese context, kinship is

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approached as a networking process with open and fluid boundaries, whereas in the Japanese case, kinship relates to processes of corporatization and formation of communities. Confucianism as a social theory that centres on ritual can make sense of this primacy of ritual and has therefore always been widely received as an intellectual framework for understanding society across East Asia. But we cannot conclude that therefore the specific societal structures and practices impacting family business are the same as defined by Confucian norms. To the contrary, it is crucial to recognize that differences in ritual practices explain the differential performance of family business in both societies.

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Radcliffe-Brown, A.  R. (1952). Structure and function in primitive society. Free Press. Reader, I. (1991). Religion in contemporary Japan. Palgrave Macmillan. Redding, S. G. (1990). The Spirit of Chinese capitalism. DeGruyter. Redding, S. G. (1996). Weak organizations and strong linkages: Managerial ideology and Chinese family business networks. In G.  G. Hamilton (Ed.), Asian business networks (pp. 27–40). Springer. Redding, S. G., & Witt, M. A. (2008). The future of Chinese capitalism: Choices and chances. Oxford University Press. Rithmire, M., & Chen, H. (2021). The emergence of mafia-like business systems in China. The China Quarterly, 248, 1037–1058. Roberts, J. G. (1991). Mitsui: Three centuries of Japanese business. Weatherhill. Rozman, G. (1991). The East Asian region in comparative perspective. In G.  Rozman (Ed.), The east Asian region. Confucian heritage and its modern adaptation (pp. 3–42). Princeton University Press. Sahlins, M. (2013). What kinship is - and is not. The University of Chicago Press. Sasaki, I., Kotlar, J., Ravasi, D., & Vaara, E. (2020). Dealing with revered past: Historical identity statements and strategic change in Japanese family. Strategic Management Journal, 41(3), 590–623. Sasaki, I., Ravasi, D., & Micelotta, E. (2019). Family firms as institutions: Cultural reproduction and status maintenance among multi-centenary shinise in Kyoto. Organization Studies, 40(6), 793–831. Schein, E. H. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley. Seligman, A. B., Weller, R. P., Puett, M. J., & Simon, B. (2008). Ritual and its consequences: An essay on the limits of sincerity. Oxford University Press. Shimamoto, M. (2013). Globalization and family business: The renewal of Idemitsu Kosan, 1990s–2000s. In M.  Umemura & R.  Fujioka (Eds.), Comparative responses to globalization (pp. 121–140). Palgrave Macmillan. Shimizu, A. (1987). Ie and dozoku: Family and descent in Japan. Current Anthropology, 28(S4), 85–90. Shinato, T., & Kato, K. (2018). Japanese corporate governance structure review and ‘the logic of ie’. International Journal of Business and Globalisation, 20(3), 354–370. Sonoda, M. (2019). Chinju no mori to community genri, in: Kokoro Research Center (Ed.), tokushū community, Kokoro no mirai 2019 (20). Stephenson, B. (2015). Ritual: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Stewart, A. (2013). The anthropology of family business: An imagined ideal. In L. Melin, M. Nordqvist, & S. Pramodita (Eds.), SAGE handbook of family business (pp. 66–82). Sage Publications. Stewart, P., & Strathern, A. (Eds.). (2016). Ritual. Routledge.

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Suenaga, K. (2019). The story of Japan’s Ohmi merchants. The precept of sanpo-yoshi. (Translated by Larry Greenberg). Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture. Sun, A. (2013). Confucianism as a world religion: Contested histories and contemporary realities. Princeton University Press. Sun, A. (2019). Turning ghosts into ancestors in contemporary China: Making sense of Chinese religious life requires a new logic. Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 2019(Spring), 49–59. Sutton, D. S. (2007). Ritual, cultural standardization, and orthopraxy in China: Reconsidering James L. Watson’s ideas. Modern China, 33(1), 3–21. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. . Teeuwen, M., & Rots, A. P. (2020). Heritage-making and the transformation of religion in modern Japan. In M. Teeuwen & A. P. Rots (Eds.), Sacred heritage in Japan (pp. 1–17). Routledge. The Making of Shimizu-no-mai Japanese Sake. Retrieved October 30, 2020., from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0txJzRAx1PsRe%2D%2D_RfJNg Thorson, A. H., & Siegfanz, F. (1999). The 1997 deregulation of Japan's holding companies. Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, 8, 261. https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wilj/vol8/iss2/11 Trémon, A.-C. (2015). Local capitalism and neoliberalization in a Shenzhen former lineage village. Focaal, 71, 71–85. Waltner, A. B. (1990). Getting an heir. Adoption and the construction of kinship in late Imperial China. University of Hawai’i Press. Wang, D.  W. D. (2016). Urban villages in the new China: Case of Shenzhen. Palgrave Macmillan. Watson, J. L. (2004). Presidential address: Virtual kinship, real estate, and diaspora formation—The man lineage revisited. Journal of Asian Studies, 63(4), 893–910. Wong, S.-L. (1985). The Chinese family firm: A model. British Journal of Sociology, XXXVI(1), 58–72. Wong, D. (2020). Comparative philosophy: Chinese and Western. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. (Fall 2020 Edition), Retrieved March 3, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/ comparphil-­chiwes/ Yamada, S. (2016). Company funeral culture and funeral companies. In H.  Nakamaki et  al. (Eds.), Enterprise as an instrument of civilization: An anthropological approach to business administration (pp.  131–144). Springer Japan. Yan, H.-D., & Yu, T. F.-L. (Eds.). (2021). The Routledge companion to Asian family business: Governance, succession, and challenges in the age of digital disruption. Routledge.

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CHAPTER 7

Kinship, Godparenthood and Urban Estates in the Bolivian Andes: The Cultural Production of Business Families Juliane Müller

1   Introduction This chapter addresses kinship relationships in growing commercial businesses in Bolivia. The businesses were founded in the 1960s to 1980s and operate in the import, distribution and sale of consumer electronics in the city of La Paz, Bolivia’s seat of government. Contrary to the common idea about Latin American family firms being hierarchically organized around a patriarchal figure (Costa, 2019; Schneider, 2009), the enterprises examined here are in the majority female-founded or run by spouses on equal footing. They started as modest endeavours to make a living but evolved into benefit-seeking enterprises. What identifies the business families as a collectivity is not so much the ‘family firm’ (which usually does not exist as such as members of the family have their own separate affairs as

J. Müller (*) University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_7

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unipersonal businesses), but a specific family asset: multi-floor buildings that serve both as a home and for commercial purposes. How can we make sense of this endurance of small-scale entrepreneurial structures—unipersonal businesses instead of family firms—concomitant with the emergence of big-scale real estate properties as family assets? I argue in this chapter that it must be related to the specificity of kinship organization and persistent forms of relatedness in and beyond the market. Ritual kinship is of prior importance, as godparenthood (compadrazgo) tends to offer more trustful relationships than those with members of the extended family. These ritual kinspeople, locally called compadres or ‘political kin’ (parientes políticos), are made at life-cycle events and cultural-­ religious festivities. My analysis starts from the premise that we should address kinship relationships, as well as family-oriented feelings and motivations, as an integral and inseparable part of entrepreneurial attitudes, strategies and practices, and not only as the social context of economic action (Yanagisako, 2019, see Koellner in the introduction to this volume). This approach offers a theoretical framework that recognizes the impact of family relations and sentiments in the formation and division of enterprises. In this sense, I am interested in the production and reproduction of a certain form of business as a cultural process (Yanagisako, 2002). The business families analysed in this chapter have usually been classified as part of the ‘informal economy’. While research in this field of study foregrounds the social dimension of peoples’ economic practice, it does so by focusing on households at the subsistence level that mobilizes mutual support and solidarity to fulfil basic material needs (among others, see Hillenkamp et  al., 2013). The emphasis on kinship and local forms of relatedness as important factors enabling social reproduction is opposed to how family firms in the ‘formal’ sector and capitalist markets are usually conceptualized. Here, emotional attachments and mutual support among family members are seen as restricting the productivity, competitiveness and success of the family enterprise (for a critique, see Yanagisako, 2019). This discrepancy is not just a matter of ‘oversocialized’ versus ‘undersocialized’ economic actors (Granovetter, 1985), but a dichotomous view that opposes the positive and desirable interference of family relations and values at the margins of the capitalist economy, and a negative and avoidable impact at its core. Instead of reifying this binary perspective of family businesses and economic practice, and against the backdrop of the large body of work that questions the practical and analytical distinction between

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informal and formal economies, we should study the practical imbrication of kinship and enterprise, whether we are dealing with livelihood- or profit-oriented businesses. Such a perspective aims to overcome long-­ standing disciplinary and epistemological binaries between Western economies and the ‘rest’ (see Martin, 2023) and advances a global and comparative perspective on family businesses (Koellner & Roth, 2023, under review). Methodologically, my work is based on long-term ethnographic research on the wholesale and retail trade of consumer electronics in La Paz and transnational commodity chains. In this chapter, I focus on ethnographic material concerning the upper fraction of trading businesses in the market. Over the fieldwork period (2013–2018), I gathered information that aids the understanding of the dynamics of the kinship group, family-related aspirations and sentiments, as well as the wider market sociality and godparenthood bonds in which traders are involved. In addition, I relate the firsthand data to Andean kinship patterns to understand the phenomena within their cultural context. In what follows I start with some conceptual remarks about market institutions, firms and urban estates, and outline the organization of marketplaces in Bolivia and the electronics trade in the city of La Paz. I then describe traders’ family composition, and mutual expectations and aspirations in the context of Andean kinship, followed by an analysis of ritual kinship. I conclude by bringing these threads together, arguing that kinship structures and family relations, the predominance of ritual kinship practices and everyday mutuality in and beyond the market, create and reproduce specific entrepreneurial organizations that differ from the family firm.

2   Market Institutions, Firms and Urban Estates In his book Peddlers and Princes on economic development in Java and Bali, the US-American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1963) made an ideal-typical distinction between a bazaar-type and a firm-type economy, the first referring to unofficial, rural and peri-urban marketplace trade, the latter describing the national market and capitalist economy. Starting from the classical approach of sociologist Max Weber on religious beliefs and rational economic action, he argued that Islamic businessmen, those of the ‘progressive’ reform type, did not lack entrepreneurial drive or the ambition to transform their individual businesses into family firms,

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but did lack an institutional and juridical environment that allowed them to build stable organizational structures and move beyond petty production and trading. Geertz argued that the widespread individualistic behaviour of bazaar owners and the lack of legal protection hindered even the progressive and determined traders from upscaling and becoming owners of merchant companies (Geertz, 1963: 28, Geertz, 1978).1 Even today, if upwardly mobile economic actors do not scale up into proper family firms (and move from the ‘informal’ into the ‘formal’ economy), this is usually explained by external restraints (institutional and juridical) and is seen as a lack of the ability to construct ‘modern’ forms of organization (cf. De Soto, 1989). Deductive and normative distinctions between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ institutional frameworks continue to be highly influential (Fourcade & Healy, 2007: 297–299). From an anthropological perspective, however, normative suppositions should be questioned. Instead of assuming ‘good’ or ‘bad’ institutions for market development and the firm economy, we analyse the variability and diversity of institutionalizing the economy and entrepreneurial practices.2 In this sense, the ‘feria-type economy’, built up by the Bolivian traders and business families analysed here, is far from an individualistic and ultra-­ competitive marketplace. The feria is an institution as central to Andean economic culture, past and present, as the bazaar is to Arabic countries. It is an open-air market for all kinds of products, fresh and manufactured, domestic and imported. Many of Geertz’s arguments built into the distinction of bazaar versus firm economy do not apply to how contemporary urban ferias are organized and instituted. They are most often surrounded by retail shops and galleries. This is the case with the marketplaces for consumer electronics in La Paz. Former feria and street vendors have moved up the economic and social ladder and have become the main import, wholesale and retail businesses in the city. These businesses are permanent, and traders’ relationships with international providers in Chile and China, and local and regional clients have been quite stable over decades (Müller, 2018; Tassi, 2016). Traders have expanded street selling 1  Note the assumption of development in this argument. Whereas Weber considered the family firm to be a relic of traditional capitalism that inevitably belongs to the past, Geertz, De Soto and others postulate a prior evolutionary step: the establishment of formal family firms wherever legal and institutional arrangements are conducive to it. 2  Legal incentives to remain a small and relatively invisible business do exist in Bolivia, but these are not sufficient to understand the proliferation of unipersonal businesses among these growing business families.

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into shops and galleries, built entire commercial districts and shopping precincts and attracted customers across different classes and ethnicities. They collaborate in marketing and merchandising with multinational East Asian brands such as Samsung and Huawei (Müller, 2021). Geertz put all these issues on the side of the firm-type economy (Geertz, 1963, Fanselow, 1990: 261–262). Explaining the causes of this ascent of once marginalized and stigmatized street vendors, many of whom have indigenous origins (mainly Aymara3), is beyond the scope of this chapter. Overall, they managed to use the interstices of the law and multiple crises in the country in the 1980s and 1990s to substitute established businesses. At a time of decreasing purchasing power of the population through the debt crisis and neoliberal restructuring, traders could offer basic consumer goods, as well as clothes and electronics, for lower prices than the established trading houses in the country, many of which were owned by European immigrants who commercialized US-American, Italian and German electronics brands. Moreover, as the merchandise increasingly was produced in China by East Asian multinational enterprises, the established Western brands and their distributors lost their dominance (Müller, 2018). Yet, instead of copying entrepreneurial strategies, adapting to the corporate organization of the ‘white’ Bolivian business elite or entering their interest groups, these upwardly mobile trader families continue to politically organize as gremiales (street vendors). Although their businesses have been partially formalized, they hesitate to legally establish them as firms, but continue as unipersonal businesses instead. In all, 86.3 per cent of all businesses in La Paz in the area of consumer electronics is unipersonal. For the commercial area under study, the numbers are even higher: 97.8 per cent of all businesses in the district Max Paredes are unipersonales with a sole responsible and liable person (GAMLP, 2007). Importantly, electronics traders are not only formally but also substantially unipersonal businesses. Although the entire nuclear family usually works in commerce, within the same or different commodity groups, they do so individually or as a couple (pareja) (de facto or de jure a married couple). The mother and father, and each adult descendant with his or her partner, manage their own business, accounts, purchases, stock, sales and shops. They are 3  Aymara is the second largest indigenous nation in pluri-national Bolivia. These traders were mainly rural migrants, with a background in livestock herding and small-scale crossborder trade.

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supported in their daily operations by only a few selected kin or employees and overwhelmingly identify as cuentapropistas (self-employed).4 Although the business families are made up of multiple cuentapropista endeavours instead of a unified family firm, they do form ‘kinship enterprises’ in the sense of believing in multi-generational bonds (Yanagisako, 2019). The asset that materializes this unity is the multi-floor building. The first generations of the business invest in multi-storey estates that combine residency and work-related activities. This kind of investment is ubiquitous in La Paz and the twin city of El Alto (see also Maclean, 2017, 2018; Tassi et al., 2013). The business founders accommodate their married children with respective families on the upper floors, each of which forms a separate household. Furthermore, each married couple or individual family member usually takes on a different built-in commercial activity. The division of the building into micro-spaces for diverse mercantile usages corresponds to the horizontal multiplication of the businesses. The lower floors are used for various economic endeavours like shops, fiesta venues, hotels and spas. I conceptualize these multi-storey properties as urban estates that enhance economic opportunities for individual family members and strengthen social connections between themselves and with others. By incorporating spaces for commercial activities that are highly social and interactive, the buildings remain dedicated to the sociability attributed to the houses in the Andes in general, as well as to reciprocal relationships (ayni) and compadrazgo that sustain this sociability (Leinaweaver, 2009). In La Paz, as elsewhere in the region, house-related affairs fold into local market life and webs of ritual sociality (Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2019: 22). Hence, the urban estates are not a display of new wealth geared exclusively to the comfort and splendour of a private and familiar space, nor are they oriented solely towards opportunities for investment and profit, but are also important in extending the social relations of the individual family members. In the following section, I analyse several extended families in the electronics trade in order to comprehend two important features: a) relationships with and attitudes towards relatives as well as non-kin forms of relatedness among traders, and b) the significance of ritual kinship bonds 4  In contrast to the most widespread corporate form in Latin America, the family holding company, i.e., diversified enterprises with subsidiaries in different markets and sectors under majority ownership by family members (Schneider, 2009).

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for their business relations (see also Antonyan on Armenia, 2023). The analysis is focused on the ‘founder’ families (in vernacular language los fundadores) of the two main commercial areas for electronic devices in La Paz, called Eloy Salmón and Huyustus. These founders constitute approximately fifteen families who started to sell electronic merchandise on Eloy Salmón street in the 1960s, and ten families who consolidated the wholesale section of household appliances and consumer electronics at Huyustus feria and commercial precinct.

3  Kinship Relationships and Mutuality in the Market To understand the horizontal fragmentation of the family business as a culturally informed dynamic, it is paramount to start with the expectations of the founder generation regarding the life and work of their offspring. From their early days, children of traders helped at their parents’ stall or shop. This had the double function of offering additional labour and learning the trade, a combination we find in family businesses around the world (see among others Hefner, 1998; for the case of Bolivian traders, see Tassi, 2016). Among traders in Bolivia, children are expected to get practical knowledge and to get to know partners and clients, so that, over time, they can build their own networks, which are perceived as a prerequisite of becoming an independent trader. Children establish their own businesses once they marry and have formed their own households. No marked differences can be observed between the expectations towards daughters and sons. This practical acquisition of knowledge and skills is, among the upper echelon of traders, accompanied by higher formal education. Whereas the search for social recognition and upward mobility via university degrees is predominant among all trader families, it is more easily met by the second and third generations of the more successful. These sons and daughters get a degree in business administration, technical tngineering, computer sciences, or foreign languages and international marketing. Law is another common discipline of both young men and women. These careers correspond to a widespread aspiration that the children should continue and ‘better’ the business, complementing practical skills with scientific

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knowledge.5 There are no marked differences in the achievements of daughters and sons, yet prospects tend to diverge between age groups. The oldest siblings, especially the oldest sisters, are less well educated than their younger siblings. This broadly reflects three factors: first, the responsibility of older sisters in caring for the family; second, the fact of being born early, during the most difficult years of the emerging family businesses; and third, the growing inclusiveness of the Bolivian educational and public university system. All in all, siblingship among these trader families is characterized by shared parenthood and experiences in childhood, adolescence and the early years as traders, as well as diverging trajectories as their businesses mature (see below; on siblingship cross-culturally, see Thelen et al., 2013). 3.1   Andean Kinship The expectation and practice of becoming an independent trader upon marriage is a model of family succession that temporarily restricts the use of unpaid family labour, coinciding with the formative phase of youth (apart from being restricted by educational concerns). This is different from the possibly life-long unpaid labour of wives (and unmarried daughters) in family businesses under a patriarchal authority, as for instance among Chinese in South-East Asia (Murray Li, 1998), or historically in the North Atlantic world. The economic autonomy of individual family members is accepted and encouraged among Bolivian traders. Comparable to how Alexander (1998) and Murray Li (1998) describe Malay and Javanese kinship patterns of family businesses, there is ‘little notion of a family or extended-kin estate’ (Hefner, 1998: 13), and women are expected to be as money-minded as—or even more than—men. In Andean Bolivia in general, as soon as children are old enough to form their own economic unit of production, whether in agriculture, artisanship, commerce or other service-oriented work in the city, they are encouraged to do so. Founding an independent household is considered obligatory for an adult person to become a full member of their communities (jaqi in Aymara) (Blumtritt, 2009: 74–78). There is not enough space here to thoroughly revisit the topic of Andean kinship or current 5  Less affluent traders also strive for university education for their children, yet with the aspiration of becoming a public employee or a ‘profesional’ (professional) rather than for a future in trading, which is seen by these parents as hard and unstable.

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pluralizing ideals and practices (for an overview, see Blumtritt, 2009, Canessa, 2012, Van Vleet, 2008). What stands out in the literature on the south-central Andes and is especially relevant for the analysis of trader families is the central role of the couple, the pareja, ‘surrounded by kinsmen of various kinds with diminishing degrees of relatedness’ (Mayer, 2002: 10). The pareja is as much a structural element in Andean kinship as it is the basic economic unit. Across the Andes, especially in rural commercial and urban settings, residential patterns are ‘based more on marriage than filiation or descent’ (Spedding, 2014: 121). Furthermore, traditional kinship patterns and related inheritance customs have granted women property (Spedding, 1997, 2014). Therefore, the fragmentation of the family business in many small undertakings should be related to Andean bilateral kinship patterns that form structural differences to patrilocal and patrilineal arrangements. Likewise, the indigenous legacy of household- rather than descent-based residence, female inheritance and gender complementarity in productive activities are all building bricks of the relatively strong position of women in Andean Bolivia and the long history of indigenous women traders. 3.2   Mutual Obligations in the Market Among electronics traders, the household continues to be primarily an economic unit, rather than a sentimental unity or exclusively dedicated to social reproduction. Children work for their parents. Yet, this support is at the same time an apprenticeship and is not expected to last beyond the coming of age. As already mentioned, parents help and encourage the following generations to make their own contacts and acquire a network of providers and clients for a later business of their own. Each economic unit in such a grid of small-scale trading businesses is involved in a web of reciprocal relationships. Within the market, the most important form of mutuality is known as being caseros/as. These are persistent buyer-seller commitments expressed symbolically and materially.6 At the electronics marketplaces in La Paz, casero-relations are not always as strong and binding as in rural settings and markets for products of everyday necessity (Buechler & Buechler, 1992; Seligmann, 2004), as many street traders and shopkeepers sell to initially unknown customers 6  Apart from the immediate exchange of a commodity for money, a small extra is offered with every purchase to secure a long-lasting relationship.

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from across the metropolitan area. Wholesalers and retailers often do not have a previous geographical, ethnic or religious bond that tends to facilitate long-lasting relations in commerce. Yet, an enduring interpersonal connection between buyer and seller continues to be a powerful mutual expectation (Müller, 2021). Retailers habitually call out to unknown passers-­by, with ‘caserito’ (loyal buyer or vendor) promising good offers and a willingness to answer any query the client might have. The casero idiom and related gestures invite and morally pressure the customer to come back and buy again in the future, and it imbues the market encounter with a sense of responsiveness across class and ethnic differences. It is an expression of a moral obligation that arises from the activity itself and prolonged commercial encounters (Carrier, 2018). The mutual obligations that structure commercial transactions between clients and providers are important to keep in mind when addressing fissions within extended families. In other words, the disputes and withdrawal from obligations towards affinal kin that I describe in the next section do not lead to an atomization of socio-economic life. 3.3   Economic Differences Among Siblings Market competition and inheritance disputes have, at times, created fissure among siblings. An example is Doña Soledad Navarro and her family. She is considered a founding figure of the Eloy Salón commercial precinct. Doña Soledad translated her economic ascendence into the construction of a bloque-long five-storey building at Eloy Salmón street. She intended to accommodate all her children’s families in the building, yet she had a dispute with two of her offspring and, to date, only three of her children’s families live on the upper floors and hold a shop on the ground floor. This experience has materialized into scepticism within the family about whether to collaborate with relatives. To my question to one of Doña Soledad’s daughters-in-law about if they shared containers or pooled resources in other ways, the woman answered: No, this not, this is everybody on its own (…) This is problematic, some order big, others bring over small, better to avoid conflicts, especially economic ones, especially among family.7 7  ‘Eso no, eso es cada uno individual (…) Es problemático eso, otros piden grande, otros traen pequeño, mejor evitar conflictos, sobre todo económicos, entre familiares sobre todo’.

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This woman managed a trading business with her husband. Another person from a commercial gallery in front of the multi-storey building of the Navarros went as far as to suggest that the entire Eloy Salmón street was his family, but not his relatives (todos son mi familia, pero ningún pariente). This man, who was in dispute with members of his affinal kin, was another founder of the commercial area who had been very active in the local traders’ association. He has established numerous caseros and ritual kinship relationships with other traders in the market over his lifetime. Another phenomenon among siblings is to withdraw from certain obligations and expectations. As mentioned, children receive early material support from parents to get a good education and start their own businesses. Yet, there are relatively few commitments towards the prospects of siblings and their families. During fieldwork, I noticed angry sentiments and unmet expectations of poorer siblings. In our interviews, they expressed their disappointment that very well-off brothers and sisters did not offer much support. Seed money for a business and apprentice positions was reserved for their nuclear families only. Doña Soledad was accused by a daughter of her elder brother of not having helped out her and her seven siblings. In my interview, this woman showed open bitterness towards her paternal aunt, Soledad, who had been so supportive with her own five children, but not with her nephews and nieces, even though they had needed assistance. Thereby, Doña Soledad’s focus on her own children clashed with the expectation that the father’s eldest sister should take over parenthood functions in case of necessity, substituting her brother (see Thelen et al., 2013 for the importance of the father’s sister— not only of the classical mother’s brother—in kinship patterns cross-culturally). There are significant wealth differences between siblings who might all be in the trading business but with different levels of success. The Quispe sisters Doña Sonia and Nuria are a case in point. Whereas Sonia rented one of the bigger shops in the area of Huyustus from where she organized import cargos and marketing and merchandising relations with various East Asian electronics multinationals, Nuria had a tiny stall at the entrance to Huyustus feria. Whereas Sonia was often away on business trips, receiving merchandise at her warehouse or supervising the last work of a multi-­ storey building she had been constructing in El Alto, Nuria sat in her little booth day after day. During fieldwork, it was hard for me to get in touch with Sonia as she was often absent from the shop, whereas Nuria was always available and delighted to talk. It was on Sonia’s birthday that I had

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come to the market to wish her happy birthday with two bottles of Bavarian wheat beer. However, Sonia had not come to the market. Her employee informed me that she had stayed at home, having ‘a small gathering’. I then went over to Nuria’s booth, without expecting her to be there, but there she was, as always. She did not seem to be even surprised that Sonia had a birthday get-together without having invited her. Contrary to the siblings mentioned earlier, she showed no signs of envy or other negative feelings towards her sister, commenting that Sonia was probably having a get-together with her four daughters, their husbands and kids and some close compadres and comadres (godparents).

4  Ritual Kinship Three basic issues differentiate godparenthood in Latin America from the European, more orthodox Catholic tradition. These are relevant for understanding the socio-economic dimension of godparenthood bonds among Bolivian traders. First, godparenthood in Latin America and in the Andes in particular is usually established between people who are neither biological kin nor otherwise family related (Spedding, 1997). Second, horizontal relationships between compadres tend to be more important than hierarchical relationships between godparents and their godchildren. Godparents form part of the web of mutual obligations and expectations that can be mobilized by the pareja for help and support (Mayer, 2002). A third Latin American feature of godparenthood is the proliferation of occasions and reasons for creating such ties. While the Catholic bond par excellence is that of baptism, in Latin America, especially in Mexico, Guatemala and the Andean countries with significant indigenous cultural influence, there are compadres for every important event beyond the Catholic sacraments (for example, the girls’ coming of age, the quinceañera and graduation); compadres are usually appointed for the inauguration of a new house or building, as well as for the purchase of a car or other important acquisitions (Schnegg, 2006; Spedding, 2014). In sum, godparenthood is relatively easy to establish in the Andes, very widespread for a variety of occasions and usually an engagement with non-­ kin. It creates a social bond between adults, especially of the same sex, even when the occasion is an event related to the children (cf. Mayer, 2002; Spedding, 2014). Among traders, rite of passage celebrations continue to be highly important. Young business families aim at broadening their social and commercial network by appointing well-known traders as

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godparents for different life-cycle events of their nuclear family, especially marriage, baptism and the first haircut (rutucha).8 Following a widespread practice throughout the Andes, godparents who are of good reputation and well-off are preferable, so that the bond promises to be fruitful personally and economically. Another setting for the establishment of compadrazgo is patron saints’ festivities. Patron saints’ festivities in the Andes consist of large dance parades performed by numerous dance troupes, so-called fraternidades (literally brotherhoods). The troupes have a rotating organization, and many prosperous traders take on the prestigious responsibility of being pasante (organizer of a troop for a year) (Müller, 2020). Usually, three to four couples organize one ‘fiesta cycle’, and through the process of organizing costumes, venues and food and drink for various events, they get to know each and become compadres. Ritual kinship ties are also established with the organizers of the previous and the following years, which are based on delayed reciprocity between cohorts who give each other gifts and counter-gifts. It is through the godparenthood bonds formed during this co-management of festive events (which includes high advances of money by the organizers) that trustful relationships are established, later to be used for the exchange of information and sporadic collaboration in everyday commerce. Firsthand information on purchases and imports from Chinese factories, for instance, as well as the possibility to rent a container together to reduce costs, are examples of the issues handled between compadres and comadres.

5  Conclusion As described in this chapter, in La Paz, Bolivia, former street traders have become gallery owners who continue to rely on new generations of petty vendors as retail clients. They have rarely moved ‘into the world of the business establishment’ (Geertz, 1963: 29). Even those merchants who regularly source goods from Chile and China are overwhelmingly involved in all core business operations. Very few have formed a proper family firm. The economic unit is formed by the individual trader or pareja with non-­ adult children; favours for or collaborations with wider kin tend to be seen 8  The first haircut (murucha in Aymara, rutucha in Quechua) is of vital importance in the Andes. It represents the rite of passage of the boy or girl into adulthood; it is the occasion where he or she receives the first work tools.

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with suspicion. While this can be interpreted as a strategic attitude against benefit sharing, it must also be seen in the historical context of kinship patterns that create new and independent households for all offspring individually, both sons and daughters, instead of cultivating extended families or a family estate based on descent. This structural pattern of multiplying economically independent households has evolved, among traders, into business fragmentation. Furthermore, the mutual expectation about long-lasting relationships in the market creates specific transactional dynamics. Every trader or trader couple is involved in a network of dyadic contacts and commitments. Counting on loyal providers and clients is one of the main factors for a successful business. This dominant logic of caseridad—which runs contrary to the common definition of market exchange as among anonymous individuals who seek short-term profits—creates highly personalized business relationships that work especially well with unipersonal businesses and an owner-manager (gerente propietario) that oversees everything. Not least, the many godparenthood associations, initiated, confirmed and strengthened at ritual events, create relationships that tend to be more intimate and trustful than those with siblings or other relatives. This illustrates the cultural variability of whom people consider to be ‘family’ and how practical forms of ‘doing kinship’, or ‘lived kinship’, shape business strategies and economic action more broadly (Koellner, 2022; Koellner et al., 2022; Schweitzer, 2000). Therefore, from an anthropological point of view, the persistence of unipersonal businesses should not be seen as a weakness, but as the outcome of specific historical-cultural patterns of socio-economic organization and the practical interrelation of kinship and enterprise. Whereas trader families hardly ever scale up into a family firm, they do construct multi-floor buildings that enhance the business opportunities of family members, intensify their external relatedness and, in future generations, possibly contribute to novel understandings of family unity and residence continuity. For now, and contrary to what might be expected, these urban estate properties help to perpetuate the fragmentation of businesses as family members are responsible for different commercial and service-­ oriented affairs accommodated in the building. The buildings are not only an investment in prestige and comfort or an expenditure in social and symbolic capital, but part of the logic of diversifying sources of income while creating patrimonial wealth.

