Abstract
Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively loaded ‘family values’ such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects.
Highlights
Research on family businesses is often insensitive to the subtleties of context
Unlike previous family business ‘by context’ studies that illustrate how such businesses re-enact their different contexts, we look at the changing context in order to explain how the very criteria that make a business a ‘family business’ and what ‘class of organizations [the family business] belongs to’ (Sasaki et al, 2019: 818) come to be re-defined over time
In qualitative family business research, individual accounts are all too often treated as firm level representations devoid of context, utilized primarily to verify organizational outcomes (Fletcher et al, 2016)
Summary
Research on family businesses is often insensitive to the subtleties of context. has previous research largely understood the family reductively, but it has focused 1 entirely on the effects of the ‘family’ cause (often ‘along a family-attributes scale’) (Basco, 2015: 261), neglecting to analyze family as a phenomenon which is itself shaped in meaningful ways by socio-historical forces. We put together a narrative analysis of a new kind of family business elite that we saw as being increasingly based on a moral-sentimental rather than a bio-legal grouping mechanism (selected as our core explanatory category – see Figure 1) whose activation ‘depends on the conditions in which it operates’ (Welch et al, 2011) We explained this change as a reworking of the familial ideology in the context of new social mobility patterns, visualised it with a model of how elite business grouping mechanisms have worked in the post-war period in Scotland (Figure 2). These new patterns of equity ownership and corporate management were fundamentally changing all of Scottish business life The dangers of this new industrial reality are described by a small-scale entrepreneur and 3rd generation shareholder of a large Scottish manufacturing company: My father tells me that when he was a young man the Scottish X trade was controlled by about 30 different families. This new moral-sentimental rather than bio-legal version of what makes a business a ‘family business’ meets the needs of a local and more educated elite to respond successfully to a new socio-economic context characterized by neoliberalism, globalisation, and the rise of the professional-executive class
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