The Family Enterprise and Business Strategies

Abstract

This chapter argues that the preservation of family enterprise hinges on a family business strategy that places its key emphasis on leadership training and particular inheritance practices. It also questions the convention of studying majority and ethnic minority business separately and argues that it is difference that is exaggerated. This creates the impression that each business category is engaged in discrete economic activities, driven in very different ways, producing different types of goods and services for different markets. There is also a silence about the class roots, the ethnicity and the gendered character of majority business. On the other hand, gender and class identities, and the dynamics of this relationship, are completely overshadowed by the elevation of ethnicity in studies on ethnic minority entrepreneurship. For instance, Werbner (1984), who is a very influential writer, thinks that ethnicity is the primary driving force behind ethnic minority enterprise. Typically, this work also assumes that the utilisation of kinship relations as a business resource is unique to ethnic minority enterprise. The result is that the importance of the class identity of ethnic minority business leaders and the significance that social class relations has for such enterprise is lost in discourses that exclusively address kinship relations and ethnicity.