Abstract
This chapter examines the wives’ firms in Russia, a type of female enterprises that are dependent on husband’s capital and support. Aimed to understand what it means to give a business as a gift in contemporary Russia, the paper looks at the interplay of economic transactions, their meanings and the relational dynamics among household members. It argues that the emergence of wives’ firms addresses the issue of social reproduction and the precarious conditions of women’s employment. At the same time, the endeavours to ensure social reproduction by reliance on entrepreneurial practices create ambiguities and tensions between participants of exchange. The paper shows 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.
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Notes
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A pseudonym. All names of informants and companies have been changed to protect their identities.
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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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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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Tereshina, D. (2023). Business as a Gift: Family Entrepreneurship and the Ambiguities of Sharing. In: Koellner, T. (eds) Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_5
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