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The ethnographic analysis of kinship structures, family relations and local forms of relatedness in this chapter has served to comprehend why businesses in Andean Bolivia materialize into a specific urban estate serving as both the residence of the founder’s family and a commercial asset for its individual members, whereas everyday economic action rests on long-term buyer-seller relations and interpersonal trust among godparents for commercial deals, demonstrating that collaboration tends to be stronger between people who are chosen and made into kin than among relatives. Therefore, an analytical focus on relatedness as seen in this chapter denaturalizes kinship and takes indigenous idioms and practices seriously and as starting points for a cross-cultural comparison (Carsten, 2000). Moreover, it supports the argument that expansive social circles and ritual kinship with non-relatives should be considered when defining and studying business families (Koellner, in the introduction to this volume).

References Alexander, J. (1998). Women traders in Javanese marketplaces: Ethnicity, gender, and the entrepreneurial Spirit. In R. Hefner (Ed.), Market cultures: Society and morality in the new Asian capitalisms (pp. 203–223). Westview Press. Antonyan, Y. (2023). Power, family and business: Practices of oligarchic economy in late soviet and post-soviet Armenia (before 2018). In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Blumtritt, A. (2009). Die Pluralisierung der Wege des Paares: Geschlechtsspezifische Dimensionen von Modernisierungsprozessen im translokalen Raum der Anden. Walter Frey. Buechler, H.  C., & Buechler, J.-M. (1992). Manufacturing against the odds: Small-scale producers in an Andean City. Westview Press. Canessa, A. (2012). Intimate Indigeneities: Race, sex, and history in the small spaces of the Andean life. Duke University Press. Carrier, J. G. (2018). Moral economy: What’s in a name. Anthropological Theory, 18(1), 18–35. Carsten, J. (2000). Introduction: Cultures of relatedness. In J.  Carsten (Ed.), Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship (pp.  1–36). Cambridge University Press. Colloredo-Mansfeld, R. (2019). Culture, competition, and urban identities in Ecuadorian popular economies. In E.  Dürr & J.  Müller (Eds.), The popular economy in urban Latin America: Informality, materiality, and gender in commerce (pp. 21–41). Lexington Books.

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Costa, N. F. (2019). Latin American family businesses and their new role as global competitor. In C. G. Müller (Ed.), Family firms in Latin America (pp. 8–13). Routledge. De Soto, H. (1989). The other path: The invisible revolution in the third world. HarperCollins. Fanselow, F. (1990). The bazaar economy or how bizarre is the bazaar really? Man, 25(2), 250–265. Fourcade, M., & Healy, K. (2007). Moral views of market society. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 285–311. GAMLP. (2007). Census of economic activities of 2007. Gobierno Autónomo municipal de La Paz. Geertz, C. (1963). Peddlers and princes: Social development and economic change in two Indonesian towns. Chicago University Press. Geertz, C. (1978). The bazaar economy: Information and search in peasant marketing. The American Economic Review, 68(2), 28–32. Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 481–510. Hefner, R.  W. (1998). Introduction. In R.  W. Hefner (Ed.), Market cultures: Society and morality in the new Asian capitalisms. Westview Press. Hillenkamp, I., Lapeyre, F., & Lemaître, A. (Eds.). (2013). Securing livelihoods. Informal economy practices and institutions. Oxford University Press. Koellner, T. (2022). Family firms and business families: A field for anthropological research. Anthropology Today 38(6): 8-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/14678322.12768 Koellner, T., Haver-Rassfeld, H., & Kleve, H. (2022). Das Doing-Family-Konzept: Eine neue Perspektive zum Verständnis der Herstellung und des Zusammenhalts von Unternehmerfamilien. Familienunternehmen und Strategie, 01(2022), 11–17. Koellner, T. & Roth, S. (2023). (Under Review) Cultural variations in family firms and business families: A literature review and agenda for future research. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management. Leinaweaver, J. (2009). Raising the roof in the transnational Andes: Building houses, forging kinship. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(4), 777–796. Maclean, K. (2017). Ninguna ciudad común: Lo que la teoría urbana crítica puede aprender de La Paz. Bolivia. Journal de Comunicación Social, 5(5), 15–48. Maclean, K. (2018). Envisioning gender, indigeneity and urban change: The case of La Paz, Bolivia. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 25(5), 711–726. Martin, J. (2023). How ‘enduring family bonds’ are made: Insights from Fulɓe Kinship enterprises in northern Benin. In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Mayer, E. (2002). The articulated peasant: Household economies in the Andes. Routledge.

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Müller, J. (2018). Andean-Pacific commerce and credit: Bolivian traders, Asian migrant businesses, and international manufacturers in the regional economy. Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 23(1), 18–36. Müller, J. (2020). Webs of fiesta-related trade. Chinese imports, investment and reciprocity in La Paz, Bolivia. Critique of Anthropology, 40(2), 238–263. Müller, J. (2021). The limits of corporate chains and Brand Management: “Loyalty” and the efficacy of vernacular Markets in the Andes. Cultural Anthropology, 36(2), 252–281. Murray Li, T. (1998). Constituting capitalist culture: The Singapore Malay problem and entrepreneurship reconsidered. In R.  W. Hefner (Ed.), Market cultures: Society and morality in the new Asian capitalisms (pp.  147–172). Westview Press. Schnegg, M. (2006). Compadres familiares: Das Verhältnis von compadrazgo und Verwandtschaft in Tlaxcala, Mexiko. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 131, 91–109. Schneider, B. R. (2009). Hierarchical market economies and Varietes of capitalism in Latin America. Journal of Latin American Studies, 41(3), 553–575. Schweitzer, P. P. (2000). Introduction. In P. P. Schweitzer (Ed.), Dividends of kinship: Meanings and uses of social relatedness (pp. 1–32). Routledge. Seligmann, L. (2004). Peruvian street lives. Culture, power, and economy among market women of Cuzco. University of Illinois Press. Spedding, A. (1997). Investigaciones sobre género en Bolivia: un comentario crítico. In D. Y. Arnold (Ed.), Más allá del silencio. Las fronteras de género en los Andes (pp. 53–74). Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara. Spedding, A. (2014). Contra-afinidad. Algunos comentarios sobre el compadrazgo andino. In D. Y. Arnold (Ed.), Gente de carne y hueso. Las tramas de parentesco en los Andes (pp. 115–137). Fundación Xavier Albó and Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara. Tassi, N. (2016). The native world system: An ethnography of Bolivian Aymara traders in the global economy. Oxford University Press. Tassi, N., Medeiros, C., Rodrígues-Carmona, A., & Ferrufino, G. (2013). ‘Hacer plata sin plata’: El desborde de los comerciantes populares en Bolivia. Fundación PIEB. Thelen, T., Coe, C., & Alber, E. (2013). Introduction. In E. Alber, C. Coe, & T.  Thelen (Eds.), The anthropology of sibling relations: Explorations in shared parentage, experience, and exchange (pp. 1–28). Palgrave. Van Vleet, K. E. (2008). Performing kinship: Narrative, gender and the intimacies of power in the Andes. University of Texas Press. Yanagisako, S. (2002). Producing culture and capital: Family firms in Italy. Princeton University Press. Yanagisako, S. (2019). Family firms as kinship enterprises. Economics Discussion Papers, No. 2019-12. Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW).

CHAPTER 8

Anthropology of Family and Family Businesses Is Emic All the Way Heung Wah Wong

This chapter is a substantial development on my several publications. They are ‘Introduction’ (2021a), Journal of Business Anthropology 10 (2), 226–240; ‘How the Chinese Think About the Family: The “Family” in Chinese Family firms’ (2021b), Journal of Business Anthropology 10 (2), 241–261; ‘Taking Culture Seriously: The Role of Culture in the Study of Business’ (2015), Journal of Business Anthropology 4 (1), 144–150; ‘It Is Not That All Cultures Have Business, But That All Business Have Culture’, in The Routledge Companion to Anthropology and Business, edited by Raza Mir and Anne-Laure Fayard, pp. 453–472, 2020, London: Routledge; and ‘What is Chinese Kinship and What Is Not?’, in Family, Ethnicity and State in Chinese Culture: Under the Impact of Globalization, edited by Min Han, Hironao Kawai, and Heung Wah Wong, pp. 83–104, 2017, New York: Bridge 21. Parts of this chapter are adopted from these publications, some of them verbatim.

H. W. Wong (*) The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_8

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1   Introduction Management scientists, when studying family businesses, tend to understand family firms as purely economic entities independent from culture. Cultural explanations of the specificity of family firms in different cultural contexts are thereby made outside the scope of management sciences. This is evident from the history of the discipline and the definition of the family business that has been part of that history. At the beginning of the campaign for the establishment of family business research as an independent field of study in the 1980s,1 the theoretical effort of management scientists was directed towards the identification of the major differences between a family business and a non-family firm. The distinctive feature that demarcated family business from non-family business was the familial involvement in the ownership, management and trans-generational succession of a firm. This distinctive feature then was used as the major criterion to define family firms. This is what Chrisman et al. (2003) called ‘the components-of-involvement approach’ to the definition of the family business. Other management scientists, however, have argued that identifying these three components alone was not sufficient for understanding whether the family involvement in these three elements in essence does produce the distinctive kind of business—namely ‘the family business’. Chrisman et al. (2003) called this the ‘essence approach’, which evolved through the identification of conundrums arising out of ‘the components-­ of-­involvement approach’. The components-of-involvement approach is implicitly based on the belief that family involvement is sufficient to make a firm a family business. The essence approach, on the other hand, is based on the belief that some form of family involvement is only one necessary condition among others. Family involvement must encourage behaviours that produce a certain distinctiveness based on the vision of the firm before it can be considered as a family firm. Thus, according to the essence approach, two firms with the same extent of family involvement might not both be ‘family businesses’ because of a lack of vision, familiness or behaviour emanating from family involvement (Chrisman et al., 2003: 4–5).

1  I would like to thank the editor of this volume for providing me with this piece of information.

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The essence of family firms is further indicated by: ‘(1) [the] [i]ntention to maintain family control of the dominant coalition; (2) unique, inseparable and synergistic resources and capabilities arising from family involvement and interactions; (3) a vision set by the family-controlled dominant coalition and intended for transgenerational pursuance, and (4) pursuance of such a vision’ (Chrisman et al., 2003: 9). A third approach that introduces the concept of the family-firm identity emerged in the 2010s. This approach argues that family firms are complex phenomena, and we need to integrate the component, essence and family-firm identity approaches to capture the complexity of family firms (Kushins & Behounek, 2020: 2). Management scientists further believed that they needed a quantitative tool to measure the extent of the essence of family firms. One of the famous quantitative tools is the F-PEC scale developed by Astrachan et al. (2002).2 ‘P’ here stands for the power scale, ‘E’ for the experience scale and ‘C’ for the culture scale. The power scale measures ‘the interchangeable and additive influence of family power through ownership, management, and/or governance’ (Sharma, 2004: 4). ‘[T]he breadth and depth of dedication of family members to the business through the number of individuals and generations of family members involved in the business’ (Sharma, 2004: 4) are measured by the experience scale. The purpose of the culture scale is to assess a ‘[f]amily’s commitment to the business and its values’ (Sharma, 2004: 4). Note that the concept of ‘culture’ in the culture scale of the F-PEC scale is very narrow, it being defined as a family’s attachment to a corporation and its corporate values rather than as the species-specific capacity for Homo sapiens known by anthropologists. We will return to this point soon. Notably, ‘the influence of family power’ and ‘the breadth and depth of the family members’ devotion to the business’ are not themselves deemed to be culturally relevant. This view of culture contains an ontological assumption that family firms are seen as ‘economic phenomena’ rather than cultural facts. That is, the family firm is understood as something that exists independently from culture. Culture is thus banished to an unexamined land of externality that can be summoned on an ad hoc basis to account for some ill-defined aspects of family firms, which are not readily explained 2  Another famous tool is the FIBER scale measurement developed by Berrone and his colleagues (Berrone et al., 2012). I would like to thank the editor of this volume for bringing this to my attention.

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by economic considerations.3 Hence, most management scientists of family firms consider culture as a residual factor only. Implied in this ontological assumption of culture as the exogenous factor to the family firm is the dichotomy of the business family and the family business. The epistemological consequence is that management scientists are inclined to make the mutual influences between the family business and the business family an important research focus (Frank et al., 2019).

2   An Anthropological Idea of Culture According to Clifford Geertz, culture is much more than simply exogenous factors added to economic phenomena. ‘[C]ulture, rather than being added on, so to speak, to a finished or virtually finished animal, was ingredient, and centrally ingredient, in the production of that animal itself’ (Geertz, 1973: 47). Culture, as a symbolic system, guides and organizes human behaviour and experience. Without culture, we ‘would be unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognizable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases’ (Geertz, 1973: 49). As Geertz concluded, ‘[w]ithout men, no culture, certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without culture, no men’ (Geertz, 1973: 49), which is also to say that culture is the essential condition of human existence. Comparing men with animals, Geertz argued: Beavers build dams, birds build nests, bees locate food, baboons organize social groups, and mice mate on the basis of forms of learning that rest predominantly on the instructions encoded in their genes and evoked by appropriate patterns of external stimuli: physical keys inserted into organic locks. 3  It is true that a few management scientists do recognize the importance of culture in shaping the family business. For example, Vipin Gupta and Nancy Levenburg (2010: 166) show that more than half of the cross-cultural differences in organizational practices and values can be attributed to regional cultures. They therefore argue for ‘the importance of contextual and cultural differences in the characteristics of family businesses’ (Gupta & Levenburg, 2010: 166), and they conclude their study by conceding that: ‘Anglo-based definitions of family business and the largely Anglo-based underpinnings may be insufficient for truly understanding the family businesses in a global sense (or in a global world). The differences that we find across cultures along the nine family business dimensions suggest that current definitions (e.g., “intent to pass along the business”) may not be transferrable globally’ (Gupta & Levenburg, 2010: 167). Unfortunately, management scientists have generally ignored this observation.

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But men build dams or shelters, locate food, organize their social groups, or find sexual partners under the guidance of instructions encoded in flow charts and blueprints, hunting lore, moral systems, and aesthetic judgments: conceptual structures molding formless talents. (Geertz, 1973: 49–50)

Indeed, culture is a species-specific capacity for Homo sapiens. For Sahlins culture is ‘the organization of human experience and action by symbolic means. The persons, relations, and materials of human existence are enacted according to their meaningful values—meaning that cannot be determined from their biological or physical properties’ (Sahlins, 2000a: 158). Anything human must be culturally constituted, which is also to say that everything ‘businesslike’ is also cultural because business phenomena are meaningfully constituted (Sahlins, 2000b: 9–32). We, in contrast to what James Glifford, E. George Marcus and Co argue,4 cannot give away culture, as without culture there are no human phenomena. Nor can we take culture as residual factors when we explain human behaviours because human behaviours are meaningful and take place in terms of that meaning specific to a culture. The cultural constitution of human phenomena involves three terms: physical acts, meaningful systems and the mediation between them. Human phenomena are the result of the interpretation of physical acts in terms of an a priori meaningful (cultural) system which is not the only one possible. ‘Interpretation’ here means conceptually ‘inserting’ a physical act within a classification system that is culturally specific and historically particular, ‘in the course of which realities are indexed to concepts in a relation of empirical tokens of cultural types’ (Sahlins, 1985: 146). Hence, the same physical act can have different meanings in different cultural schemes, as a result of which it would constitute different realities. The cultural category of the ‘family’ likewise has different meanings in different cultural contexts, and therefore the diverse practices that pertain to it cannot be assumed to exist cross-culturally (Kushins & Behounek, 2020). Most management scientists, however, simply suppose that the concept of the family is cross-culturally the same and therefore a constant in their equation of the family’s influence on business, thus rendering the definition of the family unnecessary. But the assumption of a universal concept of the family is simply not true empirically. Any attempt to refer 4  Christoph Brumann and his colleagues (1999) delivered an excellent special issue in Current Anthropology to defend the concept of culture.

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to families by resorting to some empirical universal involves ‘a logical conflict between asserting that, say, “religion,” “marriage,” or “property” are empirical universals and giving them very much in the way of specific content, for to say that they are empirical universals is to say that they have the same content, and to say that they have the same content is to fly in the face of the undeniable fact that they do not’ (Geertz, 1973: 39). Management scientists do recognize differences in families, but they always perceive the differences in terms of quantitatively measurable attributes such as differences in size, education level and gender roles (Gupta & Levenburg, 2010: 166). Concomitantly, the different expectations, behaviours, pressures, values and so forth, which are bound up with different cultural meanings of the family, are invariably ignored. I, however, argue in this chapter that the meaning of the family is crucial in understanding the cultural specificity of family firms because family firms are the pragmatic objectification of the family in a particular culture. As will be shown in the sections that follow, Japanese kinship is different from its counterpart in Chinese societies, in that the latter is ascriptive but the former can be construed genealogically and postnatally. Such a family difference can further explain the differences in the succession and management of the family firm in these two societies.5 I echo what Yanagisako (2019) concluded: that kinship is central to the family firm in different cultural contexts but in different ways, for instance in Chinese and Japanese cultures.

3  Family in Kinship Order By ignoring the cultural specificity of the family in family business, management scientists are simply ignoring fundamental features of the ‘object’ of their study. Sahlins (2013) has suggested that kinship be understood as ‘mutuality of being’: ‘people who are intrinsic to one another’s existence—thus “mutual person(s),” “life itself,” “intersubjective belonging,” “transbodily being,” and the like’ (Sahlins, 2013: 2). But the specific content of kinship in different cultural contexts is dependent on how ‘mutuality of being’ is defined locally. As Sahlins explained: 5  Seen as such, it is problematic to group Japanese and Chinese societies under the same Confucian culture label inasmuch as they, as I demonstrate here, are different culturally. See, for example, in the tradition of Hofstede, as criticized by Caspary and Herrmann-­ Pillath (2023).

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It would not be that kinship as known in various societies is innately constituted, however, inasmuch as it is always culturally structured. Everything will depend on what is locally defined as “belonging to one another” by one or another criterion of the kind previously described—together with the necessary complement of what is different and excluded. (Sahlins, 2013: 43; italics mine)

Sahlins’ insights are ethnographically exemplified by the excellent volume edited by Janet Carsten (2000). In this collection of essays, anthropologists ‘describe what “being related” does for particular people living in specific localities in Africa, China, India, Madagascar, Alaska and Europe. Rather than taking the content of “kinship” for granted, they build from first principles a picture of the implications and the lived experience of relatedness in local contexts’ (Carsten, 2000: 1; italics mine). Kinship relations as understood in different cultural contexts would have different specific contents. For example, in Chinese societies, kinship relations6 are defined by the criterion of sharing the same qi (breath).7 The Chinese consider qi as the essence of human life, ‘refer[ing] to the formless life itself, which is extended through the male reproductive function to sons and grandsons’ (1978: 123). Sons inherit qi from their fathers; they therefore share the same qi with their fathers. Shiga (1967: 35) cites a phrase, ‘fuzhi zhiqin, fenxing tongqi’, from a Chinese classical text, Nan Shih Chuan—which Allen Chun (1985: 97) has translated as ‘with respect to the relation of father to son, there is a distinction of (corporeal) form but a commonality of ch’i’—to characterize the father-son relation. The father and the son are two distinct corporeal forms sharing the same qi (tongqi) (Shiga, 1967: 37; Shiga, 1978: 123). It follows that Chinese kinship is ascriptive. Japanese kinship, as I will demonstrate soon, can be construed genealogically and postnatally.

6  I discussed Chinese kinship in detail elsewhere (Wong, 2017, 2021b), and I would like to be brief here. 7  There are variations in the transliteration of this native Chinese term ‘qi’. We use the Standard Chinese pinyin here. Scholars we quote in this chapter such as Chun (1985) and Shiga (1978) used another pinyin system, and the term becomes ‘ch’i’. We will follow their transliteration of the term when we quote them. However, in this discussion, we will use the term ‘qi’.

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4   Japanese Kinship8 One of the major characteristics of the Japanese ie (which literally means family) is that non-genealogically related persons can be incorporated into the Japanese ie as formal members. This characteristic has been and is the focal point from which anthropologists and sociologists of the Japanese ie have developed two major conceptualizations of the ie to explain this characteristic. For example, Kizaemon Ariga, one of the dominant Japanese scholars in the sociology of the Japanese ie, argued that rather than a pure kinship organization, the Japanese ie should be understood as a corporate group defined by co-residence and a common ie economy. The corporateness of Japanese ie, in turn, explains why non-kin persons such as servants can be incorporated into the ie. This is because they reside in the ie and fully participate in the domestic life of the ie. Seiichi Kitano, another dominant native scholar, disagrees with Ariga, arguing that the Japanese ie as one specific case of the universal institution of family should be seen as a kinship group, as the family is essentially defined by the fusion of emotions between kins (Ochiai, 2013: 110). Non-kin persons, Kitano continued to argue, are able to become full members of the ie because they are subjected to the same authority of the head of the ie as other kin-related members are (Hasegawa, 1991: 55–67). These two contrasting conceptualizations have been influencing the subsequent research on the ie both within and without Japan (Hasegawa, 1991: 55–66). Zenkei Hasegawa (1991: 3–141) has provided a third conceptualization of the ie, which I follow closely here. Hasegawa has suggested that we have to understand the meaning of the ie in the historical context of early modern Japan. Based on the Ninbetsuchō9 (the census register) of 1663, kept by a founding family of the old Honma village in Nagano Prefecture, Hasegawa reconstructed the seventeenth-century social structure of the village. The old Honma village was a community of nine ie with a total number of 91 villagers. The ie was called in the Ninbetsuchō ‘ikkenmae no ie’ (one independent household), which was the basic unit of the village. In his excellent book on early modern Japanese village society, the historian Thomas C. Smith observed that: 8  This description of the Japanese ie is simplified and cannot fully address the real complexities. It (the ie) would not merit any attention if it did not illustrate so  well the  points I make here. 9  Ninbetsuchō was used by overlords to control peasants, registering village members by the unit of the ie. All members of the same ie were listed together in the Ninbetsuchō.

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[p]erhaps the most convenient way to visualize this larger group [ikkenmae no ie] is to think of it as composed of three concentric circles. The first or smallest circle consisted of the nuclear family of the holder; the next larger consisted of affinal and cognate relatives, none of whom were in direct line of descent; and the third or largest consisted of persons related to the holder by neither blood nor marriage but who were nevertheless registered as part of his family and incorporated in it ceremonially. The number of persons in each circle varied considerably from one family to another, and a family might have either one of the outer circles without the other. (Smith, 1959: 6)

As noted by Smith, the first circle refers to the head of the ikkenmae no ie and his immediate family including his wife and unmarried children. The second circle usually included ‘married children and brothers of the family head’ (Smith, 1959: 8). The third circle consisted of two major groups. One was a group of servants; the other was a group of persons called nago (serf). The servants ‘were either hereditary servants called fudai, who together with their children were passed down through a family from generation to generation, or indentured servants bound for exceedingly long terms ranging from ten years or so to life. Both types of servants lived with the master, who by custom was deemed responsible not only for their food and clothing but also for their upbringing, their conduct in the village, and their general welfare’ (Smith, 1959: 8–9). Nago lived separately from the head of the ikkenmae no ie, and maintained an independent household economy, but they owed labour services to the head (Smith, 1959: 9). These three circles were differentiated by the status each maintained in the feudal system. The head of the ikkenmae no ie had a status of honbyakushō, who was the registered owner of a yashikichi (residence land) in the Kenchichō (land register), which is also to say that the ownership of a yashikichi was the defining feature of the honbyakushō in the feudal system of early modern Japan (Hasegawa, 1991: 6). Overlords recognized the owner of yashikichi as having a status of honbyakushō; the latter, in return, recognized his servant status and the associated duties owed to the former (Hasegawa, 1991: 6). Therefore, the honbyakushō was also called yakunin, a person who was obliged to provide corvée labour and pay the land tax to overlords. These duties should be considered as parts of the services provided by honbyakushō as servants to their masters (Hasegawa, 1991: 73). In return, honbyakushō were granted a series of rights, including the rights to participate in village assemblies, hold village offices, draw

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shares of the common lands and water resources of the village and address the village headman on official business. We can see that yashikichi served as a spatial medium whereby overlords established a master–servant relationship with the honbyakushō. Any people in the village who did not own a plot of yashikichi were nago. Nago were not considered as formal members of the village community. ‘They had no share in village common land and water rights; they could not hold village office or take part in the selection of village officials or even join the village assembly in discussing the formal business of the community; they were normally not even members of the five-family groups into which the village was divided for administrative purposes’ (Smith, 1959: 10). Since nago did not receive yashikichi from their overlord, they were not formally required to pay land tax to the overlord, ‘even though they might actually pay taxes in the holder’s name’ (Smith, 1959: 10). Hence, members of the second circle of the ikkenmae no ie, together with the fudai, were also considered as having a status of nago as they did not own a piece of yashikichi. What they could do was to borrow a yashikichi from a honbyakushō through whom ‘they took part in the public life of the village’ (Smith, 1959: 10). In return, nago became a servant of, and provided labour and ceremonial services for, the honbyakushō. Again, yashikichi acts in the capacity as a spatial medium through which nago established a servant–master relationship with honbyakushō (Hasegawa, 1991: 47). Several observations relevant to this chapter can be made. Firstly, the ownership of yashikichi implied a bundle of rights and duties to the overlord. The Japanese referred to this bundle of rights and duties as hyakushō kabu (peasant share). Yashikichi was thus a symbol of hyakushō kabu. In fact, the hyakushō kabu was also called yashiki kabu. Therefore, honbyakushō can be considered as the owner of hyakushō kabu through owning a yashikichi. Secondly, the honbyakushō did not own the yashikichi as an individual; he instead represented his ikkenmae no ie in owning the yashikichi. Likewise, the honbyakushō owed land tax, labour services and other duties to the overlord on behalf of the ikkenmae no ie, and he was entitled to the rights in the village as the representative of the ie. Seen in this way, the ikkenmae no ie can be understood as a unit of rights and duties. That is why the ikkenmae no ie was also called the ie kabu in early modern Japan (Hasegawa, 1991: 77–82). Thirdly, the ikkenmae no ie as a kabu could be traded. If a nago had become rich enough to purchase an ie kabu, he could become a honbyakushō. By the same token, a honbyakushō could lose his

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status and become a nago if he sold his ie kabu (Hasegawa, 1991: 72). Nago could also purchase an extinct ikkenmae no ie in which no successor was produced. Fourthly, the ikkenmae no ie included not only the family of the honbyakushō but also those of nago, who can be the honbyakushō’s relatives (the second circle in Smith’s model) or persons not agnatically related (the third circle in Smith’s model). As mentioned earlier, nago lived apart from the honbyakushō’s family, and each had its own household economy. Nago’s families were not referred to as ikkenmae no ie. They were instead members of the ikkenmae no ie (Hasegawa, 1991: 71). An ikkenmae no ie therefore could include different familial groups that formed different economic entities (Hasegawa, 1991: 10–11). The question, then, is why the families of nago, who were not genealogically related to the honbyakushō, could be incorporated into the latter’s ie as members? I argue that the Japanese kinship system, unlike its counterpart in Chinese societies, can be construed both genealogically and socially. The succession of the ikkenmae no ie follows the so-called 4-p model: patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal and primogenitural (Bachnik, 1983: 160). The ikkenmae no ie was usually succeeded by one of the honbyakushō’s sons, who was not necessarily the eldest son. The succession included the headship, the family property, tradition, culture, occupation, business and the honbyakushō status, all of which would go to the successor only (Bachnik, 1983: 161, Fauve-Chamous, 2005: 232, Marshall, 2017: 269). As Smith observed: Property, especially land, might be divided among heirs; the family headship could not. Along with heirlooms, the main dwelling, ancestral graves, and plaques—indeed everything symbolizing family continuity—headship of the family passed to a single heir. It was this heir who perpetuated the family and through whose issue descent was traced, who performed the ancestral rites that linked the family to the remotest past and projected it indefinitely into the future. (Smith, 1959: 37; italics mine)

The non-successor sons either remained in their father’s ie (the second circle in Smith’s model) or simply left to establish their new ie, which was considered as a branch of their father’s ie. The branches were called bunke, while the original ie was then referred to as honke (Brown, 1966: 1133). The non-successor might get a small piece of land from the successor, but such a partition cannot be seen as dividing the original ie into two new ie

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‘or equal parts, rather, the existing family to the head in a new generation, at the same time establishing a branch representing a new, collateral line of descent’ (Smith, 1959: 38). In short, ‘[e]quality between two such lines— old and new, senior and cadet—was not to be expected. Not only was the branch new and its descent inferior—a matter of extreme importance in a society that valued few things so highly as age and lineage—but the branch was also founded by a grant of land which came to it, not as a matter of right or course, but as a gift from the main family’ (Smith, 1959: 38). The hierarchical relationship between the honke and the bunke was further signified symbolically by a series of reciprocal exchanges between each other. For example, ‘[t]he branch family gave labor when asked [by the honke], and received in return housing, tools, animals, water, fertilizer, firewood, and protection’ (Smith, 1959: 46). Hence, Japanese ie succession is different from its Chinese counterpart. In Chinese societies, sons are entitled to the property of their father’s or their male ancestors’ families because they are the extension of their father’s life. The qi shared between the father and the son is the genuine ‘owner’ of family property—they are thus the same ‘self’ distributed in distinct corporeal forms. Hence the father and the son as distinct corporeal forms of the same qi are entitled to the property owned by the qi. In the case of more than one son, the family property will be equally shared between the sons. The father cannot deny the sons’ equal entitlement to the family property because the family property is not owned by the father as an individual. There is no Western concept of individual ownership in Chinese societies (Chen, 1986: 112–175). Likewise, the notion of ‘being’ in Chinese kinship as ‘mutuality of being’ does not have the connotation of independent entities. Empirically, family property is controlled and managed by the father, who can allocate the income generated from the property. But the father cannot divide the family property as if inheritance were simply a matter of his own will (Wong, 2021b). Returning to Japan, non-genealogically related persons can also be incorporated into the ikkenmae no ie of their honbyakushō. A fudai’s marriage, for example, was traditionally arranged by his honbyakushō when he reached a suitable age. Upon marriage, he and his wife were to be given a new place to live within the yashikichi of the honbyakushō. They ‘might [also] be given cultivation rights to a piece of land and so established in some degree as autonomous’ (Smith, 1959: 20). Despite the establishment of his own conjugal family, the fudai still remained as a member of his honbyakushō’s ikkenmae no ie (Smith, 1959: 17). The honbyakushō

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continued to ‘provide him with clothing, cooking implements and—if he were to have any—pocket money to spend on festival days or at the nearest market’ (Smith, 1959: 17). In addition, the fudai household ‘was given the use of animals and tools when they were needed until it acquired its own’ (Smith, 1959: 20). In return, the fudai was supposed to provide labour to the honbyakushō (Smith, 1959: 21). In short, the honbyakushō, like a parent, ‘took responsibility for them [fudai] through the entire life cycle, including marriage, children, sickness, old age, and death’ (Smith, 1959: 18). The fudai was even invited to attend the annual ancestral rite of the honbyakushō to symbolically acknowledge his descent from the common ancestors (Smith, 1959: 21). All of this speaks to the fact that the fudai was the honbyakushō’s kin. The fudai’s newly established household, not unlike the non-­successor’s household, was also recognized as a bunke (Smith, 1959: 23). As Smith concludes: Fudai were similar not only to kin of the master in that they might be given land—or cultivation rights—and made branch families by him; but in acquiring land they also assumed a status in relation to the master very similar to that of nago. Consider the similarities: they were listed in the population register subordinately to the holder rather than separately; they held house and land from him; and they gave him labor and other services in return. These underlying similarities are far more impressive than any difference in names. (Smith, 1959: 22)

I have to add that the major reason that the status of the fudai to the honbyakushō was akin to that of the nago was that both of them did not own a yashikichi but borrowed it from their honbyakushō. Hence, both the fudai and the nago are subordinated to the honbyakushō. The Japanese kinship, not unlike the Chinese kinship, can thus be understood as ‘mutuality of being’, which is defined genealogically as well as by the criteria of sharing the same yashikichi and the associated hierarchical relationship between the honbyakushō and the nago/fudai. While the Japanese kinship is construed genealogically, as we can see from the succession of the honbyakushō’s ikkenmae no ie, it can also be constructed postnatally, as evidenced in the way the fudai and the nago were

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incorporated into the honbyakushō’s ikkenmae no ie. The Japanese kinship therefore can be constructed both genealogically and postnatally.10 The hierarchical relationship between the honke and bunke speaks to the major distinctions within the ikkenmae no ie: the distinction between the successor and the non-successor, which further gives rise to another major distinction—the distinction between the permanent member and temporary member. The successor was the permanent member of the honke, while the non-successor was the temporary member as he is supposed to move out from the honke and then established his own ie, which constituted the bunke of the successor’s ie. ‘Permanency should not be confused with residence, because it denotes a quality of membership in the ie’ (Bachnik, 1983: 164), as evidenced by the fact that ‘[a]ncestors are differentiated into temporary and permanent so that only the two successors occupying permanent positions become permanent ancestors’ (Bachnik, 1983: 165). Taking all these together, the Japanese ie should be understood as an organization of positions rather than a kinship organization (Bachnik, 1983; Kitaoji, 1971). ‘“Position” (or “place”) defines the relation of each person to the household, rather than to one another’ (Bachnik, 1983: 164), while kinship defines the interpersonal relationship among people. According to Kitaoji (1971), the basic structure of the Japanese ie consists of three pairs of permanent positions: the retired head of the ie and his wife, the current head (the successor of the retired ie head) and his wife and the successor of the current ie head and his wife. The distinction between the permanent and the temporary member exists not only in their lifetime but also when they pass away. As Bachnik quotes Smith as saying: The deceased are not equal in death, although the ordering of the tablets on the altar shelves seldom reflects the inequalities. Instead, the inequalities are embodied in the tablets themselves, and are based on age, sex, status in the household, and position in society. (Smith 1974: 129 quoted by Bachnik, 1983: 165)

10  It is not quite correct to say that fudai and nago were treated like kin; they indeed are kin to the honbyakushō. Nor can the relationship between the honbyakushō and his fudai and nago be understood as ‘fictive’ kinship because to do so implies an ontological assumption of kinship as biology, not culture, which is simply not true, as testified by many anthropologists of kinship.

