Enterprise and Small Business Principles
Integrating notions of family and enterprise
The ‘developmental’ approach to the study of businesses involving family members (and the assumptions underlying it) provided the basis for a significant shift in our understanding of the relationship between family and business. Instead of polarising family and business issues, a more integrative understanding of the dynamic relationship between family and business began to emerge. An integrative understanding is significant because it challenges the ‘myth of separate family and business worlds’ and provides for a means of critically reviewing the relationship between work and family (Kanter, 1989a). And, it takes more fully into account the interactive, dynamic (or coevolutionary) relationship between family and enterprise (Kepner, 1983; McCollom, 1988).
Family and enterprise are closely related because of the nature of enterprise activity. Enterprise activity is usually associated with new business venturing or starting up a small business. And many new ventures emerge from ideas, knowledge or experiences that reside or are cultivated in the family unit. In some cases this might be an enterprise (or self-employment) response to a family problem (such as unemployment or desire to work from home and/or balance work and family). In other cases, the new venture may arise as a family response to a business or enterprise opportunity that might then lead to the creation of a family business (and this is discussed in more detail below). This is particularly the case with occupations that lend themselves to family or spouse involvement (such as farming and craft activities).
As a result, many studies have drawn attention to the relationship between enterprise creation and social networks (Tichy et al., 1979; Birley, 1985; Aldrich and Zimmer, 1986; Johannisson, 1987c; Lorenzoni and Ornati, 1988; Butler and Hansen, 1991; Larson, 1992). Other studies take account of how family, kinship and gender relations facilitate enterprise development (Whatmore, 1991; Stafford, 1995; Salaff and Hu,
1996) . Some focus on the ‘business as family’ - an approach suggested by Kepner (1983), but taken forward in many studies since (Wheelock, 1991; Poutziouris and Chittenden, 1996; Ram and Holliday, 1993a). Others draw attention more directly to the household as the unit of analysis (Baines and Wheelock, 1998a, 1998b) in order to highlight the interrelationship between the household, the state and labour markets (Baines et al., 2002). In addition, there is now extensive study and writings on the issue of work-life balance. Consideration is given to dual career families, how family relations shape work or career patterns, and how gender relations shape changing patterns of household employment (Barnett and Barnett, 1988; Marshack, 1993; Wheelock, 1990).
But what is distinctive about this integrative approach to the study of enterprise and family is the shift away from the dominance of individual entrepreneurial figures heroically leading new venture creation to an acknowledgement of the household or business family situations for facilitating enterprise. These studies tend to emphasise the relationships and interdependencies connecting family and enterprise and the ways in which these provide resources enabling the enterprise activity to occur.
In referring to this range of studies, which bring together more explicitly notions of enterprise and family, it is possible to see how a shift has occurred in our understanding. Not only has a move been made from closed and non-problematised views of family but, also, alternative views of family have been developed which conceptualise family enterprise in terms of ‘mapped realities’ (Levin, 1993) highlighting how people attribute meaning to the relations they assign as familial. It is this interpretive view of family and enterprise that brings this chapter to a close.
