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Paper Short Abstract:

The paper investigates family businesses in Russia asking how the politics of exclusion are enacted within family firms and how this informs the processes of self-categorization among family businesses

Paper Abstract:

Drawing upon an ethnographic investigation of small-scale family-based firms in Russia, I explore how divorce and a change in meanings and uses of social relatedness affect a family firm as a type of kinship enterprise. The paper argues that family businesses in Russia are entangled into relational webs of kinship so that their self-identification is primarily enacted according to relational principles rather than categorical ones. Since the webs of social relations based on ties of kinship and marriage are not stable and fixed in time but are subject to negotiation and change, any possible regroupings in relational dynamics within family networks would complicate the politics of organizational identity and identity claims within family businesses. The very act of categorizing a firm as a family project can be performative inasmuch as it operates as a statement of inclusion that affirms relatedness and augments a sense of belonging to an enterprise and its goals. And vice versa, the refusal to see business as a collective family project can signal exclusion and convey unwillingness to recognize belonging of a family member to a collective entity termed a family enterprise. These mechanisms of organizational categorization, which simultaneously operate as mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion, are embedded into the wider circles of social relatedness and include the groups of non-family social actors such as employees, customers, stakeholders, and state.

The research has been conducted with financial support from the Russian Scientific Foundation (project N23-18-00962 «Economic anthropology of household in contemporary Russia outside metropolitan areas», https://rscf.ru/project/23-18-00962/)