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Understanding the Japanese ie as an organization of positions renders the ie succession akin to the recruitment of the successor for the permanent position. That the ie ‘should continue takes precedence over how it continues’ (Bachnik, 1983: 167; italics mine). Hence, the recruitment of the successor does not necessarily follow patrilineal rule. Instead, it is ultimately based on whether the successor is competent to perpetuate the ie (Bachnik, 1983: 167). That is why honbyakushōs’ sons might be passed over in favour of someone who was not blood-related but competent enough to succeed the ikenmae no ie (Moore, 1970; Pelzel, 1970). This practice was implemented to ensure that the recruited head was competent enough to continue the ie and make it prosperous. The interest of the ie is considered more important than that of the genealogical relations.

5  The Japanese Ie and the Japanese Kaisha (Company)11 Inasmuch as the family in different cultural contexts will give rise to different family firms in ways specific to that culture, family firms cannot simply be understood as economic phenomena. However, I am not simply arguing that family firms are culturally contextualized. I argue rather that family firms are a pragmatic objectification of the family order in the sense that the character and form of family firms are objectifications of an underlying set of meaningful relationships of the family order. I am going to use the Japanese case here to exemplify rather than verify the general points. There are mainly two major theoretical attempts to understand the joint-stock company. Neoclassical economists tend to take the joint-stock company as an instrument to maximize shareholders’ returns, while their colleagues in transactional cost economics prefer to see it as a tool to minimize transactional cost (Aoki, 1988: 7). They share the view that the joint-­ stock company is always a means to an end. As a means, the firm itself has no intrinsic value; it can be discarded if the firm is no longer needed. As Joan Fontrodona and Alejo Sison argue: ‘[a]s an institution, the firm is of no value in itself’ (2006: 34; italics mine). However, my anthropological study of Yaohan Hong Kong (Wong, 1999), the subsidiary of a Japanese 11  I do not mean that all Japanese understand the kaisha in the same way because they obviously do not. Nor do I say that the idea of the kaisha presented here is the only possible one. However, I do say that the idea of the kaisha is a prerequisite for the understanding of the realities of Japanese companies.

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supermarket in Hong Kong, discovered that Japanese people tended to treat the kaisha (company) as an end rather than a means. The kaisha was given intrinsic value as the Japanese considered the kaisha as an eternal and supreme existence, for which all the stakeholders of the kaisha— including shareholders, management and employees—have to sacrifice their own interests. I have offered a thorough analysis of the notion of the kaisha elsewhere (Wong, 1999: 31–50) and thus want to be very brief here. In contrast with the ‘common sense’ view on companies that ‘shareholders own companies’, in Japan shareholders are not considered as the owners of the kaisha. Indeed, due to a series of institutional arrangements, the shareholder generally has far less control of the kaisha than the management, who have tremendous freedom in managing the company. Likewise, management is not an agent representing the interests of shareholders. Rather, management is the representative of the kaisha itself, and thus the kaisha is treated as if it is an interested body. Since the overriding interest of the kaisha is its survival and prosperity, any managers whose behaviour might threaten the survival of the kaisha will be forced to step down. In spite, then, of the fact that the management is given the absolute power to rule the kaisha, it can hardly be considered as its owner. Finally, employees of the kaisha are expected to be controlled by, and exist for, the kaisha as if they are owned by the kaisha. Seen as such, the term ‘kaisha’ is not just a translation of the Western ‘joint-stock company’, even though the two share similar structures and organizational features. They therefore cannot be treated as having the same meaning. We need to situate the kaisha in the kinship order that makes it possible. 5.1  The Kaisha as the Pragmatic Objectification of the Ie The kaisha is the pragmatic objectification of the ie, by which I meant the kaisha is the actualization of the meaningful relations between the successor and the non-successor, between the head of the ie and his successor and between the ie head and his non-successor. Of course, the ie cannot be compared with modern enterprises in terms of structural differentiation and functional specialization. However, they share one recursive historical feature, starting from the traditional ie via pre-modern business establishment, to modern corporations in Japan: the superiority, continuity and prosperity of the ie and the kaisha override all other stakeholders and interests. This recursive feature further explains the ownership and

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succession management of Japanese family businesses. In this regard, the history of Yaohan is very illustrative.12 Ryōhei Wada served as a live-in employee of Yaohan, a grocery shop in Odawara, Japan in the 1920s. He proved to be a competent businessman to the owner, Hanjirō Tashima, who not only agreed to marry off his daughter Katsu Tashima to Ryōhei, but also provided capital for his son-­ in-­law to start a branch store of Yaohan in Atami, a hot spring resort town 50 miles west of Tokyo. In the first thirty years of his grocery store, Ryōhei and his wife controlled the operation of the store. As more family members joined the company, Ryōhei expanded the store to include product lines other than groceries. Katsu gave birth to five sons, four of them eventually joining their father’s business. Kazuo Wada, Ryōhei’s eldest son, joined the company in 1951 and took on the role of the company’s buyer of supplies. In 1957, Ryōhei’s second son followed Kazuo and helped to establish the company’s bakery business. At the same time, the company changed its name from the Yaohan Shōten (Yaohan store) to the Yaohan Food Department Store. It was changed again to Yaohan Department Stores when Ryōhei’s third son was called by his father to join the company and helped to set up the fish, textile and houseware sections, thereby converting the company into a general merchandise store. At almost the same time, the company started to modernize its managerial system. Upon the return from a business trip to the US in 1961, Kazuo Wada, at that time senior managing director of Yaohan, proposed to his father to build a supermarket chain within Shizuoka Prefecture, where Yaohan started its business. Ryōhei welcomed the proposal and at the same time handed over the company to Kazuo, who took up its presidency. Ryōhei himself became the chairman. Kazuo then started to build a supermarket chain within Shizuoka Prefecture. In order to fund this expansion project, the Wada family decided to sell 30 per cent of the company’s shares to the employees who had worked in the company for more than three years. The rest were held by the Wada family. With the employees’ investment, Kazuo managed to open ten stores from 1962 to 1970. In 1965, Hanjirō’s store merged with Kazuo’s branch to become Yaohan’s Odawara branch, and Hanjirō and his eldest son joined the company’s board of directors. 12  The history of Yaohan narrated here is a shortened version of the section in my book Japanese Bosses, Chinese Workers: Power and Control in a Hong Kong Megastore (Wong, 1999: 20–24).

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Four years later, the board expanded and recruited Ryōhei’s fourth son to be in charge of the company’s chain store expansion. In 1971, Kazuo set up Yaohan’s first overseas store in Brazil. Although the company was forced to close its Brazilian business in the second half of the 1970s, it continued to open stores in other countries. In 1995, the company was operating 57 stores in twelve countries and regions. Funding Yaohan’s overseas development required a great amount of capital. The company was first listed on the Nagoya Stock Exchange in 1983, and on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1986. However, although Yaohan had gone public, the Wadas remained the company’s largest shareholders. The rapid overseas expansion also forced Kazuo to start delegating authority to outsiders. The company recruited more and more non-Wada board members, whose number surpassed that of Wada family members in 1977. However, the Wada family did not lose control of Yaohan as they continued to occupy the most important positions on the board, including those of chairman, president and vice-president. Moreover, the Wada family continued to appoint relatives in important positions. In 1990 Kazuo moved Yaohan’s headquarters to Hong Kong, where Kazuo established a private company called Yaohan International as the group’s holding company, through which he controlled his other business establishments. In light of this case, two major observations can be made. The first is the succession of ownership and management. Recall that Ryōhei passed the presidency of Yaohan to his eldest son, Kazuo Wada. This, in fact, follows the conventional way of the succession of the headship of the ie: only one among Ryōhei’s five sons took up the headship of the ie. As the new head of the ie, Kazuo Wada naturally also succeeded the headship of his father’s company. I have to emphasize that the succession of the company, not unlike that of the Japanese ie, includes not just the headship but also the management and ownership. Kazuo, as the successor, was given the supreme power and authority to manage the family business. His four brothers were supposed to subject themselves to Kazuo’s authority because of their non-successor status. Even Ryōhei himself had to submit himself to Kazuo’s authority after he retired from the headship of the Wada ie. He had no say in the management of Yaohan, the company he founded and developed. Instead of moving out of Ryōhei’s ie, the four sons remained in the ie as non-successor members. They were put in charge of the different departments of the company, but they could never challenge Kazuo’s decisions on the strategies and management of their family firm. For

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example, Ryōhei’s third son was sent to generate business in Brazil by Kazuo. I was told that he did not agree with Kazuo’s risky decision to spread the company’s business to a place where nobody in the family had the experience of doing business. Despite the disagreement with Kazuo’s decision, the third son still had to follow the decision made by Kazuo and moved to Brazil. Kazuo’s decision turned out to be wrong, and the Brazil subsidiary went bankrupt in the second half of the 1970s. It was the third son who took all the responsibility and was exiled to Brazil forever. This observation also speaks to one of the major differences with the succession and management of Chinese family firms. While sons of the same father share the same qi and therefore their relationship is equal, the filiation of each son to his father is, nevertheless, unique. And thus each son is independent from others. Wherever the family owns property, or the father holds corporate offices, a slight discriminatory distribution of material and/or social values among brothers will easily trigger conflicts, precisely because brothers are equal. Such conflicts inevitably lead to the division of family property (fen jiachan). Fen jiachan usually is followed by the division of the household (fen-jia). Fen-jia necessarily means the father’s household is divided into several households, each of them headed by the sons. In the event of fen-jia, the father’s household vanishes. I have to emphasize that fen jiachan and fen-jia are built into the Chinese kinship order because these two practices are the result of the unique filiation of each son to his father. That is why fen-jia tends to be prevalent in Chinese societies. Chinese family firms also tend to break down into several companies headed by each of the father’s sons when the feng-jia occurs in the father’s household. Returning to the Japanese case, the second observation is that, despite Kazuo’s domination of the ownership and management of his family business, he still had to submit his family interest to the overriding interest of the kaisha. Kazuo himself had three daughters and one son. According to the family tradition of the Wada family, which was like that of most Japanese family-owned businesses, the only son, Genichi Wada, should have succeeded him as head of the family business. He, however, reportedly did not maintain a good relationship with his father and his grandmother, Kazu. Kazuo seldom mentioned him in public, and therefore not many people knew that Kazuo had a son. I was first told about Genichi and his problematic relationship with Kazuo and Kazu in an interview with a Japanese employee in the early 1990s. Genichi did not go to

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university; he even refused to work for Yaohan because he did not want to succeed his father’s company. Another informant who used to work with Genichi in Yaohan Japan told me that all employees of the company knew that Genichi was not a promising successor. I was also told by the company’s advisor, who is very close to the Wada family, that Kazuo had already realized that Genichi held little promise of commercial success and was considering other candidates. As of 1997, Kazuo had not yet decided who would be his successor. The rumour circulating within the company at that time suggested that Kazuo’s son-in-law was a possible candidate. He had been appointed the director of Yaohan International in April 1993 and then promoted to the president of Yaohan Hong Kong in 1996. Such a promotion, as one of my Japanese informants interpreted it, symbolized that Kazuo had decided to let him take over the company gradually.13 Kazuo’s decision reveals that the son-in-law was considered as a member of the Wada’s ie. Recall that Japanese kinship can be constructed both genealogically and socially. Due to cultural reasons, in the management of the Wada family business, the son-in-law could be made a member of the Wada ie and the successor of the Wada family business. Kazuo’s succession plan, however, could not have occurred in a Chinese family firm for two major reasons: the Chinese father cannot deny his sons’ succession rights of the family property and, by extension, his family firm; and a Chinese son-in-law could never be able to succeed his father-in-law’s qi, nor can he become a kin member of his father-in-law’s family, no matter how much he contributes to his father-in-law’s family firms. He is and remains an outsider, and as an outsider, a son-in-law is not allowed to succeed his father-in-law’s family firm in Chinese societies. Kazuo’s decision also exemplifies that the continuity of the kaisha was more important than that of Kazuo’s own descent line. Even the owner of a company still has to sacrifice his family interests for the sake of the perpetuation of the kaisha.

6  Conclusion As this chapter demonstrates, the family firm is not an ontologically or structurally distinctive entity unencumbered by cultural features. It can hardly be considered as an economic phenomenon, as the family firm, as I argue and verify with the Japanese case in this chapter, is the pragmatic  The decision was not able to be realized as Yaohan went bankrupt in 1997.

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objectification of the family whose meaning is culturally specific, and thus its conduct varies according to the culture it operates within. It follows that different cultures have different familial forms and characteristics; and different families have different family firms. Hence, what is crucial here is the cultural specificity of the family and the family firm because only the former is able to specify the latter and thus explain its particularities. The human universal concept of the family assumed by management scientists, if it really exists, cannot explain, for instance, the characteristics of the kaisha, which are particularly Japanese. In anthropological explanations, the family and the family business are emic all the way.

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Chun, A. (1985). Land is to live: A study of the concept of Tsu in a Hakka Chinese village, New Territories, Hong Kong. PhD dissertation. Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago. Fauve-Chamous, A. (2005). A comparative study of family transmission systems in the Central Pyrenees and northern Japan. The History of the Family, 10(3), 231–248. Fontrodona, J., & Sison, A. J. G. (2006). The nature of the firm, agency theory and shareholder theory: A critique from philosophical anthropology. Journal of Business Ethics, 66, 33–42. Frank, H., Suess-Reyes, J., Fuetsch, E., & Kessler, A. (2019). Introducing the entrepriseness of business families: A research agenda. In E. Memili & C. Dibrell (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of heterogeneity among family firms (pp. 263–296). Palgrave Macmillan. Geertz, G. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic Books. Gupta, V., & Levenburg, N. (2010). A thematic analysis of cultural variations in family businesses: The CASE project. Family Business Review, 23(2), 155–169. Hasegawa, Z. (1991). Nippon shakai no kiso kōzō: Ie, dōzoku, sonraku no kenkyū [the structure of the base of Japanese society: The research of households, lineages, and villages]. Horyutsu Bunka Sha. Kitaoji, H. (1971). The structure of the Japanese family. American Anthropologist, 73(5), 1036–1057. Kushins, E. R., & Behounek, E. (2020). Using sociological theory to problematize family business research. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 11, 1–9. Marshall, R. (2017). Gender inequality and family formation in Japan. Asian Anthropology, 16(4), 261–278. Moore, R. A. (1970). Adoption and samurai mobility in Tokugawa Japan. Journal of Asian Studies, 29(3), 617–632. Ochiai, E. (2013). Paradigm shifts in Japanese family sociology. International Journal of Japanese Sociology, 22, 104–127. Pelzel, J.  C. (1970). Japanese kinship: A comparison. In M.  Freedman (Ed.), Family and kinship in Chinese society (pp. 227–248). Stanford University Press. Sahlins, M. (1985). Islands of history. The University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M. (2000a). Sentimental pessimism and ethnographic experience, or why culture is not a disappearing ‘object’. In L. Daston (Ed.), Biographies of scientific objects (pp. 158–202). The University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M. (2000b). Introduction. Culture in Practice: selected essays (pp. 9–32). Chicago: The University of Chicago. Sahlins, M. (2013). What kinship is and is not. The University of Chicago Press. Sharma, P. (2004). An overview of the field of family business studies: Current status and directions for the future. Family Business Review, 17(1), 1–36. Shiga, S. (1967). Chūgoku Kazokuhō no Genri [principles of Chinese family law]. Shobunsha.

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Shiga, S. (1978). Family property and the law of inheritance in traditional China. In D. C. Buxbaum (Ed.), Chinese family law and social change: In historical and comparative perspective (pp. 109–150). University of Washington Press. Smith, T.  C. (1959). The agrarian origins of modern Japan. Standard University Press. Wong, H. W. (1999). Japanese bosses, Chinese workers: Power and control in a Hong Kong megastore. University of Hawaii Press. Wong, H. W. (2015). Taking culture seriously: The role of culture in the study of business. Journal of Business Anthropology, 4(1), 114–150. Wong, H.  W. (2017). What is Chinese kinship and what is not? In M.  Han, H. Kawai, & H. W. Wong (Eds.), Family, ethnicity, and state in Chinese culture under the impact of globalization (pp. 83–104). Talyor and Francis. Wong, H. W. (2020). It is not that all cultures have business, but that all business has culture. In R.  Mir & A.  L. Fayard (Eds.), The Routledge companion to anthropology and business (pp. 453–472). Routledge. Wong, H.  W. (2021a). Introduction. Journal of Business Anthropology, 10(2), 226–240. Wong, H. W. (2021b). How the Chinese think about the family: The ‘family’ in Chinese family firms. Journal of Business Anthropology, 10(2), 241–261. Yanagisako, S. (2019). Family firms as kinship enterprises. Economics Discussion Papers, 2019-12. Institute for the World Economy.

PART V

Family Business and Historical Change

CHAPTER 9

The Legacy of the Past in Business Families of Northern Italy Simone Ghezzi

1   Introduction As an anthropologist studying Italian industrial districts, I have taken much time to get to know many entrepreneurs and visit their family-run firms. One of the questions that I almost always ask them (and other interlocutors such as trade union representatives and local politicians) is why there are so many local people running small and medium-sized enterprises in the industrial district they live in, even though they consider it very troublesome or not very profitable. This question is a way to immerse myself in the cultural milieu of my interlocutors and to grasp the ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1992) that gives me the sense of the locale. It is also a technique to see whether their answers converge to constitute an official discourse or, rather, a series of contending views. More recently, this way of eliciting world views and beliefs as possible alternative forms of local knowledge has been termed ‘para-ethnography’ by Douglas Holmes and

S. Ghezzi (*) University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_9

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George Marcus (Holmes & Marcus, 2006). They define it as ‘the intellectual response to a retreat of those forms of technical knowledge— whether in arts, science, business, finance, politics, government, or law—that have been underwritten and contextualized historically by the nation-state’ (Fisher & Downey, 2006: 33–34). I have collected different kinds of answers from the field,1 but there is one recurrent response that seems to create agreement among different parties. Here is a selection of examples of this recurring answer, from conversations and interviews: ‘Working and making plenty of sacrifices is in the DNA of the Brianzoli’; ‘It’s in the blood. Otherwise you wouldn’t do this’; ‘Industriousness and ingenuity are in the DNA of the Brianzoli’; ‘The Brianza has a strong entrepreneurial DNA’. All these statements are surprisingly alien to the cultural dimension that is frequently evoked when labour is brought up as a topic of discussion. Or rather, culture is not one of the first concepts that come to their mind when I usually pose the question to them. Obviously, in phrasing the question, I willingly avoid mentioning the word ‘culture’ in order not to influence their answer. And, indeed, what they express through their own words are motivations and behaviours profoundly rooted in the realm of the natural world, reminiscent of the ongoing nature-culture debate, which anthropologists are all too familiar with (Carsten, 2004; Descola & Pálsson, 2004; Hann, 2002; Ingold, 1996). When they respond, for example, ‘it’s in our blood’ or ‘it’s in our DNA’, they use biological metaphors to communicate an important message regarding their own culture to themselves as well as to their interlocutor (myself). Perhaps, they want to express the idea that by associating their behaviour with the natural world, they make a strong statement regarding their distinctiveness and their drive; they anchor it in place, but at the same time they remove it from the erosion of time and from their personal life history. Entrepreneurship seems so natural precisely because it is perceived as an overwhelming experience deeply shared locally. It appears to have genetic features not only because it is pervasive in the district, but also because it appears as an enduring phenomenon across generations. Thus, in denying the cultural dimension of entrepreneurship and arguing in favour of a locally shared biological heritage, paradoxically they are stressing the importance of that very dimension, although in an 1  In this chapter, I discuss the findings stemming from my ongoing research on entrepreneurship and labour in the industrial districts of the Brianza. Fieldwork is being carried out in the Monza district and the southern parts of Como and Lecco districts.

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implicit and unintentional way. It is precisely this essentializing and naturalizing discourse that is related to culture, exactly as Brumann (1999) points out: ‘Whether anthropologists like it or not, it appears that people […] want culture, and they often want it in precisely the bounded, reified, essentialized, and timeless fashion that most of us reject’ (p. 11).2 In this chapter, I take these emic statements as a point of departure to explore the origins of such ‘biological’ explanation. From my point of view, the anthropological interest in the past becomes essentially a means to shed light on the present and debunk the ‘genetics’ of entrepreneurship to restore its historical and cultural dimensions (Ling-Fung Chau & Wong, 2021; Wong, 2021; Yau, 2021). In particular, my focus is on kin groups, their ties and the broader setting that influences business practices and entrepreneurial behaviour in family business. Yet, a word of caution is necessary. By digging into the past, I am not embarking on a historical project to discover the origins of current codes of conduct in contemporary family businesses (de Lomnitz & Pérez Lizaur, 1987; Pérez-Lizaur, 1997; Yanagisako, 2002). Rather, I will try to show that what seems so peculiar in the industrial district, such as the considerable presence of family firms and entrepreneurs supported by the family group, can be better understood as a processual category, which can be studied from back to front. In so doing, we will see that these peculiarities are linked to the past in certain ways. It is a perspective that has its foundational principles in the ‘New Science’ by Giambattista Vico: The nature of things is nothing but their coming into being (nascimento) at certain times and in certain fashions. Whenever the time and fashion is thus and so, such and not otherwise are the things that come into being. (Vico, 1984: 58)

Following Vico’s argument, that the present is the result of a historical social process and that current meanings are built on old ones, I will incorporate his insightful approach into my discussion. In order to understand why family and firm conflate in a specific organizational form of production, that is, the family-run firm, so often clustered in specific areas, I will focus on the historical articulation among family, land and Catholic cooperativism. In various ways, all three contributed to mobilize multifarious 2  I am grateful to the editor of this book, Tobias Koellner, for his insightful comments and bibliographic suggestions (including Brumann’s quotation).

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forms of capital—human, physical, social, cultural and economic—that were crucial to the formation and development of the industrial district. This is what can be drawn from the ethnographic research I carried out in Brianza, in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy, where two industrial districts, the furniture making and the metal working ones, are still relevant in the global economy. Of course, each place is bound to specific practices and situations, and Italy is indeed a highly heterogeneous country; thus, it is impossible to argue that the developing path of Brianza is a model that can be extrapolated to other areas. However, it may be useful in a comparative perspective, in order to understand the extent of the embeddedness of historical, socio-economic and cultural features in those regions where small and micro family-run firms are overwhelmingly widespread. Broadly speaking, the notion of embeddedness is used in the meaning that was construed by Polanyi (Polanyi, 2001; Polanyi et  al., 1957), whereby the social actor is to be cognized as an individual within relational, institutional and cultural contexts, rather than an atomized person (Ghezzi, 2018; Ghezzi & Mingione, 2007; Krippner, 2001). By the same token, I want to bring to the fore historical elements, socio-­economic features and cultural aspects that can inform family business as an ‘embedded’ institution. Moreover, my argument does not purport to claim a teleological course of events. To paraphrase E.P.  Thompson’s classic book on the English working class, history—in my case the local history of labour—is not just lived but made by people’s agency as a response to specific events (Thompson, 2013) within a context of social relationships in which, as I will show, kin ties play an important role.

2  The Importance of Kin Ties That kin ties could be somehow connected to the mushrooming of family firms (Wong, 2021) in Italian industrial districts became more than mere anecdotal evidence with the influential works of the demographer and statistician John Hajnal (1982) and the British historian Peter Laslett (1983). A major implication of their findings was that contemporary family forms can be looked at as the outcome of a long process that has followed some old patterns, rather than as an abrupt break from them. Hajnal hypothesized two major family patterns in pre-industrial Europe: a north-­ western European system and a southern European system. The former

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was characterized by the predominance of nuclear families, with distinctive formation rules: • Late marriage for both sexes (mean ages were over 26 for men and over 23 for women). • Neolocal residence for the nuclear family: the married couple would be in charge of their household, and the husband in particular became the head of the family. • Patrilocal residence in the case of stem families: the eldest son would take over the farm only when the father retired. • ‘Circulation of servants’, that is, children were sent away to live and work in other families. By contrast, the joint household system of southern Europe presented the following features: • Earlier marriage for men and women (mean ages were under 26 for men and under 21 for women). • Co-residency: the young married couple(s) would live with an older couple (one of the newly-wed’s parents) who would remain in charge of the larger household. Usually, sons would marry in and daughters would marry out. New individuals added to the household were kept and maintained within it. • Fission of the household: the co-residency of several married couples and the high costs of childbearing could cause division and the formation of other smaller family units (Hajnal, 1982: 452). Laslett proposed similar formation rules, but a more articulated distinction: a fourfold division of marriage and familial pattern classified according to geographically defined areas of Europe, ‘which seem to have had distinguishable forms of family and household’ (1983: 516). The four areas are north-western, western or central, Mediterranean and eastern. Laslett advanced the argument that the Mediterranean type of household formation is typified by the sharecropping families of central Italy, namely, patrilocal joint households. He slightly departed from Hajnal’s formation rules of the Mediterranean type, by suggesting a higher age gap between spouses, low levels of celibacy, low proportion of widows who remarried

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and multiple households possibly with more than two generations within the domestic group.3 The main problem with Hajnal and Laslett’s typologies lies in the incorrect assumption of a Mediterranean pattern. In his overview of the literature on the research on family and household in Italy in the last decades of the twentieth century, Pier Paolo Viazzo writes that ‘testing the “Mediterranean model” rapidly became one of the prime goals of research for historical demographers and family historians working on southern Europe’ (Viazzo, 2003: 116). Indeed, it became clear, as a great deal of evidence was being assembled, that Mediterranean Europe revealed a variety of family forms, ‘an unexpected degree of regional and sub-regional variability’ (Viazzo & Zanotelli, 2010: 47). Hajnal’s and Laslett’s models overlook the macroscopic differences between north/central Italy and the south. While the sharecropping system was quite widespread from Brianza4 to Tuscany, it was rarely practised in the south, where peasants were mainly day labourers (braccianti) or small tenants. The households were principally nuclear and localized in small urban centres or rural villages. The practice of the extensive cultivation of vast latifundia (large agricultural estates) outside the village caused peasants to often walk long distances to reach the land every day; hence, the place of residence and the place of work were separate. In such conditions, the family structure and its organization were clearly very different from those of sharecroppers who,

3  One recent attempt to grasp the differences between European countries and regions has been provided by Gruber and Szoltysek in their patriarchy index, ‘which departs from the often value laden, monolithic and ideologically determined discourse of Western feminism’ (Gruber & Szołtysek, 2016: 5). 4  In Brianza, this system of farm tenancy underwent several contractual transformations in the nineteenth century. The sharecropping arrangements were set in a way that the tenant families had to produce food for their own subsistence and produce surplus for the landowner, resulting in very marginal production for the market, where the produce consisted mainly of the surplus given to the landowner. In the second half of the eighteenth century, especially between 1770 and 1780, wheat prices increased substantially in Europe, and as the demand for this cash crop and other products of agriculture kept rising, such arrangements were rapidly supplanted by a new contract, the ‘mixed grain rent’ (contratto misto a grano), which gave the owner greater discretionary power. Such a contract maintained the sharecropping system with respect to the production of grapes, silk cocoons and other obligations, but introduced the payment of a rent in kind, that is, wheat, a crop that was notoriously subject to large fluctuations in price and in quantity due to market demand and climatic conditions (Ghezzi, 2007).

