Help one another, use one another: toward an anthropology of family business

Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, Summer, 2003 by Alex Stewart

Anthropological kinship theory is explored for potential contributions to a theory of family business. This article considers the costs and benefits of a role for kinship in business. Both derive from the discrepancy between the normative orders of kinship and markets; respectively, long-term generalized reciprocity and short-term balanced reciprocity. Because the former reflects the morality of society as a whole, kinship integrates social fields more readily than more specialized orders like markets.

Introduction

The greatest unutilized resource for advancing the field of family business studies is the large anthropological literature on kinship and marriage. The purpose of this article is to substantiate that claim. It attempts to do this by seeking out and summarizing the findings and themes from that literature of likely interest to business school scholars, much as Stewart (1990, 1991) did for the anthropology of entrepreneurship. It borrows the organizing schema of Mattessich and Hill (1976): the disadvantages and advantages of kinship in business.

One of the anomalies of the patchy fish-scale world of academe (Campbell, 1969) is that few if any family business scholars are familiar with the "kinship" studies field. Nor is there much sign of progress. For example, Rosenblatt and colleagues (1985) cited few works by anthropologists, but at seven they cited more than the three in Gersick and colleagues (1997). Similarly, a search of ProQuest for both "kinship" and "business" in any search field turned up seven peer-reviewed articles, of which only one (Alexander & Alexander, 2000) uses the word kinship in this sense. Despite this absence of cross-fertilization, family business writings frequently address topics compatible with anthropological treatment.

Judging from articles in Family Business Review, family business scholars share many interests with anthropologists. For example, the attention by Perricone, Earle, and Taplin (2001) to "cultural systems" does not appear unusual (see also Garcia-Alvarez & Lopez-Sintas, 2001; Hall, Melin, & Nordqvist, 2001; Moores & Mula, 2000). A related topic that is also shared in anthropology is social capital and social networks (Steier, 2001; Veliyath & Ramaswany, 2000). Family business scholars seem, in fact, to be proto-anthropologists, writing extensively about many cultures, such as Portugal (Howorth & Ali, 2001), the Persian Gulf (Davis, Pitts, & Cormier, 2000), East and West Germany (Klein, 2000; Pistrui et al., 2000), India (Manikutty, 2000; Sharma & Rao, 2000; Ward, 2000), and China and the diaspora Chinese (Gatfield & Youseff, 2001; Lee & Tan, 2001; Pistrui et al., 2001; Tan & Fock, 2001). By my count, the 17 articles just noted cite 669 works. Of these, less than 1 percent (five, I believe) is anthropological.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Kinship theory can be a technical undertaking that glazes the eyes of even the anthropology major. Still, substantial portions of these writings are relatively nonspecialized and, I believe, compelling for the general reader. I shall gravitate to these works and pay less attention to more technical matters. Before I can do that, however, there is no escaping the need for something dull: a definition.

What Is Kinship?

As one introductory book colorfully said, "Kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy and the nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the subject" (Fox, 1983, p. 10). Clearly I cannot introduce the whole field; moreover, I could not improve on Fox's book which, despite some limitations (Scheffier, 2001, p. 104, n. 5), is clear, thorough and well organized. Other introductions include Keesing's (1975) little textbook and, for those more inclined to postmodernist self-doubt, Holy (1996) and Stone (1997, 2001; see Peletz, 1995). Harrell's (1997) Human Families is a systematically evolutionary approach, which, despite a title suggestive of family studies, is a work of anthropology.

Definition. Even if anthropologists were uniform in their theoretical and methodological views--far from the reality--the sheer variation in kinship across cultures and over time (Fortes, 1969, pp. 229-230; Harrell, 1997; Johnson, 2000; Schweitzer, 2000b) would generate controversy over definitions. My reading of the ethnographic record and the kinship debates leads me to follow Holy (1996, p. 40, also pp. 166-167) and "most anthropologists [in taking] kinship to be the network of genealogical relationships and social ties modeled on the relations of genealogical parenthood." Good (1996, p. 312) notes that most anthropologists add the qualification "biological kinship, as culturally defined by the society concerned." As Scheffier (2001, p. ix) adds, kinship in this sense is a "universal and often-extensive [factor] ... in the constitution of human societies." A loose usage of the term "kinship" also includes marriage and affinity (relationships derived from marriage)--as does this article--but most kinship th eorists make the distinction apparent in Fox's (1983) title Kinship and Marriage.