Paper long abstract:

Field work among Mexican corporate executives showed a live full of contradictions. In this paper I shall present the cultural and moral contradictions this sort of executives has to deal with, and the many ways they and their families develop to cope with them. With first hand field data among high level Mexican corporate executives I shall try to show their daily life and the ways corporate work interferes with traditional family live. One of the most crucial points is the different cultural criteria that rule employment and deals in local family enterprises and corporate international firms, especially North American ones. While most of my informants came from entrepreneurial families where employing and making deals with kindred members is a moral obligation, big corporations where they work in, especially North American ones, consider this practice as nepotism, and as such, inmoral (Lomnitz and Pérez Lizaur, 1987; Pérez Lizaur, 2005).