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practising intensive cultivation, used to live on and work in, or nearby, the land they physically occupied (Barbagli, 1984). Although these subsequent investigations have proved that there is no such thing as a distinctive Mediterranean family form, two aspects central to Laslett’s research were neglected at that time. One was the work contribution of each family member and the recruitment of additional labour; the other was the welfare function of the household that ‘shed light on how families and domestic groups had taken care of orphans, the sick and disabled, the elderly, and others in need’ (Viazzo & Zanotelli, 2010: 48). Both points are relevant for my argument on the importance of kin ties and the possible origin of their strength. I will begin by briefly discussing the latter. According to Laslett, the prevalence of the nuclear household in most parts of Western and Northern Europe in pre-industrial times meant that any critical event during the life cycle of the family may cause ‘nuclear hardship’, that is, a fall in the means of support in families (Laslett, 1988: 153). Calamities could hardly be dealt with by the nuclear family due to its inability to be self-sufficient; thus, they had to rely on ‘what is usually called the “community” or what I prefer to call the “collectivity”: friends and neighbours, along with the church and charitable institutions, as well as the village, town or state’ (Laslett, 1988: 154). This external support constitutes the base for the diffusion of the relief system for the poor in England as a precursor of the provisions by the modern welfare state. Laslett then raised the question ‘as to whether these large-scale familial groupings can legitimately be said to have had welfare as a main purpose’ and suggested that perhaps sharecropping families were indeed able to better support their members during difficult periods. Ten years later, the historian and demographer David Sven Reher formalized this issue further in a seminal and highly influential article (Reher, 1998). He too believed that co-residential groups would express strength and resilience, but he argued that the main divide was not the household structure, but its geography. As he puts it: ‘It is not difficult to identify areas where families and family ties are relatively “strong” and others where they are relatively “weak” […] The geography of these strong and weak family systems does not appear to follow the classic division of Europe into stem-family and nuclear-family regions. The dividing line, in some ways, is actually much simpler, with the center and north of Europe (Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Low Countries, much of Germany and Austria), together with North American society, being characterized by relatively weak family

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links, and the Mediterranean region by strong family ties’ (p. 203). The care for vulnerable members is a good case in point. ‘Traditionally in Mediterranean societies, much of the aid given to vulnerable members of society came from the family or from individual charity, while in northern societies this was largely accomplished through public and private institutions. The classic example of the institutionalization of solidarity in Northern Europe was the English Poor Laws, through which the collectivity came to the aid of the needy and the poor. In Mediterranean Europe the family was essential for the wellbeing of its more vulnerable members, while elsewhere it was much less so’ (p. 209). It is interesting to note that in the same period, the Danish politologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen was revisiting his well-known typology of the three welfare regimes in capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990) by adding a new type: the so-called familialistic regime. In this system, ‘public policy assumes—indeed insists—that households must carry the principal responsibility for their members’ welfare’ […]. Familialistic regimes are often influenced by Catholic social teachings and the principle of subsidiarity: limiting public interference to situations where primary social networks— read ‘family’—fail (Esping-Andersen, 2003: 51). It is true that boundaries of different family systems are not easily traceable and that sub-regional variabilities can be, and will probably be, identified by new studies; nonetheless, there seem to be persistent differences today that can be hardly coincidental (Micheli, 2021). Even more so if one considers that these pre-industrial domestic groups which historians and demographers brought to our attention have all but disappeared. What we can see today is thus a cultural legacy of the past. A legacy that turned out to be an immaterial asset for the establishment of entrepreneurial families, as will be argued below. Moreover, it may be a key aspect to further conceptualize the notion of ‘kinship enterprise’—as proposed by Sylvia Yanagisako—that is, ‘the projects of collectivities of people who construe themselves to be connected by enduring family bonds and whose relations are structured by beliefs, sentiments and commitments attached to these bonds’ (Yanagisako, 2019: 6). Consequently, it can provide insights into the very notion of ‘business family’, as defined in this book by Tobias Koellner (see the Introduction to this volume and 2022), a notion stemming from the above-mentioned concept by Yanagisako. Both similarly attempt to approach family and business in a more comprehensive way, beyond the traditional boundaries of each discipline.

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Indeed, a major implication of the notion of strong ties among kin is that it challenges the economic notion of entrepreneurship as an individualistic economic action unaffected by the family context. The entrepreneurship that is ubiquitous throughout industrial districts is by contrast profoundly entrenched in the family environment, which provides crucial resources: human capital, labour, trust as well as self-exploitative relations. No entrepreneurial planning could be put into practice without the collective effort of the family and the willingness of its members to embark upon such a risky and potentially lifelong project. Refusal to adhere to the entrepreneurial ambition of the leader, especially in the early stages of the enterprise, may result in painful failure for the firm itself and overall may compromise the well-being of the family. By the same token, those same ties may work against entrepreneurship if they are stretched or broken, as Schumpeter had already foreseen several decades ago: ‘With the decline of the driving power supplied by the family motive, the businessman’s time horizon shrinks, roughly, to his life expectancy. And he might now be less willing than he was to fulfil that function of earning, saving and investing […]’ (Schumpeter, 2005:161). Indeed, in my research, I have collected several life histories of entrepreneurs who lost interest in their business as they realized that their children’s plans were not compatible with their own, or when something tragic happened, such as the death of a child (Ghezzi, 2016).

3  Family Work Contribution The second aspect I am going to discuss is the relevance of the work contribution in pre-industrial joint family households, in particular among members of the sharecropping families of Brianza, which was the principal family form in the area. The complexity of their work arrangement and their relation to the land may shed light on the working capacity and the organizational skill of the family-run firms that were established several decades later in the 1950s. These were large patrilaterally extended families (Kertzer, 1984: 34) in which the authority was in the hands of the senior couple, usually the father and mother—the so-called reggitore and reggitrice. Patrilocal post-­ marital residence was the customary rule: there was an overwhelming tendency for sons to bring their wives into the parental household and for daughters to marry out and move into the household of their husbands. These large households would comprise up to four, five or even more

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married couples with in-laws, settled on plots of land of various sizes (ranging from 3 ha to 15 ha) allocated according to the number of family members (over 12 years old) able to work. The buildings that could host such large units were called cascine and corti,5 which also belonged to the landowner. In the subsistence economy of Brianza, peasant families were bound by a contract with the landowners, and the male family head (the patriarch reggitore) was morally as well as legally responsible to honour it with the family he represented. In the eyes of the landowner, he and the other able-­ bodied male adult members of the family were responsible for the agricultural chores and the quality of the crop. Women did contribute to some farm work, such as digging, hoeing and harvesting; yet, their responsibilities lay mainly with other activities, such as domestic chores, food provision, childcare, raising of farm animals and practising sericulture (usually under the supervision of the bigattiere, the expert in silk cocoon breeding). Children, on the other hand, not only undertook marginal tasks, but also created additional consumption pressures; in other words, as Kertzer (1984: 33) has put it, they ‘were more liability than asset to the farm’. Hence, it should not be surprising to observe that women and children outnumbered men in the early silk and cotton mills that were established in the area. Instead, what may surprise is the stark difference between the industrial statistics of this period and the information provided by the population registers (registri d’anagrafe) of the three localities6 which I selected for my case studies. Since households were defined according to the occupation of the male family heads, the population registers were particularly prone to overlook women’s occupations and neglect children’s labour entirely. Regardless of the extent of their work, children— whether employed seasonally in mills and farms or engaged in activities for domestic industry—were not defined or viewed as ‘producers’ or wage earners. In other words, they did not have an occupational status. As far as women’s work was concerned, it was only towards the end of the 1800s that the compilers of the population registers began to record their occupation less desultorily. This was not the intentional result of new methods 5  Still widespread today all over northern Italy, the former were made up of various buildings, the rooms for the household members, the haylofts and the outhouses; the latter were less complex square constructions enclosing a courtyard. 6  Besana Brianza, Carate Brianza, Agliate: all located in the administrative districts of Monza and Brianza.

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of bookkeeping after the Unification of Italy (1861); the entries are too unsystematic to be the product of new administrative regulations. Rather, such a change in the records was probably an indirect effect of the increasing mechanization of the labour process in the textile industry, which was gradually transforming seasonal, sporadic and handmade work into steadier employment in the factories, making women a less ‘liminal’ group in terms of occupational arrangements. At any rate, despite the scant occupational information regarding all the members of the household, my analysis of the population registers and the Status Animarum (parish registers) for the 1800s and early 1900s shows that almost every household was involved in multiple occupations, as illustrated by the chart below (see Fig. 9.1). The information gathered by the civic registers contains many corrections in the column recording the occupation of the family members, especially in the case of the younger cohorts. Registered first as practising one activity, they appear subsequently to have switched to a different one, as the previous occupation is crossed off and the new one is written just above it. So, it is not uncommon to read about peasants becoming Fig. 9.1  Composition of family income

Sharecropping or day labour Occasional work

Selfconsumption

Family income

Wage labour

Artisan activity

sericulture

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workers or day labourers, spinner-women turning to agriculture after marriage, donne di casa (housewives) becoming spinners, artisans becoming shopkeepers, rural day labourers switching to factory work and so on. These are revealing cases of the complexity of people’s working experiences and the extent to which their contribution to the family economy varied over time. All family members were somehow involved, from children to the elderly, male and female. Seemingly, their activities were highly flexible and did not crystallize into single occupations. The family organization was fashioned in such a way that the mix of family wage economy, cash cropping and self-provisioning for subsistence would coexist. Such organizational skill and flexibility between occupational categories were essentially a strategy to reduce family vulnerability. However, they show striking similarities with the work arrangements and flexibility of family members during the initial phases of family workshops about a century later, in the late twentieth century.

4  Land Fragmentation I am not going to delve into the complexity of agricultural contracts, land tenure and house tenancy between the domestic groups and the landlords. Suffice to say that the crisis in agriculture due to the downward spiral of cash crop prices and the recurrent epidemic outbreaks hitting silk cocoon production, wine grapes and various kinds of produce had—even as the industry continued to expand—caused the modification of sharecropping arrangements and eventually the institution of money rent or partial money rent to become the main forms of contract since the early decades of the twentieth century. This irreversible crisis in agriculture also meant that land would become more affordable for those households interested in acquiring it. As a matter of fact, there were many landowners who sold off several plots after the end of the First World War. The large number of property transfers and the consequent fragmentation of the land continued throughout the following decade.7 As a result of this high number of land acquisitions, many 7  While in the mid-1800s, according to Jacini (Jacini, 1857), there was one proprietor for every eight inhabitants in Lombardy (i.e. 350,000 proprietors and an average land size of 3.27 ha); at the end of the Second World War, the ratio was as low as one proprietor for every 2.6 inhabitants. Land was owned by 2,286,591 proprietors, of which only 606,982 were individual owners; the average size of the land was 0.96 ha per proprietor or 2.52 ha per property (Bonato, 1954).

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households could achieve the highly coveted status of becoming smallholders, even though the plot size was barely enough for self-provisioning. However, land parcelization and transformation of the peasantry into smallholders were key factors in the formation of many entrepreneurs. Several life histories confirm the social implication and the impact it had on the post-war creation and development of workshops, for most of my oldest informants were the sons or the grandsons of (or closely related to) these smallholders. The following are some examples. The late Virgilio Ratti (1922–2008), founder of a highly successful firm in the area, lived with his family as a tenant in a cascina owned by an aristocratic family. His family had to cultivate their allotted piece of land in order to keep their tenancy. After the war, Virgilio, the elder son of a carpenter, began to make barrows. This idea came to him while riding his bicycle in search of a factory job in Milan, for soon after the war (1945), there was little work for him in their small town. Hanging around in Milan, I noticed that many blocks of the city were reduced to rubble from the bombing. All around the city was full of debris and builders’ yards. So I got an idea. As the main concern was to rebuild everything, people needed barrows to remove the debris, and I could make them. So I got home with just one idea in my mind: make barrows.

The demand for barrows turned out to be unexpectedly high, and he, his brother and his father could not meet the market demand. The space in the cascina where they worked was small and, in spite of the help of a few day labourers, they could only produce roughly 40 barrows per week. At any rate, after two years of intense work, they had enough money to buy some land from the landowner who was selling some of his properties. On this land, they built a house and finally, beside it, their more comfortable and more spacious artisan workshop. The factory of thermoplastic injection moulding he founded later still stands on the same property. By moving out of the cascina and building their own house, they were able to give up agriculture entirely and work full-time in the workshop. The late Beppe Colciago (1939–2022) was an accomplished artisan whose firm made expensive chairs and sofas in classic styles. However, during his childhood, he lived in extreme poverty. After the war, his mother was asked to vacate the room of the small corte in which she and her husband’s family were living, because her deaf-mute brother-in-law was getting married and there were no additional rooms available to accommodate

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him and his spouse. As a result, in 1949, she and her two sons moved out and took up a space in the garret of a nearby corte. It was assigned to them by the mayor who could not find any accommodation except this storage area owned by a peasant family. After a long period of apprenticeship in various workshops, Beppe managed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. After six years spent in the garret, his family bought a plot of land, with the help of an uncle who lent them some money to start the construction of the house. First, they built the basement and the first floor, and five years later, they had enough money to complete the house by adding two more floors. After the house was built, he was able to set up the workshop in the basement. We were all hard workers. My mother was a textile worker by day, and a dressmaker by night, and when she retired, she could help me all day. My brother worked at the consumer cooperative, and helped me find customers for my business. In addition, during his long lunch break he used to card the wool for me. I worked at night on my own as an artisan, and during the day as a worker in an upholstery workshop. Let me tell you, I made more money at night than working ten hours a day as an employee!

Luigi Rossi (1933–2015) was one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the area, who in the same way as the others came from a semi-rural family: My family ran an inn, but we also rented a plot of land. We also had a barn with two milk cows and three oxen. I used to work in the day and study at night to get my school diploma. Then, in 1952, when my father passed away we sold the cattle, the inn and left the land. And with the money we had gotten we (Luigi and his brother-in-law, a mechanic worker) set up our first workshop, in the barn!

What first emerges from these life history excerpts is that the building of a house became tantamount to the setting up of a workshop. The space of production of the family enterprise was carved out of the domestic space. But all this was possible because of the land acquisition that had occurred before, or right after, the war. It was only when I began to consider the correspondence between the ethnographic and the historical-­ economic data that the connection of entrepreneurial activities with the tenants’ land acquisition became apparent. The progressive integration of the households into the non-agricultural economy gradually made the arable land almost a ‘burden’ for the tenants.

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For the smallholders, landholding did not cease to be the symbol of economic security, simply because its previously intended use had been altered. Land became an important ‘means of production’, in so far as it was entirely taken out of crop production and converted for residential housing and for accommodating domestic workshops. The house also turned out to be an important asset for obtaining a mortgage to purchase machinery. That land ownership lost its agrarian purpose is also confirmed by statistical data. In the second half of the 1950s, at least 6500 farms disappeared from the hilly areas of Lombardy and almost 1500 from the plain. It soon became apparent that this was not a process of property concentration. Land was being turned into capital for building speculation, due to increasing urbanization and industrialization; urban planning gradually transformed low-profit farming land into more profitable industrial and residential areas that in turn boosted its price. These changes triggered a remarkable process of fragmentation of the patriarchal joint-household system in smaller or nuclear units. Family relations underwent rapid transformations, especially in the case of multiple households. Although still living in the cascine, they were being transformed from large family units with a common budget to smaller and independent nuclear or extended families. Nevertheless, one element did still persist: the strong ties between related households in the guise of help as shown in the excerpts above.

5  Catholic Cooperativism The last legacy I would like to discuss here is the historic role of Catholic-­ based local cooperativism. Although it is rarely considered an important ingredient for the development of entrepreneurship in the family, I will provide some evidence that it was indeed important and that there are still traces of its influence in Brianza today. I set out my argument by focusing on the social activism orchestrated by a particular segment of the clergy: the parish priests. These men, who had a very high social status, were among the most influential personalities in the communities of Brianza. Being in close contact in their everyday lives with parishioners of every social class, not only did they play the role of moral authority and spiritual guide, but they also acted as advisors,

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educators and mediators between the élite and the lower classes.8 While performing their pastoral activities, they undoubtedly played a key role as agents of social control to protect the hegemony of the Catholic Church. For assistance, they relied upon nuns, who commonly worked as child educators or nurses and frequently ran schools and organized charitable activities, often financed by local philanthropists. But as industrial development increased in the rural villages, and as the relationships between industrialists and the workforce deteriorated, local priests were among the first to become cognizant of the inherent instability that this situation could bring to their communities. As advocates of a patriarchal social order, they could envisage the potential disruption that the economic tensions and social conflicts carried, including the dissemination of socialist ideas among the lower classes and the increasing radicalism that would come with it. Indeed, they first perceived clearly the necessity for some form of social activism. Therefore, the first Catholic mutual-aid societies the priests organized were conceived not only to express concrete solidarity for peasant-worker families, but also to counteract the threat of socialism and defend the existing structure of local society, in particular, the institution of the family. In Brianza, these radical groups, headed by young progressive priests, suffered the loss of support from the Church over time, since their active interests in labour matters and their activism in general generated suspicions and worries amidst the local élites. However, the outcome of their social activism was destined to endure. In a short period of time, they set up an effective network of associations, such as mutual-aid societies, local newspapers, cooperative bakeries, dairy cooperatives and local banks, mostly modelled on the cooperative organizations of the Christian socialists and the Gewerkschaften, created in England and Germany, respectively, a few decades earlier. The town of Carate offers a staggering example. In only four years (1901–1904), the newly appointed priest founded the Lega Cattolica del Lavoro fra operai e contadini, the Società Operaia di Mutuo Soccorso, the Sociertà Cattolica di Mutuo e Soccorso per la mortalità del bestiame, a musical band society and other Catholic-sponsored recreation groups, as well as the Società Cooperativa di Consumo tra operai e contadini, and a local bank, the Cassa Rurale di depositi e prestiti. Of the 8  From a comparative perspective, it is interesting to note that in contemporary Russia, Orthodox priests took on a similar function, but brought together businesspeople and political actors (Koellner, 2012).

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organizations listed above, the last three still exist today. The local bank in particular is still regarded as an important institution providing credit and financial assistance. On the whole, the Casse Rurali became the most successful financial undertaking of the clerical activism in rural areas, for it paved the way for the eventual development of artisan workshops. In Italy, in 1897, there were already some 779 Catholic financial institutions of this kind, in contrast to 125 institutions that were liberal-leaning. Most of them (about 90%) mushroomed in the towns of northern Italy (Degl’Innocenti, 1981), despite the presence of well-established banks in the same municipalities. If the development of the former was never obstructed, it was because they were not thought to be in competition with the latter. In the area of Carate, for example, there were two branches of the Cassa di Risparmio delle Provincie Lombarde (CARIPLO), established in 1823 by the Central Commission of Charity (Commissione Centrale di Beneficenza) in order to cope with the tragic consequences caused by the famine and epidemics that had hit vast areas of Lombardy during 1815–1817. As a banking institution, though, it soon created financial connections with the local élite, becoming a means of capital accumulation for the rich landowners and industrial capitalists and a safe deposit account office for the middle classes (Conigliani, 1905). Only with the increasing industrialization in the last decade of the nineteenth century were a small number of peasants, factory workers and artisans able to create small deposit accounts in this bank; but in most cases, they were unable to get loans (Conigliani, 1905; Sabbatini, 1893). Thus, the creation of the Cassa Rurale9 — a general partnership with unlimited liability — was meant to provide the associates and their families with a little liquidity in case of necessity, without turning to landlords or usurers, who then would demand repayments at exorbitant interest rates. Their savings, with a little help from the local bank and the cooperatives, were eventually invested in the acquisition of property, such as the land that became so important in the initial formation of the local workshops. 9  The first subscribers to the cooperative bank in the town of Carate were 28 male family heads, all residing in this town: 15 peasants, 6 wageworkers, 6 artisans (1 mason, 1 carpenter and 4 weavers) and 1 costermonger. The parish priest and another peasant man acted as legal witnesses to the subscription procedures. I found the original text of the deeds (dated 29 April 1903) regarding the constitution of the bank in a file retrieved from the Historical Archive of Carate.

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6  Conclusion When my interlocutors think of entrepreneurship as something that is in their blood and in their DNA, they highlight the ‘nativeness’ as well as the ordinariness as common aspects that characterize their everyday life. As such, it is ‘natural’ that the family would become part of it. Thus, what makes entrepreneurs and family businesses so distinctive is precisely their ordinariness. It is a matter of fact, and, for this reason, it does not require any further discussion for them. To ‘challenge’ their point of view, I began by exploring the two dimensions that were omitted by my interlocutors, the cultural and the historical. For this purpose, Vico’s notion of nascimento is of particular interest because it contains them both. To illuminate the present, I agree with his insightful suggestion and anthropological intuition that the past is to be explored in holistic terms, finding links and social connections, hence my choice to focus on the historical articulation among family arrangements, land tenure and religious cooperativism. I regard them as legacies of the past still relevant to comprehending the contemporary notions of entrepreneurship and business family, transcending the limitation of their economic meaning. I must clarify, though, that the concept of legacy in my discussion is not to be mistaken with the notion of tradition. It has nothing to do with the opposition between pre-industrial cultural practices and modernity, or with the idea of invented tradition. Nor is it a survival from the past, as a timeless and unaltered object that has lost its original function, but somehow continues to exist customarily. Rather, I regard it variably as a coping strategy, a means of coping with challenges from everyday life, a shifting form of adaptabilities. To turn these legacies into heuristic concepts and have them acquire an explanatory meaning, they need to be historically contextualized; but historical contextualization becomes meaningful only if historical material is put through ethnographic analysis. This is what differentiates the method I have adopted in this work, that is, historical ethnography, from micro-­ history. It is a trans-disciplinary effort to bridge disciplinary differences: historical anthropology, ethnography and micro-history.

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CHAPTER 10

Family Values, Paprika Production and E.U. Integration: An Ethnography of a Kinship Enterprise in Contemporary Hungary Luca Szücs

1   Introduction Researching multigenerational family businesses in Hungary is still very different from the Western European context in many respects, given the country’s divergent background in economic history terms and its socialist past. Like Russia and the other countries of the Eastern European Bloc prior to 1990, in Hungary, private trading and profit-making activities were seen as immoral and illegal by the dominant socialist ideology. As a result, accumulation of capital was restricted by the state, while private ownership was outlawed and no credit was available, making it impossible to implement the ‘normal’ mechanisms of succession of capital in the same

L. Szücs (*) Independent Researcher, Saxony-Anhalte, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_10

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way as, for example, Sylvia Yanagisako (2002) showed in her pivotal work on family firms in Como’s silk industry in Italy. However, this did not mean that entrepreneurship, in particular family entrepreneurship, did not exist in Hungary under socialism. Rather, entrepreneurial activities in the so-called second economy in fact thrived in the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in increased private accumulation and consumerism. One of the most salient examples of this practice was family agricultural entrepreneurship in Hungary. The widespread practice of family agricultural production in the socialist period was primarily due to the fact that a state socialist mixed economy that included market mechanisms1 had come into being by the end of the 1960s. In this context, family agricultural producers were ‘entrepreneurs who operated in the market sector of an integrated economic system that was primarily redistributive’ (Szelényi, 1988: 14). Moreover, having a professional background in a socialist enterprise was a decisive factor in one becoming an entrepreneur and starting a family business after the change of regime in 1990 (see, e.g., Hann, 1996; Kuczi & Vajda, 1991; Laki & Szalai, 2006; Lampland, 2001; Swain, 2011, 2013). Many of these studies have revealed the agricultural sector to be a salient example of this process, as former managers and leaders of cooperatives tended to gain ownership of them and become entrepreneurs by taking advantage of the social capital, knowledge, skills and professional experience they had obtained in the collective farm sector. Sociological studies aimed to understand who the newly emerging entrepreneurs were, where they came from and what sort of social and cultural capital they had to draw on in building a successful business in the period of postsocialist transformation (e.g., Böröcz & Southworth, 1996; Böröcz & Róna-Tas, 1995; Eyal et al., 1998; Laki & Szalai, 2006; Szalai, 1989). However, the complex constellations of motivations that drive the reproduction of family firms have not been explored to a great extent in this literature. Sylvia Yanagisako’s work (2002) on Como’s (Italy) silk industry focuses on the cultural underpinnings—thus, the ‘sentiments, desires and meanings of kinship’—of the reproduction of family firms. Even though Yanagisako’s research concentrates on multigenerational family firms that are absent from the Hungarian postsocialist context, her theory of capitalist motivation is worth considering. Yanagisako argues that family firms should be seen as kinship enterprises constituted by a complex web of social action in 1

 1968—the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism.

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which profit motives are entangled with a strong commitment to the reproduction of the family in the long run. As she put it, ‘kinship enterprises are projects of collectivities of people who construe themselves to be connected by enduring bonds of relatedness and whose goals and relations are shaped by a dense assemblage of beliefs, sentiments, and commitments attached to these bonds’ (Yanagisako, 2018: 4). Yanagisako therefore regards ‘kinship enterprise’ as a heuristic tool for understanding the role of sentiments, desires, gender and meanings of kinship in the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of family firms. In this chapter, drawing on my ethnographic case study of a two-­ generational family business producing paprika spice and revealing the ways in which capital was accumulated and transmitted, I will focus on the moral struggles, conflicts and tensions in which the two generations became involved. By showing how this family business came into being, I will unpack how kinship aspirations became linked with an opportunity structure that was opened up by the fall of socialism in 1990. The generational change in the ownership and management of the family business overlapped with major structural changes in Hungary’s political economy, such as the country’s accession to the European Union. While domestic paprika production and family businesses that were involved in it were seriously challenged by these transformations, the values, sentiments and aspirations that underpinned the family business have also changed. Linking Yanagisako’s understanding of kinship enterprise with Max Weber’s notions of spheres of life, I will look at how historically situated values, meanings of spheres of life and ideas of ‘kinship goals’ were fostered, maintained, transmitted and contested in this family business. One of the main theoretical concerns of Max Weber was to understand the historical and cultural developments that made modern capitalism possible. For him, it was not just the relentless pursuit of profit in and of itself that entirely distinguished modern capitalism, but the ‘manner’ in which profit was pursued (Ascher, 2015: 433). He presumed that the increasing separation of social life into various ‘spheres’ (such as the religious, the economic, the political, the aesthetic, the erotic and the intellectual) was a necessary precondition for the systematic pursuit of profit by means of rational calculation that characterizes modern capitalism. Furthermore, the complex interactions between these spheres of life constitute one of the main themes in Weber’s work (Terpe, 2018: 1). While earlier interpretations offered mainly macro approaches to this notion, Terpe suggests adopting an actor-centred approach by arguing

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that there is no fixed set of spheres of life. Rather, she constructs a flexible conceptual scheme and proposes to approach the issue of spheres of life by making it an empirical question. By differentiating spheres of life according to their experiential qualities, that is, whether they have attractive, restrictive and/or enabling qualities (ibid.: 18), she creates two flexible categories: an attractive value sphere designates what people see as good in itself, while an obligatory life order is what people see as duty. Moreover, the life order has three subcategories: internalized life order, social life order and quasi-natural life order (ibid.: 11–13). By means of these flexible categories, we are able to gain a deeper knowledge of the complex interactions between various spheres of life, such as economy, work, entrepreneurship and kinship, as well as the role they play in the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of family businesses. I will briefly outline the structure of this chapter. In the first section, by focusing on the family’s paprika powder factory, I will show how the family’s history and paprika powder production in the region are entangled with their wider economic, social and political contexts. Afterwards, I will describe the complex historical processes of social and cultural capital accumulation prior to 1990 in order to show how and why my informants decided to establish a paprika powder-producing factory after the change of regime. I will map the family members’ manifold configurations of their value spheres and their entanglements with major structural changes, such as the privatizations that followed the change of regime and Hungary’s accession to the European Union.

2   Focusing on a Family Business and a Family History: Between the City and the Countryside My informant Aranka2 is the second-generation co-owner and managing director of a paprika-processing factory that she and her older brother took over from their parents, Ernő and Márta. Even though Aranka’s 2  This study is based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2016 in Szeged. Szeged is the third largest city of Hungary after the capital, Budapest, and Debrecen. It had a population of 161,258 in 2020, making it the largest city and regional centre of the Southern Great Plain and the county town of Csongrád. The Tisza River passes through its downtown area. Furthermore, it is a border city, very close to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia.

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brother is the other co-owner of the factory, he has never really been involved in the management of the factory and instead manages his own business—producing fan belts—which is located right next door. Their factory is located in a village in south-eastern Hungary, very close to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia and twelve kilometres from Szeged. Even though the village where the factory is located does not belong to Szeged administratively, historically and economically, it has always been strongly connected to it. Aranka lives next door to her parents and commutes between her home in Szeged and her workplace on a daily basis. Her commuting lifestyle sheds light on the history of labour and economic connections between Szeged and its direct environment, on the family’s history and ultimately on the history of paprika production in the region. Through collectivization between 1949 and 1961, approximately 600,000 people left the agricultural sector for the heavy construction and service industry. However, the majority of workers had a commuting lifestyle, meaning that workers went back and forth between their rural homes and urban employment. In spite of the industrialization that took place during the sixties and seventies, the region of Szeged was predominately still agrarian. Agricultural production was carried out not only on collective farms, but also in the various gardens and neighbouring villages around the city, which provided extra economic resources for both villagers and city dwellers in the form of various household-plot farming activities (Erdei, 1971: 84–85). The historical predecessors of this form of household production in the pre-socialist period were those independent family agro-entrepreneurs who had specialized in various forms of agricultural production and horticulture (Erdei, 1971: 66). The very roots of these pre-socialist farming and gardening activities can be found in the paprika plantations and production in the surrounding villages of Szeged (ibid.: 76). Nevertheless, paprika is essentially an urban product since its production requires entrepreneurs with a certain industrial background for its processing and marketing (ibid.: 113). In Hungary, paprika production started in the eighteenth century in Szeged and from there was dispersed to the surrounding villages, including the village where the paprika-processing factory is located, as well as to other Hungarian and now Serbian towns (ibid.).

