Transcript Slide 1 - Ning.com

Girls, wives and family
lives
Positioning gender in the
family firm
Susan Marlow
Professor of Entrepreneurship
The family firm
• Family firms –
• approximately 65% or 3 million of
the 4.6 million private sector
enterprises in the UK
• 38% of GDP in the private sector
• 42% of private sector employment
• Greater stability and longevity
• Critical segment of the economy
• [source: Institute for family business]
Operating profiles
• Principal – agent tensions –
reduced in family firms therefore,
fewer monitoring issues
• Can we presume generic
subscription to shared aims?
• Employment – family preference –
constraining?
• Succession issues – management
and performance – more stable?
Family as an institution
• Persistent feature of social
organisation
• Relatively stable normative models
persist over time and context
• Cornerstone of socio-economic
stability – caring mothers, errant
fathers
• Embeds and reproduces gender
binary in the context of power
relations
Family as a site of economic
production
• Areas of tension – the firm
represents an intersection of the
private and public sphere
• Reproduces heteronormativity
embedded in the patriarchal family
unit within the economic unit of the
firm
• So, what do family firms ‘look’ like
Implications – gender relations
• Headed by men - credibility from “&
son”.
• Women as invisible labour and/or
secondary labour
• Hidden labour -:
• denies women an economic identity
• reproduces and normalises
domestic handmaiden role within
the public sphere
• Welfare and benefits implications
Implications – entrepreneuring
activities
• Reproduces notion of women as
directed followers
• Role model implications – family as site
of learning
• Evidence - female headed family firms
challenge prevailing stereotypes
• Act as positive role models for their
daughters
• Enables female succession and
independent start ups
• (see Greene, Han and Marlow, ET&P 2012)
Gender in the family firm
• Family firm is embedded within and
reflects the prevailing institutions which
inform the normative model of the
domestic family
• Tension of exposing the private to the
public gaze
• Gender relations are seamlessly
reproduced but rarely recognised
• Act to reinforce and perpetuate
subordination but perceived as benign
and natural