Class, Gender and the Family Business

"In challenging cultural and individualistic accounts of enterprise, this book argues that a class-based business culture and strategy accounts for the success and survival of family capitalism. In explaining the notion of strategy, the book draws on ethnographic data from 70 of the richest enterprising families in a Midlands county in the UK, to reveal that the availability of a combination of class resources such as leadership education and training, gendered emotional labouring practices, Exclusionary gendered management practices, a risk-astute approach to the financial management of enterprise, and the nurturing of opportunistic business networks couched in social activity, are critical for the continued significance of family capitalism, male dominance and the social and class positions of the families concerned. The book also focuses on five women entrepreneurs showing that they engage in the same strategy, sharing similar values with their male counterparts."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.