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3   Becoming a Manager and Entrepreneur: The Historical Roots of a Family Business Aranka’s parents, Ernő and his wife Márta, live in the historic centre of Szeged, on the highest floor of an apartment house that had been built in the nineteenth century. Directly next to their apartment lives Aranka with her husband and two daughters. Ernő was born at the end of the Second World War in a small town very near to Szeged. His immediate and extended families were and still are engaged in agricultural production. In 1967, he graduated from the country’s best university in agricultural sciences and became an agronomist. After finishing his studies, he moved to Szeged, where he met his future wife, Márta. Ernő took on a job at a cooperative when the newly married couple were sent to the village where their factory now is located. Starting from the bottom, he moved up all the rungs of the professional career ladder and, at the peak of his career, served as cooperative chairman between 1985 and 1996. Ernő’s career path and the fact that he joined the professional stratum of the cooperative as a young agronomist epitomized broader policy changes in agriculture during the mid- to late-1960s that affected the stratification and functioning of the cooperatives. During this period, young professionals and experts such as Ernő moved on to the farms in increasing numbers due to continued state aid (Swain, 1985: 116). With the influx of highly educated, mostly young experts, a new concept of farm management emerged in the cooperatives—now officially regarded as autonomous socialist enterprises—which became ‘increasingly “credentialist” and “technologically oriented”’ (ibid.: 114). These organizational changes led to a sharper differentiation between members employed in managerial positions and in manual labour, which ultimately had further implications for the career prospects and class positions of these two groups (ibid.). When I asked Ernő about the history of their family business and about how and when he started to engage in entrepreneurial activities—particularly paprika production—he started to talk about his experiences in the cooperative and his household-plot farming activities, two realms that were always connected in his account. As earlier research on the relation between these two realms has shown, the success of household-plot activities always depended on the cooperative in the sense that the latter always

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provided households with cheap sources of grain, fertilizer, tools and professional and marketing assistance (Hann, 1980; Swain, 1985). It was in this way that Ernő mainly referred to the new policy changes concerning agriculture that were introduced from the mid-1960s onwards. As a result of these changes, new types of cooperatives were established that integrated private and cooperative activity. Families within the cooperatives were allowed to produce goods on so-called household smallholdings. At the same time, half the livestock was transferred into private ownership. Private economic activity therefore started to grow, and a third of Hungary’s agricultural output was produced on household plots (Berend & Csató, 2001: 311). Accordingly, after the introduction of these economic reforms, Ernő and his colleagues aimed to establish viable and long-term economic cooperation not just between the cooperative and household production, but also between state companies and household production. His cooperative, for instance, allocated polytunnels to the villagers, who began to produce various vegetables in their gardens, such as onions, radishes and paprika for the market, and very often for export. Farmers delivered the vegetables to the cooperative, which marketed them and organized their export to KGST (English: COMECON)3 countries, particularly to the German Democratic Republic. As Ernő explained to me: ‘This system worked very well for ten to fifteen years; there were times when ten to twelve trucks left the village every day fully packed with commodities. In other words, people could not earn that much in the cooperative, but they could earn a good amount of money by producing in their household plots with the involvement of the family labour force, including the elderly who could not work in the cooperative, but could help in the household. We also had household plots, and with my wife and kids we also produced paprika and other vegetables.’

While Ernő’s account shows how agricultural production functioned after economic reforms were introduced, it also sheds light on his own perceptions and experience of spheres of life. In his configuration of spheres of life, work (cooperative) and family (household) were related and overlapped. Ernő’s description of the work in the cooperative suggests that he saw and experienced this sphere as a life order with enabling or 3

 The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

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even attractive qualities, since it created opportunities for the villagers and helped them attain personal material ends in respect of their household production. Ernő and his colleagues also made a contract with the famous salami and meat factory in Szeged, enabling people to raise pigs both in households and in the cooperative, with the pigs being sold to the factory through the cooperative. From the 1980s onward, they started to focus on seed production in both the cooperative and the households: ‘It was not only the villagers who worked in seed production, many workers did so too, [and] industrial workers joined from Szeged at weekends. If someone worked hard, if the marketing was good and if everything went well then one could make enough money to buy a Zsiguli4 in a year! And OK, you can say that it was only a Zsiguli, but this was the best car at that time! So, to put it simply, one was able to make some progress in life! I think numerous good developments and progressive initiatives were set in motion in those years that many people and politicians just did not want to acknowledge after 1990. You just cannot imagine how glad I was when I saw that all the elderly members of the cooperative got a pension; luckily, for demographic reasons pensions were introduced for many villagers in the 1970s and 1980s. It was really not the case previously because not everyone was employed and not everyone got a pension under the Horthy regime.5 Particularly not those women, housewives, in the countryside, who only worked in households and who, in their old age, were economically entirely dependent on the goodwill of their families and children. So these women could go into retirement with dignity too, because they had a pension, which was not a lot of money, but they could certainly count on that money, and ultimately they could supplement it with household production!’

As these short excerpts show, Ernő was involved in and responsible for numerous economic activities in the village. While he emphasized the importance of economic practices in the ‘second economy’, since this made just a limited accumulation of economic capital possible, he never separated it from the cooperative, which enabled all these possibilities. In 4  In other words, a Lada. Lada was a brand of cars manufactured by the Russian car manufacturer AvtoVAZ. 5  Miklós Horthy (1868–1957) was as an admiral and statesman who served as Regent of Hungary between World Wars I and II, and basically throughout most of World War II. Under his regency, Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany and participated in the elimination of the majority of the country’s Jews.

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other words, these two spheres—work for the cooperative and work in the household—overlapped and were experienced as a life order with attractive and enabling qualities. Another important implication of the collectivization of agricultural production was that after 1949, villagers obtained welfare benefits such as their pensions through work contracts. However, these were significantly lower than the social benefits of industrial workers due to the higher status and ideological importance of the latter during the socialist period (Varga, 2012: 45). This combination of state and household production in agriculture gave way to ‘peasant embourgeoisement’ in rural Hungary (Szelényi, 1988: 22). Ernő’s emotion-charged recollection of the social achievements of the collective (including his own work) and the socialist system in general shows that some of the practices of that time, such as granting welfare benefits to agricultural workers, carry moral meanings for him. Ernő’s emphasis on human dignity and on the importance of having social policies that favour egalitarian redistribution sheds light on his values and moral ideas about society, which were largely shaped by the ideologies of that period. Unlike Ernő, his wife Márta was born and raised in Szeged, although she went on to spend almost thirty years with her husband in the village where their paprika factory was located. After finishing secondary school, she married Ernő and moved in with him, and therefore could not pursue higher education at that time. Shortly after they married, she gave birth first to her son and then to her daughter. The newly introduced childcare allowance, GYES,6 enabled her to stay at home with her children after birth for two and a half years and to use these years to continue her studies at college. Márta finished her studies in part-time education in Szeged and obtained a bachelor’s degree in business economics. From the 1970s onwards, she worked in various areas of public administration as a civil servant and even served as president of the local council. Without going into detail about the legal and historical specifics of the Hungarian council system in the socialist period, I will just briefly touch on this issue in order to provide a general overview of Maria’s job and position. After 1945, like other central and southern European states within the Soviet sphere, a so-called Soviet-type council system—a 6  One of the most significant welfare provisions in socialism was the childcare allowance (GYES—Gyermekjóléti segély), introduced in 1967, which enabled women to stay at home with their children after birth for two and a half years.

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structure of public administration and institutions—was established in Hungary. Councils were the regional institutions of the central, unified state power, which did not just manage local matters, but also carried out the political aims and principles developed by higher state and non-state organs (Antal, 2010: 148). Márta explained to me that as a young woman—she was just thirty at that time—who was just an ‘incomer’ in the villagers’ eyes, she had to work hard and struggle a lot to gain acceptance within the community and with her colleagues. However, she had nice memories of that period. She was proud of the achievements that were accomplished under her mandate, such as the development of healthcare services and care of the elderly, the renovation of cultural facilities, the enlargement of the kindergarten, the modernization of the elementary school and the building of new roads. When her mandate ended, she started to work on the Szeged council where she was responsible for state investments at the county level, including building hospitals and renovating important public buildings, such as the national theatre in the city. From the end of the 1980s onwards, she worked for the National Bank as a tax expert and auditor. In the early 2000s, she left the banking sector and became a self-employed accountant and auditor. Recalling her memories of her parents during the socialist period, Aranka pointed out that her mother and father both worked a lot and tried to take as many side jobs as they could. As children, she and her brother were frequently alone or with other neighbours in the village: ‘They worked a lot because they always had some side activities to do besides their main job. They left early in the morning and came back late in the evening, so for instance, she was not a kind of mum who helps her children to do homework after school or who checks them in the evening. By the way, nor was I that kind of mum, which I regretted, because I hardly spent any time with my daughters when they were young, and now they just don’t require me anymore. Very often, even if I was at home, I could not really focus on family matters; I was not able to think about anything else because of work and business-related issues.’

As Aranka’s account confirms, Ernő and Márta worked very hard, beyond their state job, ‘to make some progress’, though perhaps at the high cost of self-exploitation. Although Aranka did not take side jobs like her parents, she worked in their paprika-producing family business from

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early morning to late in the evening, thus reproducing her parents’ practice and attitudes toward work. She found it hard to reconcile her work and managerial role in the business with her family life, indicating that she experienced a moral dilemma in linking these two spheres. While she experienced the sphere of work as an internalized life order transmitted by her parents, her family and domestic life were seen more in terms of an attractive value sphere. During the socialist era, entrepreneurial activities in the so-called second economy meant extra sources of income for the family and ultimately enabled them to accumulate some capital. However, the social and cultural capital, knowledge, skills and experiences that Ernő acquired as a cooperative manager and Márta acquired as a high-profile civil servant played a more crucial role in the formation of their family business—this will be described in the next section in more detail. Moreover, Aranka emphasized that acquiring cultural capital in the form of formal education was also crucial for her parents: ‘Although they did not really speak languages, they did realize that learning English is very important and supported us by all means. For instance, from the 1980s onwards, there were American students in the Department of Hungarology at the University of Szeged [who came] through an exchange program. So various families accommodated these students as soon as it was possible, and my parents too applied to take in students to live with us. Those families who accommodated American students got a certain amount of money for this, but not my parents—they refused to accept any money for taking students in by saying that it was a good opportunity for us to practise English with natives and to socialize with other young people. Ultimately, in the early 1980s, five American students in total lived with us. But actually my parents were always like that; also they always helped if someone needed it.’

These memories illustrate nicely the parents’ privileged social position, economic status and also their aspirations for upward social mobility by providing their children with as good an education as they could. While the extensive and compulsory public schooling system was a cornerstone of the socialist ideology and socialist morality as it enabled social mobility for the masses and was an important institutionalized mechanism to propagate equality, from the 1970s and 1980s onward, education also became a means to reach good material well-being (Valuch, 2005: 264). Studying the background of the newly emerged entrepreneurs of the 1990s, Laki

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and Szalai point out the important role of carefully selected secondary education and language-learning opportunities of the entrepreneurs in their future success (2006: 333–334). The political changes of the 1990s triggered major changes in the family’s life. By showing how they built up their own family business in the decades following the change of regime, I will look at how the various family members’ configurations of their value spheres were changed and reproduced over time.

4  Privatization: Becoming a Family Business The political changes of 1990 were followed by large-scale economic restructuring and privatization of the state sector. One of the benchmarks of postsocialist transformations was the complete reorganization of property relations in the agricultural sector. As Laki and Szalai (2006) put it, ‘the initiation of the new property relations required the purposeful reallocation of productive wealth, the introduction of new arrangements of command and control over it, and perhaps even more importantly, the emergence of a new group of entrepreneurs’ (ibid.: 317). Ernő and Márta realized that neither their future nor their children’s future would be guaranteed by the state anymore. They therefore aimed to create a solid base for their children to study and then to start their own lives. They also experienced an ‘everything is possible’ atmosphere in those years, and they just felt that they had to make a move, though it was very hard to see which choice and direction would be the right one. As they were still both employed, Márta with the National Bank and Ernő still as a cooperative manager until the mid-1990s, they launched their family business ‘on the side’. First, they wanted to set up a business not just with the family, but also with friends, but various conflicts and disagreements over taxation, law and how to manage a business put an end to this approach. After some bitter experiences, as Ernő told me, he felt that he could only count on the family: ‘So with the family, we all could just sit down at a table and talk through all the issues. We had a division of labour within the family: given my wife’s professional background, she was responsible for the financial aspects, including banking, loans and taxation, and I was in charge of the organization of the production. The kids were involved in the planning phase from the very beginning, although they started to work in it later on.’

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This shows that starting a family business was a common goal to ensure the family’s reproduction and upward mobility. Or, in terms used by Yanagisako, it was primarily kinship goals in the form of ‘sentiments, desires, and meanings of kinship’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 4; 2018) that motivated Ernő and Márta to start their own business. This way of thinking might also be seen as a continuation of the practice of household production in the socialist era. However, this is not to suggest that they did not have a profit motive, only to show how economic motivations to capitalize on opportunities opened up by the regime change became entangled with motivations to establish a solid material base to ensure the family’s reproduction in the long run. As Ernő emphasized, they were simply overwhelmed by new information—and disinformation—and it was very hard for them to foresee which business had a future. His decision to turn to paprika was clearly shaped by his historical, political and professional experiences. In the early 1990s, Ernő had a short political career as a member of a newly formed party, the Alliance of Agrarians (Agrárszövetség), launched mainly by agrarian intellectuals and cooperative managers. The party’s main agenda was to protect the interests of the cooperatives and to fight against the economically irrational de-collectivization policies of the 1990s, which supported the dismantling of the collective farms. Despite his aspirations to become a business owner like other members of the party, Ernő argued fervently against the full restoration of private ownership in accordance with the pre-collectivization plot boundaries: ‘They made a political case out of it and used it to compensate people’s justified and unjustified grievances. In this way, many people benefited from this compensation who actually had nothing to do with agriculture and who did not work in cooperatives at all. Moreover, given the lack of any law and regulations concerning these issues at that time, many cooperative managers used their knowledge and power to gain assets and to dispossess other members of collective properties. Very briefly, greed and wild capitalism characterized these processes.’

Ernő’s moral values are crystallized by his description of their absence in the attitudes of other cooperative managers. Moreover, in his characterization of privatization processes, Ernő used the strongly condemnatory language of ‘greed’ and ‘wild capitalism’. When I asked him what made him start food (paprika powder) production instead of investing in land

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and engaging in agriculture, to my surprise, he replied that he regarded land as a volatile investment. He argued: ‘Land is such an important national asset that will never go away, which will always be here, and it is well known that Hungary’s greatest asset is the six to seven million acres of soil that we have. Regarding the scarcity of water globally, many predict that our fresh-water reserves—because we have a lot—will be as valuable as fossil oil by 2080. However, historically, in Hungary, the subdivision of land was always subordinated to power and politics. Certain people and social groups always wanted to appropriate them, from feudalism to the Horthy regime, and even when we had land reforms, they were always badly carried out. After 1956, and particularly after 1959/1960, through collectivization and the creation of cooperatives, we had thirty good years, but then they implemented land reform badly again. And if recent trends continue in Hungary, then the majority of land will fall into the hands of some feudal lords again…well, this is the nature of power, so those who are in power always supply their own allies and their own people, regardless of which group has the power.’

These historically shaped experiences with land reforms certainly influenced Ernő’s decision to take up the production of paprika powder. However, under socialism, this had been an economically much more significant, much more lucrative industry than it was now. Based on his professional knowledge, expertise and position in the cooperative, he firmly believed that paprika powder production would be a more lucrative investment for his family in the long run. To understand his decision, it is crucial to touch upon the economic and symbolic significance of paprika powder production from a historical perspective.

5  Paprika Powder Production The spice paprika (capsicum annuum) is the most significant spice produced in Hungary and one of the most important ingredients in Hungarian cuisine. The originally Central American spice spread throughout Europe in the early modern period mainly through the conquistadors. The spice arrived in Hungary through the Balkans by means of Turkish and Slav mediation (Csóka, 2014: 1). The production of paprika became widespread at the end of the eighteenth century, primarily in southern Hungary, in the region of Szeged and Kalocsa. Until the mid-nineteenth century, production was mainly

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carried out in family households. However, by the end of the century, paprika powder had become a lucrative industry and an important export commodity. In the same period, fake and mixed-spice paprika commodities also emerged on the market, so the state imposed strict safety and quality standards to protect the quality of Hungarian paprika (Csóka, 2014: 1–2). After 1945, with the restructuring of the economy, the production of paprika changed. The raw paprika (the plant) was produced by both cooperatives and households. Agricultural research institutions were set up to monitor paprika varieties and production and to determine quality standards. The production and marketing of paprika powder became a state monopoly (Erdei, 1971: 114–115). Regarding the numbers, between 1960 and 1980, Hungary produced paprika on 8000–9000 hectares of land, which produced 10,000–14,000 tons of paprika powder a year, approximately 8000–10,000 tons of which were exported (Hodossi et al., 2012: 98, Gille, 2009: 59, 2016: 20). To put these figures in their wider context, during the same period, paprika was produced globally on 200,000 hectares of land, of which 45,000 hectares were in Europe, accounting for 75% of the global trade in paprika powder (Hodossi et al., 2012: 98). Paprika powder production was therefore economically important, and the industry was strongly export oriented. After 1989, paprika-producing lands were increasingly privatized, though many plots remained in cooperatives. As Gille pointed out, even though the two main paprika-processing firms of the socialist period, ‘Kalocsai Fűszerpaprika’ and ‘Szegedi Paprika’, became shareholding corporations, members of paprika-producing cooperatives also bought shares in these newly formed processing companies, and the state remained a key shareholder in Kalocsai Fűszerpaprika (Gille, 2009: 63). In the 1990s, paprika production was significantly reshaped in the face of global economic restructuring, which shifted the majority of the production from the global north to the global south. Accession to the E.U. in 2004 and the adoption of its neoliberal policies drastically reduced the Hungarian figures further. Nevertheless, back at the beginning of the 1990s, when Ernő decided to establish a paprika powder factory, he could not foresee the changes that were to come. His previous experiences, expertise and knowledge largely defined the direction in which he could move. ‘I have seen this paprika thing for a long time. The state had a monopoly on it—it was a lucrative industry. I worked in the cooperative since 1967, where

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there was paprika production as well. So I could gain insights into the methods and various steps of the processing, packaging and marketing of the paprika. I was allowed to visit the factory that processed the paprika, so I could observe how they produce it, what kind of machines they used, etc. So, back in the 1990s, this seemed to be a safer investment…and in fact, back then it certainly was.’

As I mentioned above, at the beginning of the 1990s, he was still a cooperative manager, and actually he had just been re-elected for another cycle. In his account, he was very much against the privatization of collective properties and assets. Therefore, he did not want to acquire any of the cooperative’s machines. Nevertheless, his wide network and contacts enabled him to acquire both machines and a place—an old barn—where he could start setting up his business. As he told me: ‘Back then it was a very widespread practice that the chairmen of collectives picked up machines and whatnot from their collectives. I knew that I did not want to do it and that I would not take anything from my collective. We were lucky, because at the same time I was talking with the chairman of the other collective next door. We had a good relationship with them, since we often rented his paprika-drier to dry our own raw paprika. Once when we were talking, the chairman told me the collective was in trouble, so the barn was for sale, and he suggested I buy it for five million HUF. But then the question was how to obtain this amount of money, because we did not have five million HUF at that time.’

As Ernő’s account shows, he found a place for his future paprika factory and his first machines—a paprika drier and a milling machine—through a cooperative manager friend, who was selling off the viable units of a paprika-processing factory. While Ernő verbally condemned those chairmen who acquired assets and equipment from their own cooperatives, he did not see any moral conflict in buying them from another cooperative through his contacts. However, Ernő was far from being alone in acquiring assets through his contacts; on the contrary, as many observed, this was a widespread practice. Lampland also pointed out that professional and informal networks of former cooperative farm managers were essential during privatization and in the creation of new businesses (Lampland, 2001: 48). Nevertheless, as I indicated above, Ernő lacked the money to purchase all these pieces of equipment. During privatization, it was very difficult to

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obtain bank loans—particularly in agriculture due to uncertainties over property rights—and only a small number of people could start a business by doing so (Kuczi, 2011: 96). The majority of entrepreneurs who started doing business at that time drew mainly on their family’s and relatives’ financial resources and assets. Ernő also drew from various family resources by selling a house his family owned for twice the price they paid for it originally and by using the ‘compensation money’ that the Hungarian state paid to those families in which there were prisoners of war. However, he was one of the few people who were also able to obtain a bank loan to start a business due to his wife’s knowledge and extensive experience in the banking sector. Yet even with this background and advantageous position, it was difficult for them to obtain a bank loan. Working in the family business in addition to his main job, he purchased machines for the factory piece by piece and developed the production units very slowly, bit by bit, over the years. The factory started to function properly in the mid-1990s, and according to the family legend, they had almost ten fairly good years until 2004, the year of Hungary’s accession to the European Union. As Koellner pointed out in the Introduction, narratives like these—along with shared memories and joint rituals—are foundational for the construction of relatedness and strengthening cohesion within family businesses (see Koellner, 2022; Koellner et  al., 2023). Accession to the European Union in 2004 reshaped the Hungarian paprika market and therefore the family’s business and family strategies, as will be explored in the following section.

6  The Family Business’s Accession to the European Union By the mid-1990s, the full production line was up and running. At that time, Ernő focused only on producing paprika powder and did not trade in it. His business model was as follows: he made contracts with local raw paprika producers around February, bought up the paprika from these producers in the autumn during the harvest season and finally sold the paprika powder the following year. Accordingly, he had a long business relationship with his producers, usually of one and a half years. This business model was challenged by E.U. accession and its neoliberal policies after 2004.

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‘Free trade’ is one of the key principles of neoliberalism and of the functioning of the European Union. Accordingly, in 2004, when Hungary joined the European Union, the country’s high import duty levied on paprika was radically reduced, from 44.2% to 5% (Gille, 2009: 63, 2016: 34). The result was that a huge amount of cheap, imported paprika flowed into the country. Ernő reflected on Hungary’s accession to the European Union thus: ‘In hindsight, I would rather have chosen something other than paprika powder production. We joined the European Union in 2004, at a time when we realized that the import duties, which had protected our commodities before accession, were to be eliminated, thus squeezing our paprika out of the market. In general, misinformation, disorientation and lots of mistakes characterized this period. However, despite all of this, I do not regret us having chosen this path. I still hope there will be a sort of national or consumer awareness so that people will prefer to choose a Hungarian product than something else. Perhaps one day this will have importance for consumers.’

Ernő’s attitude toward Hungary’s accession to the European Union and its impact on his business are rather ambivalent. In retrospect, he does not think that producing paprika was the best choice from a rational point of view, but he would still go for it, indicating that he attached values to producing local ‘national’ paprika and that he experienced his work and family business as an attractive value sphere. In this context, referring to national awareness is more about being concerned with provenance, which is crucial in preserving the quality, product safety and authenticity of paprika. In that respect, Ernő had a higher purpose that went beyond narrow self-interest: namely, to maintain the local culture of paprika production and to supply consumers with good-quality products. Another important aspect of the idea of ‘free trade’ was that Hungarian national food safety regulations—including the quality standards of paprika powder—were replaced by the European Union’s standards, which turned out to be weaker than Hungary’s own national safety regulations. As Zsuzsa Gille (2009, 2016) pointed out in her analysis of the ‘paprika scandal’ that followed the E.U. accession, the result of the relaxation of national food standards was that a huge amount of imported paprika powder contained aflatoxin B1, a liver- and kidney-damaging microtoxin

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produced by mould. This led to paprika powder sales being banned for three days in 2004. Aflatoxin can only grow in peppers that are produced in Mediterranean or tropical climates. The scandal made it painfully clear that paprika exported around the E.U. is not tested for mould toxins, just for additives. Second, when peppers are imported from other E.U. countries to Hungary, one cannot be certain that they have actually been grown, dried and milled in the E.U., or whether they have been imported from non-E.U. countries further afield (Gille, 2009: 66). The consequences of the changes described above were significant for both the Hungarian paprika market and Ernő’s business. While in 2003 the proportion of imported paprika was still insignificant, in 2004 it increased drastically, and by 2005 Hungary only had imported paprika. This slowly changed after 2006, but the rate of imported paprika has remained very high until now (Hodossi et al., 2012: 96). Ernő admitted that they really did not see this coming: ‘So a huge amount of crap, Chinese paprika, came onto the domestic market and was mixed up with Hungarian paprika, and to be honest—perhaps I was just too naïve and relaxed—I thought that Hungary’s and, in general, Central Europe’s paprika was really good, it was tasty and had high quality. As a result, I thought that our product could and would compete with imported paprika. We thought that the bad quality, imported Chinese paprika7 would be sold at a lower price than Hungarian paprika. However, what happened was that the good quality Hungarian paprika was kicked out by the cheap imported paprika, and the price of Hungarian paprika was adjusted to that of the imported.’

This extract shows a swift change in Ernő’s understanding of the economy as a sphere of life from a value sphere (with moral conflicts) to a life order. Ernő’s ideas about ‘the economy’ are mainly framed by his accounts of work in the cooperative and in the household or family business. While it was argued above that Ernő saw his work and family business as an attractive value sphere, here the sphere of the economy emerges as a ‘life order’ with a quasi-natural quality: it is experienced as something that he cannot change, only adjust to. However, this is not to suggest that he had anti-E.U. sentiments. Rather, his opinion about Hungary and its position

7  Here, the phrase ‘Chinese paprika’ should be seen as an umbrella term for all cheap and/ or poor-quality imported products.

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within the European Union reinforces his idea of the economy as a ‘life order’ with a quasi-natural quality: ‘Now, the economic performance of this country does not even reach the pre-crisis level—that is, the level of 2007—and the level of 2007 does not reach the level of the 1980s. Here is what I think about Hungary’s accession to the European Union. What was it all about? It is undeniable that the West needed a new market. I believe that the capitalist system is characterized by cycles of crises: a crisis happens when there is overproduction and underconsumption at the same time, so there is a gap between demand and supply.8 If there is a surplus in the capitalist system, then a new market is needed where the surplus product can be placed. So whenever they need new markets for their surplus products, they enlarge the European Union… In the bipolar world it was easier for me to find my bearings, [but] today the logic is entirely different, although what runs the world is still the same: money. If you look around, it is easy to see that everything that has been built since 2004 was subsidized by the European Union. Quite simply, there is no other way forward for this country.’

Ernő’s comments about the economy shed light on the bitter social reality present after Hungary’s accession to the European Union. Contrary to predictions that Hungary would make a smooth transition to the European Union and that the economic level of the country would quickly catch up with the ‘West’, Hungary has lagged behind the core countries of the European Union in many areas—economic, social and political. As Gille notes, ten years after Hungary’s accession to the European Union, ‘its poverty rate was higher than during the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and with a poverty rate three times the E.U. average, it ranked as the second poorest member state’ (Gille, 2016: 1). As stated above, even though Ernő is critical regarding the functioning of the European Union, he does not see any other future for the country, nor for his paprika-producing factory. In his account, the idea of economy appears as a quasi-natural life order whose rules and objectives are external and whose sanctions are exercised by seemingly uncontrollable forces (Terpe, 2018: 18). However, as Terpe points out: ‘While uncontrollable forces and the circumstances they produce can be bemoaned, they cannot 8  Ernő’s critical reflections on the economy and Hungary’s position within the European Union recall Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of underconsumption as the explanation for crises in capitalism.

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be criticized morally. But if one cannot change the order of things, one can only live with it and try doing the best out of acquiescing in its rules’ (ibid.: 16). The price competition that Ernő described above is a classic example of ‘the race to the bottom’, which is allegedly an outcome of neoliberal policies. In capitalism, the profit comes from trade and from the increased circulation of goods and capital. As Gille points out in relation to paprika, ‘promotion of free trade leads to the import of the cheapest products even when there is sufficient domestic produce; and the radical reduction of import duties, further cheapening imports…as a result of it, Hungarian paprika mixed up with cheap imports increases profits’ (2009: 69). Accordingly, a large number of trading companies emerged in the Hungarian market that were only involved in trade and not production. However, as I wrote above, the supply chain of paprika powder production in Ernő’s factory rested on a long, one- or even one-and-a-half-year business relationship between producer and processor. Ernő and his family had to realize that with this model, they simply could not compete with the trading companies that buy up large quantities of imported paprika and sell it within a short period of time. Ernő felt the market pressure, but he remained only a processor and did not want to deal with imported paprika, neither by mixing it with his products nor by trading it wholesale. Had he done so, he thought that it would have seriously jeopardized the reputation of their products and their whole family business. Ernő’s concern for the reputation of his products can be seen as a combination of value and instrumentally rational motives. While Ernő’s strong commitment to his product shows that his business and producing local paprika became inherent parts of his identity, it also points to an older meaning of professionality. Professionalism—or the lack of it—is a recurring topic in the family business literature (Stewart & Hitt, 2012: 61). Professionalism is often associated with formalization, rationalization, standardization or, in other words, bureaucratization of businesses. While family businesses may resist this narrow connotation of professionalization, Stewart and Hitt (2012) argue that they might embrace an older meaning of the term: ‘A true professional is expected to develop not only generally applicable knowledge but also to adopt a moral code and to view the career as a “calling” (…) Professionals are also expected to display integrity to “protect the interests of clients and/or society in general”’ (2012: 61).

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7  Generational Change The new challenges entailed generational changes in the ownership of the factory: Ernő’s daughter Aranka took over the family business after 2004. She came from a very different professional background than her parents, with degrees in History and English. After teaching at the university for a short period, she worked for a private company that mainly focused on the European Union and state-run tenders. Parallel to her main job, she became involved in the family business and gained insight into various aspects of production prior to taking over its management. After 2004, the business struggled with major financial difficulties that the family tried to ease by putting savings and bank loans into the business. Nevertheless, Aranka was aware that significant changes would be required if they were to keep the business in the long run. Therefore, she decided to change their profile and to trade with imported paprika, as well as mix their own paprika with the imports. As she told me: ‘I had to realize that it is just very mistaken to make an emotional question of it. We had to accept that we cannot change the market but only adjust to it. So now we deal both with production and trade, and to be honest, in this way we have been able to improve our liquidity a bit. However, it is still very hard to stay alive in this market—there is always cheaper paprika on the market, and it is just impossible to compete with these prices.’

Aranka’s account shows that generational change was indispensable in order to change the business profile as well. The value commitment of her father Ernő, in believing in the quality of their own (Hungarian) paprika and his objection to dealing in imported paprika, would have prevented such a change. Aranka’s perception of the market as something that cannot be changed but only adjusted to is a sign of a life order. In Terpe’s conceptualization of them, life orders can be conceived as both constraints and opportunities. As she writes, ‘constraints imposed by the rules of life orders may also create opportunities, which may even imbue constraints with a sense of attractiveness. In other words, they are experienced as attractive because they are seen as useful to reach other ends. This should not be confused with ideals or values which are attractive in themselves. Nonetheless, one may assume that people or groups for whom sphere-­ specific constraints produce opportunities are open to articulations which frame the underlying rules in a language of obligatory duties or even

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appreciated ideals. This may in turn initiate shifts in how they imagine and experience this sphere. Beyond that, such articulations may even influence those for whom spheres do not provide opportunities in the here and now, so that they start hoping for such opportunities in the future’ (Terpe, 2018: 14). While her father mainly experienced the sphere of economy as a constraining life order, Aranka regarded it as an opportunity through which she could improve her business and ultimately keep her heritage, the family business, alive in the long run. To give an estimation of Aranka’s paprika production, last year, she contracted with approximately five producers farming on thirty hectares to provide her with forty tons of paprika powder. Recently, she also started to rent out their paprika drier to other small paprika processors when they are not using it. Besides the problems described above, Aranka’s business also suffers from a shortage of labour. In 2016 she had six permanent employees, but at the peak of the harvesting season, she usually needed to hire ten more temporary workers. She complained that every year it was becoming harder and harder to hire people for temporary jobs because she could only offer very low wages (1.59 EUR/hour) and because most unemployed villagers who were fit for work were now in workfare programmes9: ‘Employees’ wages are low, but the truth is that the employers’ wages are also low in this sector. My monthly wage is 320 EUR, which is nothing, and even if I have a dividend (478 EUR), I cannot take it out because the business is just not in that financial situation. Therefore the only way I can offer more wages to temporary employees is if they work overtime. During the harvesting season children, wives, husbands, the whole family can come to work at weekends so they can make some extra money.’

