Abstract
This chapter advocates an anthropology of family and family business that takes the cultural specificity of the family and the family firm seriously. It argues that the family and the family firm are not ontologically or structurally distinctive. The latter instead is the pragmatic objectification of the former, whose meaning is culturally specific. The conduct of family firms varies with the culture they operate within. Hence, different cultures have different familial forms and features, and, more importantly, different families have different family firms. The theoretical implication of this chapter is that in anthropological explanations, the family and the family business are emic all the way.
This chapter is a substantial development on my several publications. They are ‘Introduction’ (2021a), Journal of Business Anthropology 10 (2), 226–240; ‘How the Chinese Think About the Family: The “Family” in Chinese Family firms’ (2021b), Journal of Business Anthropology 10 (2), 241–261; ‘Taking Culture Seriously: The Role of Culture in the Study of Business’ (2015), Journal of Business Anthropology 4 (1), 144–150; ‘It Is Not That All Cultures Have Business, But That All Business Have Culture’, in The Routledge Companion to Anthropology and Business, edited by Raza Mir and Anne-Laure Fayard, pp. 453–472, 2020, London: Routledge; and ‘What is Chinese Kinship and What Is Not?’, in Family, Ethnicity and State in Chinese Culture: Under the Impact of Globalization, edited by Min Han, Hironao Kawai, and Heung Wah Wong, pp. 83–104, 2017, New York: Bridge 21. Parts of this chapter are adopted from these publications, some of them verbatim.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank the editor of this volume for providing me with this piece of information.
- 2.
Another famous tool is the FIBER scale measurement developed by Berrone and his colleagues (Berrone et al., 2012). I would like to thank the editor of this volume for bringing this to my attention.
- 3.
It is true that a few management scientists do recognize the importance of culture in shaping the family business. For example, Vipin Gupta and Nancy Levenburg (2010: 166) show that more than half of the cross-cultural differences in organizational practices and values can be attributed to regional cultures. They therefore argue for ‘the importance of contextual and cultural differences in the characteristics of family businesses’ (Gupta & Levenburg, 2010: 166), and they conclude their study by conceding that: ‘Anglo-based definitions of family business and the largely Anglo-based underpinnings may be insufficient for truly understanding the family businesses in a global sense (or in a global world). The differences that we find across cultures along the nine family business dimensions suggest that current definitions (e.g., “intent to pass along the business”) may not be transferrable globally’ (Gupta & Levenburg, 2010: 167). Unfortunately, management scientists have generally ignored this observation.
- 4.
Christoph Brumann and his colleagues (1999) delivered an excellent special issue in Current Anthropology to defend the concept of culture.
- 5.
Seen as such, it is problematic to group Japanese and Chinese societies under the same Confucian culture label inasmuch as they, as I demonstrate here, are different culturally. See, for example, in the tradition of Hofstede, as criticized by Caspary and Herrmann-Pillath (2023).
- 6.
- 7.
There are variations in the transliteration of this native Chinese term ‘qi’. We use the Standard Chinese pinyin here. Scholars we quote in this chapter such as Chun (1985) and Shiga (1978) used another pinyin system, and the term becomes ‘ch’i’. We will follow their transliteration of the term when we quote them. However, in this discussion, we will use the term ‘qi’.
- 8.
Ninbetsuchō was used by overlords to control peasants, registering village members by the unit of the ie. All members of the same ie were listed together in the Ninbetsuchō.
- 9.
It is not quite correct to say that fudai and nago were treated like kin; they indeed are kin to the honbyakushō. Nor can the relationship between the honbyakushō and his fudai and nago be understood as ‘fictive’ kinship because to do so implies an ontological assumption of kinship as biology, not culture, which is simply not true, as testified by many anthropologists of kinship.
- 10.
The history of Yaohan narrated here is a shortened version of the section in my book Japanese Bosses, Chinese Workers: Power and Control in a Hong Kong Megastore (Wong, 1999: 20–24).
- 11.
The decision was not able to be realized as Yaohan went bankrupt in 1997.
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Wong, H.W. (2023). Anthropology of Family and Family Businesses Is Emic All the Way. 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_8
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