Aranka’s explanation of the salaries seems to include a moral justification: she is well aware that her employees’ wages are low and should be better, but she makes a moral excuse by first pointing out that her wage is also low, and second showing that she provides work for whole families whenever she can. 9  This is a public works programme. In 2011, Hungary’s populist right-wing government introduced its rather controversial workfare scheme and established the idea of a workfare society, a supposedly positive alternative to the ‘decline of Western welfare states’ (Szikra, 2014: 492). This meant that only those unemployed people who fulfilled their work responsibilities were entitled to social rights.

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Despite all the financial difficulties and hardships her business has to endure, Aranka is determined not to give up producing paprika powder. When I asked what motivates her the most in continuing this family business, she answered: ‘Obviously, dealing with paprika is a nice heritage and tradition, but this is what motivates me the least. What matters the most to me is the work that my family put into this business. My family, my parents toiled throughout their lives and then they put everything that they have into this business. Because they started the business with insignificant economic capital and build it up bit by bit. So this is what concerns me the most.’

This shows the different values and value sphere configurations of Ernő and Aranka. Unlike her father, who, like many others, attached certain values to producing paprika and maintaining the quality of Hungarian paprika, Aranka was more concerned with her parents’ work in building the family business together. It was not just the sheer pursuit of profit which made Aranka keep her business running: she was also motivated by ‘kinship goals’ and by her sentiments and commitments toward her parents’ complex ‘inheritance’, including their labour, ideas and values, which were ultimately materialized in the form of their paprika powder factory. In other words, she experienced her family and her business as overlapping attractive value spheres, a combination that increases, and appreciates, the importance of private ownership. Against this figuration, however, she sees the wider economy as a life order with constraints and opportunities.

8  Conclusion In this chapter, I have focused on a two-generation family business and its rootedness in its social, cultural and historical contexts to reveal the motivations and value sphere configurations of the various generations and actors involved. By focusing on both the social and individual levels, I pointed out how moral ideas about the economy, work and family changed from generation to generation in relation to wider political and economic transformations. In the first part of the chapter, I paid attention to the complex processes of capital accumulation in the socialist era. Going beyond the importance of gaining entrepreneurial experience in the family’s agricultural production in the second economy, I showed that Ernő’s and Márta’s respective professional work experiences played a crucial role

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in the creation of their future business after 1990. I also pointed out that Ernő was responsible for numerous economic activities of the village that required the cooperation of the cooperative and households, thus encouraging the process of ‘peasant embourgeoisement’. Following Sylvia Terpe’s interpretation of Max Weber’s spheres of life (2018), I argued that for Ernő, the two spheres—work with the cooperative and work in the household—overlapped and were experienced as a life order with attractive and enabling qualities in the socialist era. The change of regime in 1990 brought new challenges for the family. I showed that Ernő and Márta’s initial decision to start the family business was underpinned by ‘kinship goals’ (Yanagisako, 2018), as their main motivation was to ensure the reproduction and upward mobility of the family in the long run. Their choice to turn to paprika production was primarily shaped by Ernő’s expertise and knowledge in agriculture and business in the socialist era: paprika production was a lucrative industry, and the socialist state had a monopoly on it. However, it was drastically reshaped in the 1990s as Hungary became more exposed to global economic forces, particularly after its accession to the European Union in 2004. After accession, the high import duty levied on paprika was radically reduced, resulting in the flow of a huge amount of cheap, imported paprika into the country. Trading in imported paprika became a more lucrative enterprise than producing local paprika. Even though Ernő felt the market pressure, he deliberately chose not to deal with imported paprika out of a fear of jeopardizing the reputation of the firm’s products and their whole family business. A generational change was needed in the ownership of the factory in order to tackle the new challenges, and after 2004, Ernő’s daughter Aranka took over the family business. Unlike her father, she started to trade in imported paprika and also to mix their own produced paprika with imported paprika. Aranka perceived the economy as a life order with enabling qualities, thus providing an opportunity through which she could improve the family business. I argued that there were different value sphere configurations between Ernő and Aranka. While Ernő attached values to producing paprika and maintaining the quality of Hungarian paprika, Aranka was mainly motivated by ‘kinship goals’—sentiments as well as enduring bonds of relatedness—and was therefore committed to keeping her parents’ inheritance, in the form of their paprika powder factory, alive.

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References Antal, T. (2010). Local soviets and councils in the ex-socialist European states with special regard to Hungary (1950–1990). Hungarian Studies, 24(1), 136–166. Ascher, I. (2015). Capitalism. In M. Gibbons (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Political Thought (pp. 430–441). Wiley-Blackwell. Berend, I. T., & Csató, T. (2001). Evolution of the Hungarian economy 1848–1998: Volume I. One-and-a-half centuries of semi-successful modernization 1848–1998. Columbia University Press. Böröcz, J., & Róna-Tas, Á. (1995). Small leap forward: Emergence of new economic elites. Theory and Society, 24(5), 751–781. Böröcz, J., & Southworth, C. (1996). Decomposing the Intellectuals’ class power: Conversion of cultural capital to income, Hungary, 1986. Social Forces, 74(3), 797–822. Csóka, M. (2014). Fűszerpaprika őrlemények szín és illattulajdonságainak vizsgálata. PhD disszertáció. Corvinus Egyetem. Erdei, F. (1971). Város és vidéke. Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó. Eyal, G., Szelényi, I., & Townsley, E. (1998). Making capitalism without capitalists: Class formation and elite struggles in post-communist Central Europe. Verso. Gille, Z. (2009). The tale of toxic paprika. In M.  L. Caldwell (Ed.), Food and everyday life in the Postsocialist world (pp. 57–78). Indiana University Press. Gille, Z. (2016). Paprika, foie gras, and red mud: The politics of materiality in the European Union. Indiana University Press. Hann, C. (1980). Tázlár: a village in Hungary. Cambridge University Press. Hann, C. (1996). Land tenure and citizenship in Tázlár. In R. Abrahams (Ed.), After socialism: Land reform and rural social change in Eastern Europe (pp. 23–49). Berghahn. Hodossi, S., Dudás, L., Kapitány, J., & Somogyi, G. Y. (2012). Nagy értékű hungarikum: a fűszerpaprika. Agrofórum, 2012(Február), 96–102. Koellner, T. 2022. Family firms and business families: A field for anthropological research. Anthropology Today 38 (6): 8-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/14678322.12768 Koellner, T., Boyd, B., Kleve, H., & Rüsen, T. (2023). Producing and reproducing the business family across generations: The importance of narratives in German business families. In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Kuczi, T. (2011). Kisvállalkozás és társadalmi környezet. Jelenkutató Alapítvány. Kuczi, T., & Vajda, Á. (1991). A kisvállalkozók társadalmi összetétele. Közgazdasági Szemle, 1, 83–97. Laki, M., & Szalai, J. (2006). The puzzle of success: Hungarian entrepreneurs at the turn of the millennium. Europe-Asia Studies, 58(3), 317–345.

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Lampland, M. (2001). The advantages of being collectivized: Cooperative farm managers in postsocialist economy. In C. M. Hann (Ed.), Postsocialism, ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia (pp. 31–57). Routledge. Stewart, A., & Hitt, M. A. (2012). Why Can’t a family business be more like a nonfamily business? Modes of professionalization in family firms. Family Business Review, 25(1), 58–86. Swain, N. (1985). Collective farms which work? Cambridge University Press. Swain, N. (2011). A Post-Socialist Capitalism. Europe-Asia Studies, 63(9), 1671–1695. Swain, N. (2013). Green barons, force-of-circumstance entrepreneurs, impotent mayors: Rural change in the early years of post-socialist capitalist democracy. Central European University Press. Szalai, E. (1989). Az új elit. Beszélő, 9(27), 65–74. Szelényi, I. (1988). Socialist entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in rural Hungary. The University of Wisconsin Press. Szikra, D. (2014). Democracy and welfare in hard times: The social policy of the Orbán government in Hungary between 2010 and 2014. Journal of European Social Policy, 24, 486–500. Terpe, S. (2018). Working with max Weber’s ‘spheres of life’: An actor-centred approach. Journal of Classical Sociology, 20, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.117 7/1468795X18789328 Valuch, T. (2005). Magyarország társadalomtörténete a 20. Század második felében. Osiris. Varga, Z. (2012). Mit ér a munkás, ha paraszt (is)? A falusi munkásság és a hatalom a Kádár-korszakban. Korall Társadalomtörténeti Folyóirat, 49, 37–57. Yanagisako, S. (2002). Producing culture and capital. Princeton University Press. Yanagisako, S. (2018). Family firms. In H. Callan (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of anthropology (pp.  1–7). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781118924396.wbiea2235. (Retrieved from Wiley Online Library on 02. 05. 2022).

CHAPTER 11

The Other Side of Succession Issues: How the Decline of Some Family Businesses Allows for the Consolidation of Others Tijo Salverda

1   Introduction The saying, though also the reality, about family firms goes like this: The first generation builds the business with sweat and tears. The second consolidates the business, yet already has limited active memory of the labour and hardship that made it into a success. And eventually, the third (or fourth) generation, who lived in affluence and only experienced the full-­ grown company, lacks the drive and skills to prolong the business, frequently also due to power struggles between heirs, hence from ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations’, as the folk theory states (Marcus, 2008: 618). A main reason, in line with Sylvia J. Yanagisako’s (2019: 4) observations about the tensions family firms face in the transition phase from one

T. Salverda (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_11

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generation to the next, is that with the increase of heirs it tends to become more difficult to find agreement about who should lead the firm, which family members should work within the family business and how managerial responsibilities are organized. What subsequently happens with (failing) family businesses, however, is neither included in the saying nor in most studies of family firms. Partly, families fail to prolong the existence of the firm in line with Joseph A.  Schumpeter’s (1975) theory of creative destruction, i.e., through innovation new firms emerge, while established ones disappear because they fail to remain competitive. According to George E. Marcus (2008: 618), Schumpeter might not explicitly mention family firms, but ‘undoubtedly had them in mind when he wrote about the “creative destruction” that was inherent in capitalist organization’. Yanagisako states that out of the ashes of these ‘destructed’ firms, new family businesses often arise: ‘Family firms that end because of disagreements frequently spawn new family firms as fractions of the family hive off to initiate their own firms’ (Yanagisako, 2018: 6). Yet as the case of the Franco-Mauritians, the white business elite of the island of Mauritius, shows, there is also another aspect that requires attention. It is not necessarily the case that family firms ‘end’ because they are no longer successful or profitable, but that due to management and/or succession issues they are sold on, frequently in fact to other family enterprises. Accordingly, by virtue of some families facing difficulties managing their firms (often with increasing numbers of heirs), other families are able to expand their businesses. To better understand how the decline of one family firm may hang together with the expansion of another, this contribution will explain that the existence of a few very powerful Franco-­ Mauritian family business conglomerates on the island is also the result of a long history of buying up, and providing finance to, other family firms. A closer analysis of the aftermath of succession issues, then, will provide additional insights into the lifespan and dynamics of family firms. In addition to understanding struggles within families and the reasons why it is often difficult to prolong businesses over several generations, this contribution shows that other families often benefit from these difficulties. They can, as a result, consolidate their interests—also because their businesses may be better managed, may receive targeted advice from business schools and consultants, may have better access to finance, or are still younger in existence. Although the (family) profile of the ones buying up family firms may differ from one setting to another, the Franco-Mauritian case illustrates

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that the family, as a smaller face-to-face elite milieu (Mills, 2000), remains central to broader dynamics in society. To individual families, the prolongation of family firms and the success in passing these on from one generation to the next already indicate that families are key to the maintenance of privilege (e.g., de Pina-Cabral & Pedroso de Lima, 2000). Yet even when individual family businesses ‘fail’ in successive generations, the transition to another business family within a broader setting of kinship shows how such patterns still contribute to the successful consolidation of a business elite—and related inequality—over time. In resonance with Tobias Koellner’s introduction (see also Koellner, 2022), the Franco-Mauritian case highlights that for a better understanding it is key to broaden the kinship focus, instead of mainly concentrating on nuclear or conjugal families. In the Mauritian case, close-knit kinship relations importantly based on white skin colour, a key marker of the Franco-Mauritian (elite) community, have allowed other white-owned family firms to profit most from succession issues. They were best positioned to purchase ‘declining’ businesses. This confirms, in the words of Yanagisako (2018: 4), that the link between kinship and capitalism is often more prominent than the ‘Weberian assumption of the separation of kinship from economy in modern society’. The material discussed in this contribution is based on the ethnographic research conducted on the island of Mauritius (and in South Africa and France) during frequent visits since the year 2000. I have used multiple methods and sources, such as interviews, participant observation, network analyses, a questionnaire and written sources (see my monograph on the Franco-Mauritians, Salverda, 2015a). The interviewees included heads and former heads of the island’s largest conglomerates, other businesspeople, employees, politicians, students, retirees and so on, some with a Franco-Mauritian background, but some with other Mauritian and foreign backgrounds. I will anonymize the individuals I spoke or interacted with, though some of the family firms will be named. To explain Franco-Mauritian succession patterns in more detail, I will first provide a historical introduction of the Mauritian case. This will demonstrate how the origins of many family firms are unmistakably connected to the island’s grim plantation history. Next, I will look at several of the largest family conglomerates, as well as discuss other examples, and show how large, family firms are often the result of benefitting from succession and financial issues other family firms face. This, as this part will highlight, cannot be understood without considering the dynamics of Franco-­ Mauritian (elite) kinship. Yet even if the contribution will illustrate that

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broader kinship patterns bring benefits to the biggest Franco-Mauritian conglomerates, the role of the family remains central nonetheless. In the cases of shared ownership between different Franco-Mauritian families, of which there is a long history, there also exists a tendency to over time disentangle these again along family lines. Besides, even if the most powerful companies associated with the wealthiest families are listed companies, the respective families have constructed their ownership in such ways that they remain in control. In the Conclusion, I will discuss how insights coming from the Franco-Mauritian case may raise several questions regarding a better (anthropological) understanding of family firms elsewhere, too.

2  The ‘Sweet’ Origin of Mauritian History—and Family Firms Mauritius is a relatively small island, lying in the Indian Ocean about 800 kilometres to the east of Madagascar. Its human history only started with European colonization, as the island was uninhabited until then. After temporary settlements by the Portuguese and a century of (not very successful) occupation by the Dutch from 1598 onwards (Benedict, 1965: 9, Toussaint, 1971: 23, 27, Vaughan, 2005: 4–12), it was the French that came thereafter and left a more permanent mark on the island. Like the Portuguese and Dutch, they were initially interested in setting up a hub on the lucrative trade route to Asia, mainly. Yet they eventually not only laid the foundations for the capital, Port Louis, but also set up the first sugar plantations (Benedict, 1965: 10, Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, 1993: 155–182, 260–263). Partly through these plantations, but also through exploiting trading opportunities between Asia and Europe, the French period marked the first signs of the establishment of a white, colonial elite, of which the Franco-Mauritians are importantly the descendants. This white elite controlled both the administration and main business ventures on the island, sustained by large numbers of enslaved people imported from, especially, Madagascar and Mozambique, who quickly outnumbered the white settlers (North-Coombes, 2000: 7). Most contemporary Franco-Mauritian family firms do not date back in a straight line to the French period, which came to an end when the British conquered Mauritius in 1810. However, as a result of their elite networks, landed properties nonetheless largely remained in the hands of Franco-­ Mauritians. This indicates the importance of kinship; even if with the tides

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of economic prosperity and decline, business interests may have changed hands between individuals and families. This process was hardly disrupted with the arrival of the British (e.g., Salverda, 2015a). The British not only facilitated the expansion of the plantation economy with access to the lucrative British market, but were also mainly interested in taking over the island’s colonial administration (Allen, 1999). The well-organized community of planters, who gradually shaped an identity as Franco-Mauritians (Boudet, 2005: 26), were not expropriated. The British considered them a valuable asset (Sornay, 1950: 88, 262), while at the same time Britons never settled in large numbers in Mauritius to take over the economy. It was a ‘political quid pro quo’ between the British colonial administration, who were interested in maintaining control at low cost, and the Franco-­ Mauritians, who controlled the sugar industry (Mozaffar, 2005: 269, 270). Besides, the small number of British traders who did settle on the island, often integrated into the Franco-Mauritian community. ‘Many of the merchants who established themselves on the island married local [Franco-Mauritian] women, and it is reasonable to assume that significant sums of merchant capital subsequently found its way into the colony’s agricultural sector via familial connections’ (Allen, 1999: 21)—as will be shown below, some contemporary Franco-Mauritian family firms have (partly) British origins as a result. This was evidently facilitated by a shared white skin colour. ‘In Mauritius, it was racism which was used’, according to Daniel North-Coombes, ‘very successfully, to provide for the preservation of the status quo’ (North-Coombes, 2000: 38). At moments in time, nonetheless, the British colonial administration and Franco-Mauritian business interests clashed, such as in the case of the abolition of slavery. At the start of the 1830s, the British intention to abolish slavery was met with a great deal of resistance by Franco-Mauritian slave owners—but also by other, non-white slave owners, as not all of them were white Franco-Mauritians. This caused a serious power struggle between the British colonial administration and Franco-Mauritian slave owners, with the latter eventually ‘losing out’. In 1833, slavery was abolished, yet their strong opposition contributed favourably to the negotiation of substantial compensation. The British paid £69 per slave to 6874 slave owners, for a total of 68,613 enslaved people (Benedict, 1965: 17). ‘[T]he Mauritian plantocracy as a whole, therefore, did not suffer drastic property losses from [slave] emancipation’ (North-Coombes, 2000: 23), and they remained very powerful in the political and economic domain.

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Yet the Franco-Mauritians had to find a new source of labour for their plantations: indentured labourers from India. This greatly changed the composition of the island’s inhabitants. Starting with a first, small number of indentured labourers that arrived in 1834 (Vaughan, 2005: 269), by 1861 the population of inhabitants with Indian origin had risen to two-­ thirds (Benedict, 1965: 17). Among many things, such as through the purchase of land which the Franco-Mauritian-dominated sugar industry was faced to sell due to the falling world market price of sugar and various natural catastrophes in the late nineteenth century, the (economic) position of these Indian immigrants gradually strengthened (Allen, 1999; Storey, 1997). Although the new landowners mainly purchased small plots of land, it contributed to their emancipation, which cumulated with the independence of Mauritius more than fifty years later. In opposition to the fact that most Mauritians were excluded from a say in the island’s affairs, large parts of the population were mobilized from the 1930s onwards. This affected the Franco-Mauritians’ position, as they lost their (direct) political power in the preamble to independence in 1968, in particular to the Hindu majority, predominantly descendants of the indentured labourers. Today, the island’s highly diverse population of about 1.3 million people, with ancestors coming from Europe, India and the African mainland, live in relative harmony. The small group of Franco-­ Mauritians are estimated to constitute slightly less than 1% of the population, while Creoles, largely of slave descent, number about 28% (including a small ‘elite’ group of the so-called gens de couleur). The largest group are the Hindus (52%), who, together with a smaller minority of Muslims (16%), originate from India. Finally, there are the Sino-Mauritians, who make up 3% of the population (Eriksen, 1998: 15). Notwithstanding the occasional ethnic tensions, the island is nowadays celebrated as one of the soundest democracies and economies in Africa (Ramtohul & Kasenally, 2021: 219). Economically, though, there are still wide disparities, with large parts of the land (under sugar cultivation) that remain under the control of a few powerful Franco-Mauritian families (Ramtohul & Kasenally, 2021: 220). Importantly, this was due to the fact that Franco-­ Mauritian family firms could continue business relatively unscathed in the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial period, as the demands of the majority of Mauritians were initially predominantly political. A key explanation of this maintenance of economic dominance is also embedded in the dynamics of kinship on the island. Group identity in postcolonial Mauritian society is to a large extent defined by ethnicity

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(Salverda, 2015b), which in return shapes kinship relations, even if the exact notions of kinship and family may vary between (and within) the various ‘ethnic’ groups. Simply put, Hindus and Muslims value the importance of extended families, while Creoles are deemed to have less static kinship relations. In the case of the Franco-Mauritians, a closer look at their kinship and family relations confirms, as Peter Schweitzer (2000) highlights, not only the local meaning of kinship but also the importance to consider both biology and culture: ‘While it has become evident that biology alone is insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of what kinship is and does, it is equally hard to maintain that kinship has nothing to do with biology and procreation’ (Schweitzer, 2000: 16). Franco-­ Mauritian family patterns by and large follow the biological dynamics of traditional kinship in Euro-American cultures (Carsten, 2000). In third or fourth generations, these biological notions of family remain important, though without doubt at times showing a certain level of flexibility—as far as I have witnessed, however, in the direct management of the most powerful family firms, the biological notion remains dominant, as the continuing influence of primogeniture demonstrates. Yet when Franco-Mauritian kinship patterns more broadly are considered, the realities are more mixed—and flexible. Despite the fact that white skin colour as a marker of ‘racial’/ethnic distinction is often considered a natural/biological trait, whiteness is also shaped in accordance with cultural dynamics (Welsch & Vivanco, 2014). Owing to the relatively small size of the Franco-Mauritian community, kinship ties at times still follow biological family lines, yet in general kinship relations are determined by a broader sense of (white) ethnic identity; some people with white skin colour are excluded from the community, as they allegedly have non-white ancestors, while others are included, because they are members of important Franco-Mauritian families (Salverda, 2015a). The ties, moreover, have important socio-economic dimensions, as Franco-Mauritians frequently refer to themselves as being of higher class than other Mauritians, even if others are as wealthy or wealthier than they are. Such kinship dynamics, as the next section highlights, have shaped a setting in which ‘failing’ Franco-Mauritian family firms often change hands among kin—to the advancement of various economically powerful, family-controlled conglomerates.

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3   Between Failed and Successful Succession: Franco-Mauritian Conglomerates The largest Franco-Mauritian business conglomerates, such as IBL, CIEL, ENL Limited and Eclosia, are not only among the largest Mauritian businesses measured on turnover (Business, 2020), but all have links to the plantation economy. Either they directly originate from stakes in the sugar industry or family branches with stakes in the sugar industry have invested significant sums in the firm—such as in the case of Eclosia. Not only do these assets in the sugar industry result from a long history of buying up other (family-owned) estates, but all the large business conglomerates are also de facto family firms. Apart from various state-controlled business entities, this does not differ greatly from other businesses in Mauritius. By and large, family firms remain the dominant form of economic organization. This is also reflected today in the world more generally. As Yanagisako (2018: 1) shows, ‘[a]t the end of the twentieth century, family firms comprised the vast majority of firms in Western Europe’. These, as she continues, ‘are not […] limited to small and medium-sized businesses, but are also present among big businesses’. Building upon Andrea Colli (2003), she shows that of the biggest companies in Italy, almost half were family controlled, while also in Switzerland one-third were family controlled. Mauritius is, thus, no outlier. Succession issues, furthermore, follow a dominant, highly gendered path: primogeniture. In Franco-Mauritian family firms, traditionally succession is from father to eldest son. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, women tend to be absent from the management of the firm. All of the conglomerates mentioned above are managed by men, and most by the eldest son. In an analysis of Franco-Mauritian dominance in the top 100 companies of 2007 (the respective conglomerates were already among the biggest then), I demonstrated that the situation was relatively similar, though if you include board members there are a few more women among them (Salverda, 2015a: 77–80). As apart from Eclosia these biggest firms are already in their third generation of management or above, it could be argued that the men in charge have successfully navigated succession issues within their families. In contrast, one member of the respective families was of the opinion that mainly in non-Franco-Mauritian family firms, succession issues lead to conflicts between heirs, which negatively affect the business. ‘It happens less between children in the Franco-Mauritian community’, he said, ‘because Franco-Mauritian families may be more

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business-minded families’. In reality, though, it is not always a foregone conclusion who will be the successor. Often, my research participants would not be very open about succession issues—as a Franco-Mauritian contact told me, families would not share details of their succession disputes with a researcher. As in cases of family dynasties elsewhere, they probably want to portray the image to the outside world that they are a unified family (Koellner et al., 2022: 16). Yet with winners and losers, information still at times comes out that shows that cases of succession among heirs have all but been smooth. In the case of one of the most economically powerful Franco-Mauritian families, the oldest brother running the firm argued that he came from a friendly-­ minded family without struggles over succession. Other data I gathered, however, suggests that it was not a foregone conclusion that he and his brothers would become the leading branch of the family. Initially, a cousin was managing the family assets, yet allegedly not to the liking of the other heirs. He eventually left the family firm, sold his shares and then successfully started his own company. So, we see that also out of the ashes of succession battles, new firms may emerge. This was, moreover, not an anomaly, as control over the family firm had also before shifted from one branch to another, with some family members still holding grudges because of succession issues two generations back. In the case of Portuguese family firms, Antónia Pedroso de Lima (2000) shows, though, how this may change over time again. Branches that may have lost succession battles in the past may settle these in their favour later down the line, because of the increased strength of their branch, due to grouping shareholders and acquiring (strategic) control over management. The aforementioned Franco-Mauritian case shows that once a branch successfully ‘solves’ succession issues, things may calm down for a while. When the family firm is generating revenue, there is not always reason to complain; however, at times, there are complaints that heirs managing the firm pay themselves nice salaries, while for other heirs, there is no employment in the family firm and/or ‘only’ dividends (see also Kleve et al., 2020 on active and non-active shareholders). Non-economic issues are of influence, too, however. For example, in another case, a business group with a shareholding divided between different branches, with distinct family names, ended up in a media-covered ‘boardroom battle’. It appeared that much of the struggle was influenced by economically irrational factors, such as power over assets and big egos, though with the pretext that the heir in charge was incapable of running the business, while his father, who

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he had succeeded, had allegedly successfully run the company to everyone’s liking. Management of dynastic family businesses, as Heiko Kleve et al. (2020) show, is in any case a complex matter, with often up to a hundred or more shareholders. Similar patterns can be observed in the Franco-Mauritian cases, as owing to the long tradition of many Franco-Mauritian families in the private sector, wealth has frequently been passed on from generation to generation. With both a history of large families and, certainly in the recent past, share ownership relatively equally inherited between sons and daughters, even if management remains dominated by men, the number of heirs can increase substantially in the case of successful prolongation. One family behind one of the biggest family firms, for example, has eighty to a hundred shareholders. As mentioned above, kinship relations in the case of these heirs are importantly shaped along biological lines, namely through inheritance from parents to (biological) children. There are examples of sons-in-law becoming important within the family firm, yet this tends to initially be via (the inheritance of) their spouses. Moreover, the number and strength of family members owning shares do not exactly follow the family tree. Shareholders, for instance, may sell shares to, and buy from, other family members, as the example above of the cousin selling his shares highlights. In addition, and similar to elite families elsewhere, the future of the family (name) also influences matters. When family firms move into the third generation or above, the nature of family ties tends to change. This, as witnessed in the case of French elite families (Pinçon & Pinçon-Charlot, 1998: 328), shapes the firm’s management. The one in charge is not only managing the family firm, but he (so far, it is always a he in Mauritius) also has a function and role within the family structure. He manages the family assets and has to make sure that they are safeguarded for future generations. Closely associated with this is that the family name itself becomes an ‘asset’ or status symbol in matters of heritage. The carrying of wealth and power across several generations means that, next to the transfer of property, the symbolic aspect of the family name, family status and family history all influence behaviour relating to inheritance matters (Pinçon & Pinçon-Charlot, 1998: 331, 334). In these instances, as Pedroso de Lima’s (2000) Portuguese example illustrates, the family firm tends to become a cultural symbol that ties the group together—through both collaboration and infighting—rather than ‘pure’ family ties. As Yanagisako (2020: 711) highlights, this also goes the other way around, that is, in the case of heirs who experienced

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the end of their family firm, and thus the end of the connection between family name and firm. Some of the heirs may long for the past of the family firm, even when they have successful careers themselves. Such attachment to the family firm and name shows that the running of the family firm is determined not only by financial performance (Yanagisako, 2018: 1), but also by all kinds of ‘family values’, for the better or the worse. 3.1   Building Upon the Succession and Financial Troubles of Other Family Firms The development of the largest Franco-Mauritian business conglomerates highlights how various financial and non-financial issues come together, both involving broader kinship relations and the (legacy of the) family. The background of the company IBL, which is today linked to the richest Franco-Mauritian family, is insightful in this respect. The company, which is the island’s biggest measured on turnover, includes retail, construction and engineering, sugarcane production, property development and more. Its origins show the British legacy and date back to the 1830s, when the Blyth Brothers established their Mauritian business in trading and shipping (Lagesse, 1982). The other part of the name, Ireland Fraser, has similar origins, though it was established two decades later. Both were directly serving the sugar industry by shipping sugar to European markets and providing equipment and other material to the sugar estates (MacMillan, 2000: 351–354). Unlike many Franco-Mauritian family firms, the British owners remained closely attached to Britain, partly also running their business interests from there. With Mauritian Independence in 1968, the British owners considered it most appropriate to ‘Mauritianize’ the companies, i.e., to sell their controlling stakes. Over time, Franco-Mauritians possessing various sugar estates had already bought into Ireland Fraser, while there were equally close links to the Blyth Brothers, with Franco-Mauritians working there in the upper management. The Franco-Mauritians involved were especially related to two family firms, which had been independently initiated with the purchase of two sugar estates in 1912 and 1939. These family firms, thus, do not (openly) trace their histories back to the period of slavery. In one case, the establishment of the family name on the island dates back to 1767, i.e., during the French period, and the seven children the first settler had with his wife. Yet most of the descendants nowadays only share a family name or ancestors, rather than a firm. In the case of the family firm

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involved in Ireland Fraser, the original funding to purchase the sugar estate has a much later origin, namely of a forefather who was a successful grain trader in the 1930s—of the other Franco-Mauritian family involved, it is unclear where the initial funding originates from. In 1972, notably through the involvement of Franco-Mauritians on the side of Ireland Fraser, the two companies merged into a new company, IBL, which was an abbreviation of Ireland Blyth Limited. Initially, there remained significant, though minority, British ownership in the new company, yet within the decade thereafter the two Franco-Mauritian families came to control the group; tellingly, as I will discuss below, since 2016, it has been only controlled by one family. According to a family member involved at the time of the merger, the Franco-Mauritian families eventually benefitted from the British owners’ wish to completely withdraw from the newly established firm. As he told me, ‘an outside party had made an offer for the remaining British shares. Yet, since we were already involved, we could make the first bid and did not hesitate to do so’. This history shows, both on the side of the two companies and on the side of Franco-Mauritian firms established through the purchase of two sugar estates, that the current company unmistakably has links to the colonial past of a white-­ dominated sugar economy. IBL’s power and diverse business interests, though, are also the result of successfully purchasing family firms that faced succession issues. A member of one of the Franco-Mauritian families involved in the establishment of IBL remembered with much fondness the purchase of the island’s oldest existing business at that time. This trading company, Adam and Co., even dated back to the French period, as it was founded in 1802 (Lagesse, 1982: 141). Just prior to the establishment of IBL, Blyth Brothers purchased this company. The family member, who was working at Blyth Brothers at that time, remembered the takeover as one of the most significant events in his working life. He told me that when the notary placed the bid, all the heirs of the Adam family were present to finalize the last chapter of their family firm. Exactly what the succession and/or financial matters within the Adam family were are difficult to ascertain, yet the example shows how business interests may subsequently change hands to another family firm and facilitate its expansion. It highlights, moreover, how in such transitions the workings of broader Franco-­ Mauritian kin relationships are often essential. In a similar vein, kinship plays a role in the consolidation of family firms through the provision of additional finances to other Franco-Mauritian

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businesses. IBL, for example, controls the largest Mauritian brewery, which also has bottling rights for Coca-Cola. The family currently controlling IBL was not a founder of the brewery (which is, like IBL, also the result of the merger of two companies). Instead, the founders required funding and turned to the respective family. Over time, though, this family came to be the main shareholder and eventually merged the company with its family interests in IBL. Such patterns of succession issues and/or need for additional finances explain the wide portfolio of IBL and most of the other family conglomerates, but also of a variety of other Franco-Mauritian businesses. Through Franco-Mauritian kin networks, firms in financial difficulty and/or with succession problems tend to be first offered to other Franco-Mauritians—with whom kinship relations are, as discussed above, at times more flexible than in the case of the (extended) family. In line with the notion of relatedness, which Koellner discusses in the Introduction (see also Carsten, 2000; Koellner, 2022), a Franco-Mauritian businessman involved in the purchase of numerous businesses said: ‘You always ask people you know first if you have something to offer. For example, people you meet at a cocktail party’. Or at a wedding, because this same businessman was at a (Franco-Mauritian) wedding I attended, where I found him in profound discussion with another Franco-Mauritian man about business. Expanding and/or consolidating family firms, then, is partly the result of this historical pattern: businesses may have changed hands between individual Franco-Mauritian families, but they have remained within the Franco-Mauritian community—derailed succession disputes, thus, hardly affected the Franco-Mauritian (business) elite position as a whole (Salverda, 2015a). Conversely, it is not only that they tend to do business with their own kin, but until recently Franco-Mauritians have also largely refrained from close financial interactions with Mauritians of other backgrounds. As an elite community with a long history in the island’s business and administrative affairs, Franco-Mauritians have long considered most other Mauritians, including successful businessmen, as of lower rank. This is similar to established French families, who are suspicious of the nouveaux riches because they have not yet proven the capacity to safeguard their patrimony over several generations (Pinçon & Pinçon-Charlot, 1998: 151). In the case of the French luxury brand and family firm Hermès, concerns about a lack of patrimony even united the heirs in the sixth generation of management. In 2010, after more than 150  years within the same family (which, tellingly, was also the result of purchasing several

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other family firms), Bernard Arnault, the wealthiest Frenchman and owner of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, attempted to purchase Hermès. He would only have to lure some family members to sell their shares to take control of Hermès, yet instead the heirs united and resisted the aggressive takeover. Allegedly, also because they ‘dismissed Arnault as a brash US-style operator who would ruin the 177-year-old company’ (Farrell, 2014).1 The Hermès example indicates, like in the Franco-Mauritian case, how, apart from financial aspects, family and kin identity shape the management of family firms (see Koellner’s introduction, too). Yet in the running of a family firm, as the example of IBL demonstrates, there are at times also tensions between broader kinship patterns and a focus on the prolongation of the family firm for coming generations. 3.2   Disentangling Shared Investments Previously, I have analysed the connections between the top hundred companies in Mauritius based on interlocking directorates, that is, the official connections between boards and top management of different companies (Salverda, 2015a, 2016). This shows that shared investments and other forms of entanglement between Franco-Mauritian (family) firms occur more frequently than between other Mauritian businesses, most likely also because the latter are often in their first or second generation. A non-Franco-Mauritian businessman said: ‘Joint ventures between local players are limited in Mauritius anyhow. The local joint ventures that exist are mainly between Franco-Mauritians’. These entanglements, illustrated by interlocking directorates, tend to be the result of dynamics already discussed, in particular that family firms, especially the largest ones, have a history of investing together and/or purchasing (controlling stakes in) other businesses. The strong ties between various companies, accordingly, are very much a representation of the strength of certain families within the Mauritian business community. Franco-Mauritian businessmen would typically downplay their close cooperation and frequently argued that there is strong competition among 1  Interestingly, at around the same time, LVMH purchased another family firm with a history of over a century, Bulgari, without much opposition (Elliott, 2011). The heirs considered it actually beneficial to team up with the global conglomerate LVMH, as this would allow Bulgari to scale up. Yet with a majority stake, LVMH consolidated its position, more or less as a family firm, too, though rather as one in its first generation.

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them. This, according to a retired Franco-Mauritian businessman who worked for one of the largest family firms, is one of the explanations for the high number of joint ventures between Franco-Mauritians. As he told me, ‘all the large business groups operate in their own domains and have their own supply chains. They don’t want to buy, for instance, fertilisers [for their sugar industry] from the competitor, despite belonging to the same community. Instead, they create a separate joint venture together for selling fertilisers, so all of them can have a share of the profit’. One could argue that such kind of competition is inherent to capitalism, yet the Franco-Mauritian case highlights how defending the family’s interest is at the core of the competition. Over time, co-ownership often competes with the aims of managing the family firm. This can happen because none of the families involved in shared investments feel fully responsible, as the case of a shared investment in a car dealership between two Franco-Mauritian family firms demonstrates. Two different Franco-Mauritian families had both been the exclusive importers of certain vehicle brands, but to cut costs, they had joined forces. Each then owned 50% of the shares of the joint venture. However, a lack of ownership did not contribute to good management of the company, and the dealership started drifting. Subsequently, a decision was made to sell the company to the largest non-Franco-Mauritian business group in 2006. This was perceived as a unicum, as usually Franco-­ Mauritians would by virtue of their extended kin networks sell their interests to other Franco-Mauritians only (Salverda, 2015a). Furthermore, the case of IBL shows that even without facing management issues, business interests are often split again along family lines. Despite the relative success of IBL, as well as of the two families’ other business ventures, the families disentangled their shared operations to a large extent in 2016. It may be that when the shared investment was initiated half a century before, the ones in charge on the sides of both families had a certain chemistry. Yet in the following generations, this may have become even more difficult to maintain than the already difficult task of running a firm within one extended family. The outcome was that one of the Franco-Mauritian families sold their shares in IBL. The other family, instead, brought its various investments, including in the brewery referred to above, together under the umbrella of IBL—interestingly, in the brief description of the company’s history on its website, there is now no

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reference to the other family, such as described in the history of IBL above.2 IBL, accordingly, is now by far the biggest Mauritian company in terms of turnover (Business, 2020), yet is fully controlled by one family. The other family still controls the second biggest company, however. To me, this shows the continuing dominance of family in running these firms—whether these are firms directly under the control of families and/ or firms in which they have a controlling stake. Co-ownership and shared projects still exist and will probably continue to do so in the future. But as families in the end own a part in joint ventures as a family, it appears that securing the future of the family firm and legacy remains the dominant drive. The disentangling of ownership between various families demonstrates this well. Interestingly, as I have argued before (Salverda, 2015a: 93, 108), the disentanglement of the family interests also refutes the argument that as listed companies the ownership is distributed among general public shareholders. The consolidation of the family’s interests under the umbrella of IBL shows that various companies, such as the brewery, are de facto controlled by the respective Franco-Mauritian family, even if these may at the same time be listed companies. This aspect was also observed by a joint IMF-World Bank report in 2002: ‘The ownership structure of Mauritius companies is dominated by a small group of family-owned companies. Many family-owned companies listed their stock in response to tax and other incentives provided by the Mauritius government. Despite the stock market listings, many of the listed companies are still controlled by a family holding company or a partnership acting as the holding company. These holding companies often control a range of diverse enterprises and typically own vast landholdings that have failed to produce satisfactory earnings.’ (World Bank, 2002: 1)3

Hence, public ownership is somewhat of a non-argument, as all large business conglomerates are in the end still controlled by particular Franco-­ Mauritian families, through a majority share ownership, holding companies or their flagship firms. This is not to say that as an ordinary shareholder you may not benefit, but the respective families determine the direction of

 https://www.iblgroup.com/our-history [accessed 26 May 2022].  Since this 2002 IMF-World Bank report, much of the vast landholdings initially dedicated to sugar production have become more valuable through the conversion of land to property development. 2 3

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the business in the end, including the disentangling of co-ownership, as the IBL case demonstrates (see also Stewart & Hitt, 2012: 19).

4  Conclusion As the Franco-Mauritian case highlights, succession within family firms remains a pertinent issue. Many Franco-Mauritian family firms are, in this sense, not much different from other family firms facing the conundrum of succession. It could simply be argued that the large, Franco-Mauritian conglomerates have, despite occasional struggles between heirs, managed succession issues somewhat better than families that fail to prolong the family firm beyond the third generation. So far, that is, because the transition to a new generation may unleash all kinds of new dynamics affecting collaboration—or clashes—between heirs. The prolongation of the family firm, thus, is also in their cases not a guarantee. What the Franco-Mauritian example demonstrates, though, is that in the case of succession issues, other family firms are often available to purchase the family firm—provided the firm holds a certain value. In similar ways, family firms may provide finances to other family firms, with in some instances an eventual shift of control. This highlights that it is not only important to consider succession issues as such, but also of relevance to study what happens at the ‘end’ of succession issues. It may, as the case shows, strengthen other family firms. A broader definition of kin, as several Franco-Mauritian examples show, is essential to understanding these transitions—this highlights that it is not only important to define family in the study of family firms (Wong, 2021), but also kinship. Partly, this may be unique to the Mauritian context, as Franco-Mauritian kin largely overlaps with an elite position, this also highlighting the cultural, and to a certain extent flexible, notion of Franco-Mauritian kinship. Franco-­ Mauritians have had, accordingly, not only more means to purchase family firms facing succession issues, but also an interest in keeping assets within their elite circles—even if this is slowly changing. Without doubt, the role of broader kinship relations differs from setting to setting. In some cases, they may matter more to the understanding of family firms than in other cases. Yet even without a significant impact of broader kinship patterns on the running of family firms, the Franco-­ Mauritian case points to the need to investigate what happens to family firms when succession can no longer be prolonged—and why. Is it, like in the Franco-Mauritian case, likely that other family firms purchase family

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businesses facing succession issues? And if so, why? Is it simply more likely that family firms purchase or finance other family firms, because they remain dominant forms of economic organization? Or are there other dynamics involved? Koellner et al. (2022: 11) indicate that from an economic perspective, it does not always make sense to maintain the firm within the family, as selling shares directly may fetch higher prices. Following this logic, it may equally not always be the case that other family firms offer the best price for a ‘failing’ family firm. Would heirs nonetheless opt to sell to another family firm? Is this because they may have more affinity with other family firms—and maybe hope to protect the legacy of the firm beyond their ownership? Either way, exploring such questions in the (anthropological) study of family firms may help to better understand and explain how families are able to grow and consolidate their family firm over time—at least for several generations.

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Kleve, H., Koellner, T., von Schlippe, A., & Rüsen, T. A. (2020). The business family 3.0: Dynastic business families as families, organizations and networks— Outline of a theory extension. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 37(3), 516–526. Koellner, T. (2022). Family firms and business families: A field for anthropological research. Anthropology Today 38 (6): 8-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/14678322.12768. Koellner, T., Haver-Rassfeld, H., & Kleve, H. (2022). Das doing-family Konzept. FUS, 1, 11–17. Lagesse, M. (1982). Blyth brothers & company limited, 1830–1980. IPC. Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, H. (1993). Ile de France, 1715–1746. Mahatma Gandhi Institute. MacMillan, A. (2000). Mauritius illustrated: Historical and descriptive, commercial and industrial, facts, figures and resources. Asian Educational Services. Marcus, G. E. (2008). Family firms amidst the creative destruction of capitalism. American Ethnologist, 32(4), 618–622. Mills, C.W. (2000 [1956]). The power elite. Oxford University Press. Mozaffar, S. (2005). Negotiating independence in Mauritius. International Negotiation, 10, 263–291. North-Coombes, M. (2000). Studies in the political economy of Mauritius. Mahatma Gandhi Institute. Pinçon, M., & Pinçon-Charlot, M. (1998). Grandes fortunes: Dynasties familiales et formes de richesse en France. Editions Payot et Rivages. Ramtohul, R., & Kasenally, R. (2021). Elites and the practice of (non)accountability in Mauritius. In W. Adebanwi & R. Orock (Eds.), Elites and the politics of accountability in Africa (pp. 218–246). University of Michigan Press. Salverda, T. (2015a). The Franco-Mauritian elite: Power and anxiety in the face of change. Berghahn Books. Salverda, T. (2015b). (dis)unity in diversity: How common beliefs about ethnicity benefit the white Mauritian elite. Journal of Modern African Studies, 53(4), 533–555. Salverda, T. (2016). Who belongs to the elite? Insights from the study of the Franco-Mauritians. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 141, 123–142. Schumpeter, J.A. (1975 [1942]). Capitalism, socialism and democracy. Harper. Schweitzer, P. (2000). Dividends of kinship. Routledge. Sornay, P. (1950). Isle de France/Ile Maurice. General Printing and Stationery Company. Stewart, A., & Hitt, M.  A. (2012). Why can’t a family business be more like a nonfamily business? Modes of professionalization in family firms. Family Business Review, 25(1), 58–86. Storey, W.  K. (1997). Science and power in colonial Mauritius. University of Rochester Press.

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PART VI

Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion Tobias Koellner

In the Introduction to the volume, some suggestions were made as to how anthropology can contribute to ongoing discourses and reflections on family businesses and business families. For this, the volume is a first attempt to stimulate cross-fertilization and interdisciplinary exchange between anthropologists, sociologists, economists and regional scientists. All of them have contributed to the volume and have described and explained their ideas and associations by drawing on long-term engagement with family businesses or business families. Therefore, all the contributions follow a qualitative research methodology and approach, although not all of them are based on the ethnographic fieldwork, the main method in anthropology. The first contribution mentioned in the Introduction is the empirical analysis of family businesses and business families based on long-term research and with the help of ethnographic methods. On the whole, the volume covers ten different cultural contexts in so different locations as Bolivia, Japan, Germany, China, Russia, Hungary, Armenia, Italy, Benin and Mauritius. Moreover, the individual accounts do not only cover a

T. Koellner (*) WIFU, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_12

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wide range of regional settings, but also address very different topics such as various practices for the production and reproduction of the business family (rituals, narratives, etc.), notions of power and hierarchy inside the family and the business, succession and longevity, and different understandings of the family as such. To be sure, this does not allow us to speak ‘representatively’ for family businesses on a global scale, but it is a good basis for taking initial cross-cultural considerations and developing initial comparative contributions. A first crucial finding that becomes obvious from the chapters in the volume is that there is no single and coherent understanding of the business family or the family business across different local settings and in different time periods. Quite the contrary seems to be true because both are understood and realized in very different ways. To quote Heung Wah Wong (2023): ‘they are emic all the way’; this is an expression borrowed from anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (2017). Secondly, I think that the concepts used and discussed in anthropology and the social sciences can be an important contribution for the analysis of the business family and the family business. Key concepts originate from kinship anthropology and family sociology and allow for a new understanding of the family and kinship in the business context. In particular, these are relatedness (Carsten, 2000), kinning (Howell, 2006) and doing family (Jurczyk et  al., 2014). Although very different in their specific notions, all three concepts share an understanding of family and kinship as processes that do not exist as unchanged entities over longer periods of time but need constant efforts for their implementation and realization. Consequently, families and kinship groups need to be produced and reproduced within and across generations which also has implications for the organization of the family firm (see also Koellner et al., 2023; Martin, 2023; or Müller, 2023). This finding is very relevant for any family or kinship group but even more so for business families that may become very large and include different nuclear families. In such growing business families, interaction becomes rare due to language, spatial and emotional distances (Felden et al., 2019; Jaffe & Lane, 2004; Kleve et al., 2020; Rüsen et al., 2019, 2021). In this context, centrifugal tendencies may prevail and cause the separation of the business family as an entity which, in many cases, is the end of the business as a family business too. Herewith it becomes clear that a shared identity, cohesion, an emotional attachment, binding social ties and transgenerational continuation or entrepreneurial orientation are not given but need to be established (see also Habbershon et al., 2010).

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Therefore, this volume contributes to recent discussions in family business research and enhances our understanding of how socio-emotional wealth (Berrone et al., 2012; Gómez-Mejía et al., 2007), familiness (Frank et al., 2010; Habbershon & Williams, 1999; Zellweger et al., 2010), an intent at transgenerational continuation (Basco et al., 2019; Nordqvist & Zellweger, 2010) or entrepreneurial legacies (Jaskiewicz et al., 2015) are made and remade in the business family. Thus, our aim is not to measure such phenomena but to focus on their very generation and enactment. The main topics addressed in the articles of the volume, then, are to show how meaning is created, emotional attachment is fostered and identification with the business family, the family firm, the assets and the products are created and sustained. A third contribution pertains to the analysis of family businesses and business families in their respective cultural contexts. Here, we need to pay more attention to cross-cultural differences by drawing on a differentiated understanding of culture (see also Koellner, 2021, 2022, Koellner & Roth, 2022, Koellner et al. 2022b). For this, it is crucial to enhance our understanding of culture and to incorporate insights from anthropology and other disciplines with a cross-cultural agenda. Having said this, we also need to take into account that there is no single and coherent understanding of culture, neither in anthropology nor in any other discipline. Cross-cultural studies of family businesses and business families thus face the same problems that other disciplines have encountered before when they address cultural differences and highlight the importance of the context. How, then, should we take cultural differences and other contextual influences into consideration adequately? One way to do this could be the concept of embeddedness that allows for the analysis of different characteristics such as moral notions, religious considerations, ethnic belonging and their influence on human behaviour in family businesses and business families. Economic action, then, is embedded not only in social relations but also in ‘a nexus of social action in which kinship goals, sentiments and commitments are at play’ (Yanagisako, 2019: 6). Moreover, these kinship goals, sentiments and commitments ‘are culturally mediated’ (Yanagisako, 2002: 7) so that we have strong variation between different cultural settings. Applied in that way, we are able to draw on an understanding of culture that is not essentialist (e.g., Hofstede’s cultural dimensions) but allows for the incorporation of different contexts, some of which are distributed across whole countries (e.g., the legal context), across even wider spaces (for example,

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religious denominations), or emphasize the symbolic constitution and the processual production of culture in larger social entities beyond organizational culture (Brumann, 1999, 2002; Geertz, 1973; Ortner, 1973; Sahlins, 1999; Sökefeld, 1999). To be sure, the concept of embeddedness has a long use in anthropology and economic sociology (Beckert, 2003; Granovetter, 1985; Hann & Hart, 2009; Koellner, 2012; Polanyi, 2001; Zukin & DiMaggio, 1990), and its application should present few problems for family business research, as some applications indicate (Aldrich et  al., 2021; Aldrich & Cliff, 2003; Basco, 2017). For the application of embeddedness, however, we have to move beyond Granovetter’s narrow concept which focuses on the social networks of the actors and ignores the ‘complex alchemy of politics, culture, and ideology’ (Krippner, 2001: 782). Equipped with such a broader understanding of embeddedness, then, the analysis of family businesses and business families will be most improved when it incorporates different aspects of embeddedness such as (1) the institutional setting, (2) social norms, (3) religion/rituals, (4) world views and (5) the broader socio-economic conditions, some of which are distributed across whole countries (for an application in the post-Soviet Russian context, see Koellner, 2012). Finally, let me refer to a last suggestion mentioned in the Introduction: cross-cultural comparisons. Although there do not exist any ready-to-­ apply formats for this, and the methods, concepts and foci applied throughout the volume differ considerably, nevertheless, a preliminary basis for this can be found throughout the chapters of this volume. In particular, the notion of the kinship enterprise and associated concepts such as relatedness, kinning and doing family provide a joint basis. For this, we have seen efforts that emphasize the processes for the development of the business family: narratives as a technique for this have been discussed by Koellner et al. in the German case; kinning rituals, transfer of ownership rights and marriage patterns have been highlighted by Martin in her analysis of the Fulɓe in Northern Benin; and godparenthood and political kin relations have been explored by Müller in Bolivia. As we can see, the contents and mechanisms for production and reproduction do differ, although the patterns and modes for producing and reproducing relatedness, cohesion and meaning as such are similar and comparable. Likewise, there is some overlap in the post-Soviet setting as the examples from Russia and Armenia indicate. In Armenia, Antonyan has shown that family and kinship structures have been the main pillars of the parallel

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‘oligarchic’ economy, which has been characterized by paternalism, solidarity, reciprocity and loyalty in the in-group with a clear preference for kin mates in key positions. This is also true for Russia, as is shown by Tereshina, who also emphasizes the gender dimension in these relations when a business is given as a gift to a wife to secure her well-being and that of her offspring. Yet more examples highlight the importance of ritual practices, moral teachings and practices and kin relations. In their analyses of Japan and China, Wong and Caspary & Herrmann-Pillath highlight the differences between both countries and emphasize the different implementations of kin relations and understandings of Confucianism which are in contrast to other authors who describe a joint Confucian cultural space or describe the East Asian context as one single cultural entity. Further chapters in the volume draw attention to the historic dimension of family businesses and business families. In their chapters on Italy (Ghezzi), Mauritius (Salverda) and Hungary (Szűcs), these authors highlight various changes over time. In the case of Italy, Ghezzi mentions the importance of land fragmentation and the cooperativism of the Catholic Church, which have had a significant influence on the development of family businesses and their structure. Similarly, but in different ways, Salverda shows how colonialism and trade patterns at that time allowed for the establishment of companies, most of which have existed until today although in changed forms and through incorporation into bigger firms. In the Hungarian case described by Szűcs, the socialist era with collectivization and the creation of cooperatives had an important influence on the economic structure of the country. Nevertheless, it was the time after the end of socialism which saw the creation of new enterprises, even though most of them—in one way or another—drew on the legacies of the past. New challenges arose with the integration into the European Union which made competition for local producers of paprika even more difficult. As a result, the continuation of the business in family ownership is in question and needs further efforts to ensure commitment and identification in the new generation. Despite some overlap and strong efforts to ensure conceptual consistency, some challenges still remain before we are able to truly apply a cross-cultural perspective and develop a more coherent point of view on family firms and business families. The main reason for this is that although all authors of the volume paid particular attention to the role of the family or the kinship group, the questions raised and the topics addressed do differ. For the time being, this can be seen as an asset because it shows the

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width and breadth of topics and themes in family business research, which can be analysed with the help of anthropology and ethnographic methods. Here, long-term interaction allows for incorporating changes over time and the detailed analysis of structures, hierarchies and mechanisms such as marriage (see also Stewart, 2010), godparenthood or adoption, all of which have been largely neglected so far in family business research despite their clear consequences for the business family and the family firm. For this, anthropology is particularly well suited and allows us to access different people in the business family apart from the owner or manager, such as women, children and grandparents, or from among the stakeholders (employees, community members, business partners and others). This enables a change of perspective and even more attention to be paid to the kinship group behind the family firm, as it is the starting point for the heterogeneity of family businesses. In the future, this approach should be strengthened by an anthropological perspective. Based on this, it is time to put the structures, composition and identity of the family behind the company centre stage. Herewith, we are able to pay more attention to the study of the culturally embedded and shaped business family, the starting point for a better understanding of the family business as such. Despite all these efforts, some limitations remain. We definitely need more empirical studies for enhancing our understanding of kinship in relation to economic activity. Although the authors strongly emphasized the symbolic construction of kin relations in the chapters, the actual importance of ‘blood relations’ still is in question. The authors of this volume do not argue that blood relations are irrelevant because most of our interlocutors perceive them to be the ‘most natural and important’ pattern for creating relatedness. Nevertheless, the business family also knows more fluid modes of association for consanguineal and affinal kin relations and may be prototypical for discussing such conceptualizations where we found references to the founder or more distant ancestors, and where ownership may be a precondition for full involvement. Moreover, the incorporation of external people through marriage or adoption seems to be more strategic than we are used to recognize it. Here, we need more coordinated efforts in the future where similar research methods, research questions and conceptual underpinnings are combined for a more consistent collection and analysis of empirical material. A starting point for this may be my own upcoming project, which aims to develop a cross-cultural and comparative perspective on business families and family businesses that highlights their context and their cultural specifics. For this, the

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incorporation of empirical research in Peru, Russia, Germany, India, China and Japan is envisioned. Based on such a broad and coordinated effort of conducting research and analysing the data, it may be possible to even better integrate the research efforts and apply the recently developed conceptual models more consistently. This is my vision for the future that builds on the incorporation of anthropological knowledge and methodology for a better understanding of family businesses and business families and allows for bringing anthropology back in.

References Aldrich, H. E., Brumana, M., Campopiano, G., & Minola, T. (2021). Embedded but not asleep: Entrepreneurship and family business research in the 21st century. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 12, 100390. Aldrich, H. E., & Cliff, J. E. (2003). The pervasive effects of family on entrepreneurship: Toward a family embeddedness perspective. Journal of Business Venturing, 18(5), 573–596. Basco, R. (2017). Epilogue: Multiple embeddedness contexts for entrepreneurship. In M.  Ramírez-Pasillas, E.  Brundin, & M.  Markowska (Eds.), Contextualizing entrepreneurship in developing and emerging economies (pp. 329–336). Edward Edgar. Basco, R., Calabrò, A., & Campopiano, G. (2019). Transgenerational entrepreneurship around the world: Implications for family business research and practice. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 10(4), 100249. Beckert, J. (2003). Economic sociology and embeddedness: How shall we conceptualize economic action? Journal of Economic Issues, 37, 769–787. Berrone, P., Cruz, C., & Gomez-Mejia, R. (2012). Socioemotional wealth in family firms: Theoretical dimensions, assessment approaches, and agenda for future research. Family Business Review, 25(3), 258–279. Brumann, C. (1999). Writing for culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded. Current Anthropology, 40(1), 1–27. Brumann, C. (2002). On culture and symbols. Current Anthropology, 43(3), 509–510. Carsten, J. (Ed.). (2000). Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship (pp. 1–36). Cambridge University Press. Felden, B., Hack, A., & Hoon, C. (2019). Management von Familienunternehmen. Springer Gabler. Frank, H., Lueger, M., Nosé, L., & Suchy, D. (2010). The concept of ‘Familiness’: Literature review and systems theory-based reflections. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 1(3), 119–130. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of culture. Basic Books.

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Gómez-Mejía, L., Haynes, K., Núñez-Nickel, M., Jacobson, K., & Moyano-­ Fuentes, J. (2007). Socioemotional wealth and business risks in ­family-­controlled firms: Evidence from Spanish olive oil Mills. Administrative Science Quarterly, 52(1), 106–137. Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 481–510. Habbershon, T. G., Nordqvist, M., & Zellweger, T. M. (2010). Transgenerational entrepreneurship. In M. Nordqvist & T. Zellweger (Eds.), Transgenerational entrepreneurship (pp. 1–38). Edward Elgar Publishing. Habbershon, T. G., & Williams, M. L. (1999). A resource-based framework for assessing the strategic advantages of family firms. Family Business Review, 12(1), 1–25. Hann, C., & Hart, K. (2009). Market and society: The great transformation today. Cambridge University Press. Howell, S. (2006). The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. New York: Berghahn Books. Jaffe, D., & Lane, S. (2004). Sustaining a family dynasty: Key issues facing complex multigenerational business- and investment-owning families. Family Business Review, 17(1), 81–98. Jaskiewicz, P., Combs, J. G., & Rau, S. B. (2015). Entrepreneurial legacy: Toward a theory of how some family firms nurture transgenerational entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing, 30(1), 29–49. Jurczyk, K., Lange, A., & Thiessen, B. (Eds.). (2014). Doing Family: Warum Familienleben heute nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist. München: Juventa Verlag. Kleve, H., Koellner, T., Schlippe, A. V., & Rüsen, T. A. (2020). The business family 3.0: Dynastic business families as families, organizations and networks; outline of a theory extension. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 37, 516–526. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2684 Koellner, T. (2012). Practising without belonging? Entrepreneurship, religion and morality in contemporary Russia. LIT Verlag. Koellner, T. (2021). Kulturelle Variationen in Familienunternehmen und Unternehmensfamilien: Eine Literaturübersicht und eine Forschungsagenda. Otto-von-Guericke-Universität, Fakultät für Humanwissenschaften, Institut II: Fachdisziplin Soziologie. Koellner, T. 2022 . Family firms and business families: A field for anthropological research. Anthropology Today 38 (6): 8-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/14678322.12768 Koellner, T., Boyd, B., Kleve, H., & Rüsen, T. (2023). Producing and reproducing the business family across generations: The importance of narratives in German business families. In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Koellner, T., Haver-Rassfeld, H., & Kleve, H. (2022). Das Doing-Family-Konzept: Eine neue Perspektive zum Verständnis der Herstellung und des Zusammenhalts von Unternehmerfamilien. Familienunternehmen und Strategie, (01/2022), 11–17. Koellner, T. & Roth, S. (2023) (Under Review). Cultural variations in family firms and business families: A literature review and agenda for future research. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management. Krippner, G. R. (2001). The elusive market: Embeddedness and the paradigm of economic sociology. Theory & Society, 30, 775–810. Martin, J. (2023). How ‘enduring family bonds’ are made: Insights from Fulɓe kinship enterprises in northern Benin. In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Müller, J. (2023). Kinship, godparenthood and urban estates in the Bolivian Andes: The cultural production of business families. In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Nordqvist, M., & Zellweger, T. (Eds.). (2010). Transgenerational entrepreneurship: Exploring growth and performance in family firms across generations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Ortner, S.  B. (1973). On key symbols 1. American Anthropologist, 75(5), 1338–1346. Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]). The great transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Rüsen, T., Kleve, H., & Schlippe, A. V. (2021). Managing business family dynasties. Springer. Rüsen, T., Kleve, H., Schlippe, A., & v. (2019). Die dynastische Großfamilie. Skizze eines spezifischen Typus von Unternehmerfamilien. In H.  Kleve & T.  Koellner (Eds.), Die Soziologie der Unternehmerfamilie. Grundlagen, Entwicklungslinien, Perspektiven (pp. 225–245). Springer VS. Sahlins, M. (1999). Two or three things that I know about culture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5(3), 399–421. Sahlins, M. (2017). In anthropology, it’s emic all the way down. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(2), 157–163. Sökefeld, M. (1999). Debating self, identity, and culture in anthropology. Current Anthropology, 40(4), 417–448. Stewart, A. (2010). Sources of entrepreneurial discretion in kinship systems. In A. Stewart, G. T. Lumpkin, & J. A. Katz (Eds.), Entrepreneurship and family business (pp. 291–313). Bingley. Wong, H. W. (2023). Anthropology of family and family businesses is emic all the way. In T. Koellner (Ed.), Family firms and business families in cross-cultural perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Yanagisako, S. J. (2002). Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Yanagisako, S. (2019). Family firms as kinship enterprises. Economics Discussion Papers, No. 2019-12. Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW). Zellweger, T. M., Eddleston, K. A., & Kellermanns, F. W. (2010). Exploring the concept of Familiness: Introducing family firm identity. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 1(1), 54–63. Zukin, S., & DiMaggio, P.  J. (Eds.). (1990). Structures of capital: The social Organization of the Economy. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 13

Afterword Chris Hann

If one looks around for examples of successful business families in the United Kingdom, one dynasty stands out. Established in 1709, the family known nowadays as the Windsors is referred to by its most senior members as ‘the firm’. Its accumulated capital is carefully managed and distributed. Revenue streams are supplemented by contributions from British taxpayers for services rendered. By virtue of the land they own, distinguished members of this family profited hugely from the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, before Brexit put an end to that particular bonanza. In the twentieth-century United States, an entrepreneur of German descent called Fred Trump established a somewhat more conventional business family that remains shallow in comparison with the Windsors. The New World context is different: a president is not a monarch. Are the differences cultural, in the sense explored by Tobias Koellner in his Introduction to this volume? Or is the celebrity culture of the anglophone

C. Hann (*) Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_13

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world in the twenty-first century now thoroughly globalized and homogenized, in the business world as everywhere else? This volume explores numerous large questions that have preoccupied the modern social sciences since their inception. Most of us have some notion of ‘the economy’ as a realm in which we produce goods and provide services to satisfy our needs by relying on market mechanisms that are construed as basically impersonal. The digital revolution has further removed the personal element from a great many of our transactions. The social science called economics (the only one for which a Nobel Prize is awarded) is premised on criteria of rationality and efficiency that, when pushed to their limits in certain approaches favoured particularly in Chicago, treat individual human beings as continuously maximizing utility in every action they take. This includes the decision to do nothing, which can only be the result of a calculation of the opportunity costs of time. The social sciences have also devoted much attention to the institutions of modern capitalism. Some economists have recognized that the reduction of ‘transaction costs’ by keeping activities within the corporation exceeds the benefits potentially available via outsourcing to impersonal markets. Sociologists began to investigate industrial labour processes a century ago, and eventually similar attention was paid to service sectors. However, as Koellner points out, research within paradigms of modernization has tended to overlook continuities in economic organization that have remained significant in the most advanced capitalist countries and often remain dominant in what we have come to call the Global South. The task of showing how personal and familial ties determine the engines of economic development has been largely left to anthropologists. Yet one searches in vain for an entry on business families or family firms in the three editions of James Carrier’s wide-ranging Handbook of Economic Anthropology. The present volume therefore fills a gap. It presents original analyses from all around the world of how ‘kinship enterprises’ function through time. The emphasis is on diversity. How is it possible that local  understandings of family and corporation should diverge significantly from what is taken for granted in the contemporary West? Closer scrutiny reveals that cultural notions and practices differ greatly within the West (the Italian historical ethnography sketched by Ghezzi is quite unlike the Anglophone world). They can also differ radically within a region such as East Asia, despite close historical ties (Caspary and Herrmann-Pillath). It is widely assumed that business families flourish on the basis of unconditional trust,

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yet what may have been true of the Rothschild banking family in the nineteenth century does not seem to hold for Aymara-speaking families in La Paz, who prefer to conduct their business with strangers (Müller). Many family firms fail in the third generation, but rather than perish or be sold to the highest bidder in an impersonal auction, some may be acquired by business families belonging to the same broader social grouping as the previous owners (Salverda). Business families everywhere construct narratives designed to maintain both customer loyalty to a brand and above all personal loyalties to each other (Koellner et al.). Beyond the concrete challenges of assuring succession, contemporary configurations are determined by cumulative phases of history, both material and ideational. Sometimes, these can be traced deep into the preindustrial past (Ghezzi). In postsocialist countries where the family business sector lacks comparable time depth, other fascinating questions present themselves: how do family firms emerge and how are gender relations restructured in unstable political conditions, when private property and entrepreneurship have been repressed for generations (Antonyan, Szücs, Tereshina)? In the case of China (Caspary and Herrmann-Pillath; Wong), the discontinuities are less marked: the socialism of the twentieth century has not been formally abandoned but successfully grafted onto much older traditions. All of the chapters in this volume are anthropological in the sense that the analysis is fleshed out in empirical illustrations, some based on surveys, some relying more on interviews, some on historical data, but most drawing on the results of long-term ethnographic fieldwork. This empiricism is obviously helpful in broaching concrete processes and penetrating beyond the representations offered by persons who often have good reason to be wary of researchers. But is anthropology more than ethnography? Several contributors dig deep into quintessentially anthropological topics. In her analysis of intra-familial gifting by entrepreneurs in provincial European Russia, Daria Tereshina picks up a favourite theme in economic anthropology in a highly original way. But the topic treated most prominently is not economic in the conventional sense at all: from Confucian China (Caspary and Herrmann-Pillath) to the pastoral Fulbe of northern Benin (Martin) to urban Bolivia (Müller), a strong case is made for the centrality of ritual in shaping the economic relations that the modern social sciences generally take to be based on antithetical principles. Note that the emphasis is on ritual rather than religion. Standardized performances in public are of greater significance than the internalized beliefs of individuals. It is

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striking that Max Weber’s celebrated thesis concerning the links between a ‘Protestant ethic’ and the ‘spirit of capitalism’ finds no echo in these case studies (though Weber’s theorizing of distinct ‘value spheres’ is taken up in an interesting way by Luca Szücs). In short, as Stephen Gudeman has argued over many years (e.g., Gudeman, 2016), ritual is central to economy: these categories collapse into each other in all types of human society. Finally, uniting all the chapters of this volume, there is the concept of kinship. This is an abstraction analogous to ‘the economy’. It has long been the most technical branch of anthropology (roughly the equivalent of econometrics in modern economics), and outsiders can easily feel intimidated by the jargon. Due to the way the concept of kinship straddles the realms of biology and culture, it has also been a site for philosophical disagreement within the discipline. Uncontroversial is the observation that humans regulate marriage and family (and incest) in highly diverse ways. Sociocultural anthropologists prioritize the emic understandings they have found in their field research (as Wong does most emphatically in his contribution to this volume). Janet Carsten, whose work is frequently cited by the contributors, goes further in proposing a broader concept of ‘relatedness’ that transcends biology. New reproductive technologies have fuelled these trends in the anthropological literature. Yet to argue that the language of kinship is entirely symbolic seems unsatisfactory, even incoherent (Gellner, 1960). When a term that formerly indicated close bonds of spiritual kinship (compadrazgo—see Chap. 7 (Müller)) is exported into contexts where it facilitates new  economic goals, some readers may wonder whether this indicates not so much an expansion of meaningful relatedness as a secularizing debasement. In my own research into collectivized agriculture in Hungary in the 1970s, I found the traditional term koma, a relation of godparenthood, to be widely used in contexts where there was no question of spiritual kinship. Contacting a koma was a common way to get things done, or to gain access to scarce goods. In the first generation of postsocialist firms, a strong koma relationship (perhaps corresponding to an actual Catholic sacrament and/or affinal relations) might form the core of a private enterprise. This ritual relationship is available to supplement the ties of ‘blood’. But I do not think it is confused with them. This should perhaps be borne in mind when considering Tobias Koellner’s proposal to extend Yanagisako’s definition of the kinship enterprise (quoted by several contributors). In any case, the editor’s call to pinpoint links between

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(institutional) ‘varieties of capitalism’ and (cultural) variation in kinship and the family charts an ambitious agenda for further research. Sylvia Yanagisako argues persuasively that ‘enduring bonds between the family, the assets and the family firm rest on shared beliefs, sentiments and commitments attached to these bonds’ (2019: 6). If ‘assets’ are generously defined, however, one wonders what families do not have such collective projects. The Windsors and Trumps qualify for gold membership of this category, but a household headed by two academics who have never engaged in business but who juggle their investments, assets and pensions with a continuous eye on how best to help their children and grandchildren would also have to be included. What is business anyway? Have we reached the point where the neoclassical economist and sociocultural anthropologist converge, with the role of the latter being to fill in supplementary contextual ‘values’ wherever a simple individualist calculation of rationality is patently insufficient to explain observed behaviour? To my mind, a helpful synthesis was outlined by Eric Wolf four decades ago in his formulation of a ‘kin-ordered’ mode of production (Wolf, 1982: 88–96). This was put forward as part of a more general adaption of Marxist theory to explain the deployment of social labour in time and space. Wolf was mainly interested in the expansion of a capitalist mode of production originating in North-West Europe in recent centuries. A second mode was the tributary mode of production, which subsumed such non-capitalist social formations as feudalism and advanced chiefdoms in which elements of class formation were incipient. All other human societies were dominated by kinship. Wolf distinguished between small hunter-gatherer bands of interacting individuals and larger communities in which the principles of kinship were ‘extended’ to larger populations where they functioned in broader political and jural contexts. New members might still be welcome and readily incorporated as kin in such cases, but kin groups would tend to become more exclusive as they created assets of value to succeeding generations. Eric Wolf insisted that his concepts were not evolutionary stages, but the long-term trend was nonetheless clear. One might extend the historical approach of Simone Ghezzi much further back into the past. The force of kinship is not linear: the ties which expanded in certain tribal societies to regulate the larger political-jural domain are found to contract again when specialized institutions of governance emerge. But kinship never goes away. In the light of the studies in this volume, we see how elements of kin ordering can be found everywhere in contemporary economic life,

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from plutocratic  dynasties to the bazaar and informal sector. Wherever exclusive groups hold assets of transgenerational value, questions of continuity will present themselves. If no obvious successors are available, whether due to familial demographics, the unsuitability of the individuals who are formally eligible, or because of incompatible personal aspirations on the part of familial heirs, the institutions of kinship can usually be stretched to allow others to come forward in their place. This should not come as a surprise: after all, the in-marrying son-in-law has been a feature of Eurasian society since the Neolithic (Goody, 1976). Kinship that is established through ritual is doubtless older still. The House of Windsor would understand this!

References Carrier, J. G. (Ed.). (2022). A handbook of economic anthropology. Edward Elgar. Gellner, E. (1960). The concept of kinship (with special reference to Mr Needham’s ‘descent systems and ideal language’). Philosophy of Science, 27, 187–204. Goody, J. (1976). Production and reproduction. A comparative study of the domestic domain. Cambridge University Press. Gudeman, S. (2016). Anthropology and economy. Cambridge University Press. Wolf, E.  R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. University of California Press. Yanagisako, S. (2019). Family firms as kinship enterprises. Economics Discussion Papers, No. 2019-12. Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Index1

A Adoption, 7, 32, 163, 164, 166, 168, 259, 300 Animals, 13, 26, 28, 34, 35, 43n20, 44–47, 44n23, 200, 208, 209, 232 See also Livestock Anthropology economic, 27, 29, 30, 118, 123, 307 kinship, 3, 10, 27–30, 57, 74, 118, 150, 296 Armenia/Armenian, 84–87, 89, 90, 90n2, 91n3, 93–98, 93n7, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 185, 295, 298 Aspirations, 128–130, 181, 185, 186n5, 247, 255, 257, 310

B Benin/Beninese, 28, 42, 295 Birth, 6, 32, 37–39, 42n16, 43, 46, 47, 85, 87, 119, 129, 137, 165, 213, 253, 253n6 Blood/blood relation, 49, 58, 86, 94, 95, 133, 205, 224, 240, 300, 308 Bolivia/Bolivian, 14, 179–193, 295, 298, 307 Boundary-making, 9, 75 Breadwinner, 14, 121, 122, 125, 129 Brianza, 224, 224n1, 226, 228, 228n4, 231, 232, 237, 238 Bride, 40, 40n14, 41, 41n15, 46 See also Marriage Business challenges, 61, 63, 253, 296 Business family definition, 9, 16, 30, 165, 198, 200n3, 201 identity, 5, 9, 59, 64, 70

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Koellner (ed.), Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5

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312 

INDEX

C Capital, 7, 14, 41, 42, 43n19, 46n24, 47, 47n26, 59, 98, 101, 108, 109, 116, 118, 126, 128, 130–136, 138, 140, 142, 160, 192, 213, 214, 231, 237, 239, 245, 247, 248, 248n2, 252, 255, 265, 268, 276, 277 forms of capital, 226 Capitalism/capitalist, 12, 16, 27, 28, 30, 49, 83, 94, 95, 109, 121, 122, 128, 130, 142, 150, 153, 180, 181, 182n1, 230, 239, 246, 247, 257, 264, 264n8, 265, 274, 275, 287, 306, 308, 309 Care/caring, vi, 6, 13, 26, 35, 36, 43–46, 44n23, 49, 91, 118, 128–131, 138, 142, 143, 162, 186, 229, 230, 254 Carrier, James G., 188, 306 Carsten, Janet, 4–8, 31, 41, 43, 49, 58, 85, 86, 158, 193, 203, 224, 279, 285, 296, 308 Catholic Church/Catholic, 15, 190, 225, 230, 237–239, 299, 308 Cattle, 13, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33–36, 34n7, 38, 39, 41–49, 41n15, 48n29, 236 Change, social, 41, 63 Children, vi, 14, 25, 32, 36, 38–47, 44n23, 49, 66, 69, 90, 91, 99, 101, 102, 106n20, 107, 119, 119n3, 121, 129, 130, 141–143, 160–162, 184–191, 186n5, 205, 209, 227, 231, 232, 234, 252–256, 253n6, 267, 280, 282, 283, 300, 309 China/Chinese, 14, 15, 149–171, 182, 183, 186, 191, 202, 202n5, 203, 203n6, 203n7, 207–209, 215, 216, 263, 263n7, 295, 299, 301, 307

Cohesion, 8, 13, 57, 66, 70, 74, 75, 261, 296, 298 Colonialism/colonial, 28, 33, 276–278, 284, 299 Commitment, vi, 9, 13, 27, 29, 30, 37, 44, 50, 58, 60, 121, 125, 126, 143, 164, 187, 189, 192, 199, 230, 247, 265, 266, 268, 297, 299, 309 Community, 32, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43n20, 50, 64, 84–87, 89, 90, 95, 98, 102, 103, 150, 151, 155, 157, 158, 160–164, 166, 167, 171, 186, 204, 206, 229, 237, 238, 254, 275, 277, 279, 280, 285–287, 300, 309 Compadrazgo (cronyism), 180, 184, 191, 308 Comparison, cross-cultural, 16, 49, 193, 298, 300 Components of involvement, 58 Conflict, 30, 37, 40, 42n17, 44, 45, 47, 49, 64, 65, 75, 105, 119, 129, 135, 188, 202, 215, 238, 247, 256, 260, 263, 280 Consolidation, 15, 137, 273–290 Constructivism/constructivist, 6, 7, 29, 62 Consumption, 12, 29, 93, 118, 126, 232 Cooperativism, 15, 237, 240, 299 Catholic cooperativism, 15, 225, 237–239 Corruption, 92, 94, 108 Culture notion of, 5, 11, 12, 306 symbolic construction of, 12 Customer, 12, 73, 127, 162, 183, 187, 188, 236, 307

 INDEX 

D Debt, 136, 139–142, 183 Dedication, 27, 199 Descent, 6, 26, 31, 33n6, 36, 48, 159, 165–170, 187, 192, 205, 207–209, 216, 278, 305 Divorce, 106, 106n20, 122, 133, 137, 138, 141, 143 Doing family, 5–8, 13, 74, 89, 296, 298 Domestic group, 27, 228–230, 234 Domestic sphere, 44n21 E Elder/elderly, 26, 39–46, 39n11, 50, 91, 189, 229, 234, 235, 251, 252, 254 Elite, 15, 16, 85, 87, 98, 108, 117, 118, 127, 160, 183, 238, 239, 274–276, 278, 282, 285, 289 Embeddedness, 12, 70, 75, 226, 297, 298, 300 Emotion, 5, 49, 58, 158, 204 Entrepreneurial legacy, 4, 59, 74, 75, 119n3, 297 Entrepreneurship, 12, 14, 15, 68, 92, 115–143, 224, 224n1, 225, 231, 237, 240, 246, 248, 307 female, 107, 116, 127, 129 Essence (approach), 58, 59, 198 Estate (urban), 179–193 Ethnography, 4, 48, 118, 124, 240, 245–269, 306, 307 Ethnos, ethnic, 12, 33, 42n18, 188, 278, 279, 297 Ethos, 118, 131 See also Morality/moral European Union (EU), 15, 245–269, 299, 305

313

Exchange gift, 123, 133, 134, 137, 141 logics of, 125, 130, 141 long-term, 124, 125, 130 market, 123, 139, 140, 142, 192 moralities of, 124, 137 property, 130–134 short-term, 124, 125 Exclusion, 7, 8, 32, 49, 74 Expansion, 89, 97, 99, 104, 213, 214, 274, 277, 284, 308, 309 F Familialism, 12 Familiness, 4, 5, 157, 158, 198, 297 Family firm identity, 59, 70, 199 Family, structure and composition budget, 136 business, v, vi, 4–16, 26, 58–75, 86, 87, 89, 92, 95–98, 101, 105, 107, 117, 119n3, 120, 142, 149–171, 180, 181, 185–187, 198–217, 225, 226, 240, 245–258, 261–269, 273–290, 295–301, 307 conflict, 42n17 as construction, 14, 149–171 extended, 14, 87, 90, 97n12, 101, 180, 184, 188, 192, 231, 237, 250, 279, 285, 287 joint, 231 nuclear, 6–9, 75, 90, 91, 96, 97, 101, 122, 133, 136, 167, 183, 189, 191, 205, 227, 229, 230, 296 rural, 90, 236 sharecropping, 227, 228n4, 229, 231 stem, 227, 230 structure and composition Feminism/feminist, 31, 228n3

314 

INDEX

Founder/founding generation, 185 Fulbe, 34n7, 42n18, 43n19, 44n22, 307 G Geertz, Clifford, 11, 155, 181–183, 182n1, 191, 200, 298 Gellner, Ernest, 308 Gender gendered boundary, 127 gendered economy, 126 gender politics, 130 Germany/German, 13, 57–75, 183, 230, 238, 295, 298, 301, 305 Gift commercial, 125 vs. commodity, 123–125, 138 exchange, 123, 133, 134, 137, 141 Godparenthood, 14, 179–193, 298, 300, 308 Goody, Jack, 7, 16, 27, 58, 310 Groom, 40, 41, 104 See also Marriage H Hajnal, John, 226–228 Heritage, 47, 85, 224, 267, 268, 282 Heroization, 13, 50 Hierarchy, social, 31 History, importance of, 89, 162 Homestead, 13, 25, 26, 48n28 House, 69, 90, 93, 93n8, 102, 105, 108, 136, 141, 153, 159–163, 165, 170, 183, 184, 190, 209, 234–237, 250, 261 Household economy, 27, 117, 118, 122, 130, 142, 205, 207 reproduction, 133, 138, 142

Howell, Signe, 4, 7, 32, 32n5, 39, 58, 119, 296 Hungary/Hungarian, 15, 245–269, 295, 299, 308 I Identification, 8, 13, 63, 64, 68–70, 74, 75, 152, 198, 297, 299 Identity, 5, 9, 59, 60, 62–64, 69, 70, 75, 86, 115n1, 117, 124, 138, 140, 141, 143, 155, 157, 166, 169, 199, 265, 277–279, 286, 296, 300 Inclusion, 7–9, 32, 74 Income, 7, 28, 37, 45, 48, 94, 95, 105, 108, 109, 126, 136, 138, 192, 208, 233, 255 family income, 126, 233 Independence/independent, 35, 41, 50, 63, 95, 117, 135, 158, 159, 185, 186, 192, 198, 204, 205, 208, 215, 237, 249, 278 Individualization, 35, 63, 64 Informality/informal, 85, 86, 88, 92–95, 97, 100, 101, 108, 109, 120, 127, 131, 134–139, 143, 181, 182, 260, 310 Inheritance, 64, 66, 187, 188, 208, 268, 269, 282 In-laws, 123, 141, 232 Italy/Italian, 183, 223, 226–228, 239, 246, 280, 295, 299, 306 J Japan/Japanese, 7, 14, 15, 149–171, 202–217, 202n5, 204n8, 211n11, 295, 299, 301 Jurczyk, Karin, 5, 7, 8, 296

 INDEX 

K Kinning, 4–8, 13, 16, 26, 32, 32n5, 37–39, 58, 60, 74, 119, 142, 296, 298 Kinship feminist approaches, 31 functional aspects of, 30, 31, 94 goals, 247, 257, 268, 269, 297 practice-oriented approaches, 32 as process, 5, 171, 296 structure, 91, 150, 181, 193, 298 Kinship enterprise, 6, 8–9, 16, 25–50, 58, 60, 74, 157, 167, 184, 230, 245–269, 298, 306, 308 L Labour, 29, 33–35, 44n21, 92, 94, 118, 120, 126, 127, 130, 136, 185, 186, 205, 206, 209, 224, 224n1, 226, 229, 231–233, 238, 249–251, 256, 267, 268, 273, 278, 306, 309 Laslett, Peter, 226–229 Law, 41, 83, 85, 88, 92, 95, 100, 101, 105, 133, 143, 169, 183, 185, 224, 256, 257 Livestock, 34, 35, 35n9, 44n21, 183n3, 251 See also Animals Lombardy, 226, 234n7, 237, 239 Loyalty, 50, 85, 86, 91–96, 98–101, 103, 104, 106, 109, 136, 169, 299, 307 M Market/markets, 15, 28, 33–35, 49, 59, 67, 83, 92, 93, 95, 109, 116–123, 127, 130, 135, 138–143, 180–190, 184n4, 192,

315

209, 228n4, 235, 246, 251, 259, 261–266, 269, 277, 278, 283, 288, 306 Marketplace, 181, 182, 187 Marriage, 7, 13, 26, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39–43, 42n18, 43n19, 47–49, 58, 92, 97, 104–107, 106n20, 118, 121–123, 128, 131, 133, 137, 138, 140–143, 186, 187, 191, 202, 205, 208, 209, 227, 234, 298, 300, 308 See also Bride; Groom Masculinity, 121, 122, 127 Mauritius, 15, 274–278, 280, 282, 286, 288, 295, 299 Meaning, 11, 12, 16, 30, 34, 38, 45, 49, 59–62, 75, 84, 88, 104, 117–119, 124, 125, 130, 133, 134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 153–156, 168, 201, 202, 204, 212, 217, 225, 226, 240, 246, 247, 249, 253, 257, 265, 279, 297, 298 Modernity/modern, 10, 29, 87, 89, 120, 123, 153, 182, 204–206, 212, 229, 240, 247, 258, 275, 306–308 Money, 41n15, 46n24, 85, 106, 108–110, 117, 119, 123, 125–127, 130, 131, 133–141, 187n6, 189, 191, 209, 234–236, 251, 252, 255, 260, 261, 264, 267 Morality/moral, v, 12, 13, 85, 119, 123–125, 130, 132–134, 137–141, 143, 155, 188, 201, 237, 247, 253, 255, 257, 260, 263, 265, 267, 268, 297, 299 See also Ethos Muslim, 28, 37, 41, 278, 279 Mutuality, 135–137, 168, 181, 185–190

316 

INDEX

N Narrative/narration, 8, 13, 50, 57–75, 89, 98, 157, 261, 296, 298, 307 Network/networking, 4, 7, 12, 14, 43n20, 58, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94–97, 97n12, 99, 101–109, 103n16, 119, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134, 157, 159, 162, 167–171, 185, 187, 190, 192, 230, 238, 260, 275, 276, 285, 287, 298 Nurturing, 31, 43, 49 See also Socialization; Upbringing O Oligarchy/oligarch/oligarchal, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92n5, 97–108, 117, 118 Organization, 4, 5, 11, 14, 39, 63, 86, 88, 90, 150, 153, 161, 167, 168, 170, 180–183, 191, 192, 201, 204, 210, 211, 228, 234, 238, 239, 256, 274, 280, 290, 306 P Parents, vi, 38, 39, 41–43, 42n17, 90, 91, 99, 101, 106, 119, 123, 134, 136, 185, 186n5, 187, 189, 209, 227, 248–250, 254, 255, 266, 268, 269, 282 Pastoralism/pastoralist, 27, 28, 30, 33–35, 33n6, 35n9, 35n10, 43, 49 Paternalism, 299 Patriarchy/patriarchal, 29, 50, 85, 89, 107, 109, 110, 179, 186, 207, 228n3, 237, 238 Performance/performing, 8, 39, 49, 107, 128, 132, 134, 155, 161, 164, 171, 238, 264, 283, 307 Political kin, 14, 180, 298

Politics/political, 10, 12, 14, 33, 42n18, 84–87, 89, 95–101, 98n13, 103–106, 108–110, 123–125, 130, 131, 143, 160, 165, 166, 224, 238n8, 247, 248, 254, 256–258, 264, 268, 277, 278, 298, 307, 309 Post-socialism, 118 Production, vi, 5, 6, 9, 12–15, 27–29, 31n4, 32–36, 43, 44, 44n21, 47n27, 49, 50, 61, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 104, 120, 122, 127, 128, 131, 132, 139, 162, 168, 179–193, 200, 225, 228n4, 234, 236, 237, 245–269, 283, 288n3, 296, 298, 309 Prolongation, 275, 282, 286, 289 Property, 10, 14, 35, 45, 46, 49, 86, 88, 94–96, 99, 100, 102, 105–107, 109, 119, 123, 124, 130–135, 137, 140, 142, 143, 169, 180, 184, 187, 192, 201, 202, 207, 208, 215, 216, 234, 234n7, 235, 237, 239, 256, 257, 260, 261, 276, 277, 282, 283, 288n3, 307 R Ratilainen, Saara, 117–119 Reciprocity/reciprocal, 14, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 100, 102–104, 109, 119, 123, 138–141, 184, 187, 191, 208, 299 Reher, David Sven, 229 Relatedness, 4–9, 13, 14, 26, 27, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 43, 43n20, 44, 48, 49, 58, 60, 75, 85, 95–97, 97n12, 99, 101–104, 117, 119, 131, 158, 160, 169, 180, 184, 187, 192, 193, 203, 247, 261, 269, 285, 296, 298, 300, 308

 INDEX 

Religion/religious, v, 10, 12, 13, 41, 92, 103, 151–157, 163, 166, 170, 181, 188, 202, 240, 247, 297, 298, 307 Resilience, 27, 29, 65, 168, 229 Revolution, 89, 131, 306 Revolution, Velvet, 85–87, 87n1, 108, 109 Rights, 13, 26, 35, 45–49, 68, 91, 119, 131–133, 143, 165, 182, 205, 206, 208, 209, 216, 236, 249, 256, 261, 267n9, 285, 298 Rites of passage, 37 Ritual, 7, 8, 14, 26, 37–39, 41, 49, 60, 103, 149–171, 180, 181, 184, 189–193, 261, 296, 298, 299, 307, 308, 310 economy, 308 Role, 9, 10, 12, 30, 39, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 60, 63–67, 69, 85, 86, 89, 107, 117, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 140, 141, 149–151, 154, 156, 157, 166, 168–170, 187, 202, 213, 226, 237, 238, 247, 248, 255, 256, 268, 276, 282, 284, 289, 299, 309 Rural, 27, 28, 90, 91, 181, 183n3, 187, 228, 234, 238, 239, 249, 253 Russia/Russian, v, 14, 85, 98n13, 101, 104, 106n20, 116–118, 117n2, 120–122, 126–128, 130, 133, 142, 143, 238n8, 245, 252n4, 295, 298, 299, 301 S Sahlins, Marshall, 4, 11, 123, 158, 201–203, 296, 298 Schneider, David, 6, 29–31, 57

317

Schweitzer, Peter, 7, 31, 43, 48, 192, 279 Sense-making, 5, 74, 75 Sentiment, vi, 9, 16, 27, 29, 58, 60, 180, 181, 189, 200, 230, 246, 247, 257, 263, 268, 269, 297, 309 Sharing, 115–143, 158, 169, 192, 203, 209 Siblings, 42, 90, 97, 99, 101, 119, 123, 134, 136, 137, 186, 188–190, 192 Socialism, 15, 118, 120, 122, 238, 246, 247, 253n6, 258, 299, 307 Socio-emotional wealth (SEW), 4, 5, 158, 297 Solidarity, 27, 35n10, 37, 90–92, 94, 109, 137, 180, 230, 238, 299 Spheres of life, 247, 248, 251, 263, 269 Succession, 7, 15, 29, 59, 63, 64, 66–70, 119n3, 139, 161, 165, 186, 198, 202, 207–209, 211, 213–216, 245, 273–290, 296, 307 Supplier, 12, 33, 162 T Trader/trade, 28, 33n6, 34–36, 34n7, 89, 95, 96, 120, 125, 126, 181–187, 183n3, 186n5, 189–192, 223, 259, 261, 265, 266, 269, 276, 277, 284, 299 U Upbringing, 205 See also Nurturing; Socialization Urban, 27, 90, 91, 167, 179–193, 228, 237, 249, 307

318 

INDEX

V Value, vi, 5, 10, 12, 28, 30, 67, 87, 88, 102, 116, 119, 123–125, 132, 137, 139, 143, 151, 157, 170, 180, 199, 200n3, 201, 202, 211, 212, 215, 228n3, 245–269, 279, 289, 309, 310 Viazzo, Pier Paolo, 228, 229 Vico, Giambattista, 225, 240 W Wealth, 16, 33, 34, 41, 41n15, 43, 45, 46, 84, 86, 106, 118, 127, 132, 184, 189, 192, 256, 282

Weber, Max, 10, 29, 181, 182n1, 247, 269, 308 Witten Institute for Family Business (WIFU), v, vi Workshop, artisan, 235, 239 Y Yanagisako, Sylvia, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 27–31, 31n3, 39, 50, 58–61, 70, 74, 86, 119n3, 157, 180, 184, 202, 224, 225, 230, 246, 247, 257, 269, 273–275, 280, 282, 283, 297, 308, 309 Yaohan Hong Kong, 211, 213, 213n12, 214, 216, 216n13