Paper short abstract:

One orientation of family businesses is to provide a future for the next generation. Based on fieldwork in a Spanish village, I have identified three different projections of the family farm regarding its role in providing for the children’s future over the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st century.

Paper long abstract:

Family businesses often have a dual orientation of making a living for the present and providing a future of some sort, in the business or elsewhere, for the next generation. It is this second aspect that I will deal with, using Bourdieu's concepts of value, the social field, and the reproduction (or non-reproduction) of the habitus. Based on fieldwork in a Spanish village, I have identified three different projections of the family farm regarding its role in providing for the children's future over the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st century. Until the 1980s, the family farm, in this area with its system of equal-part inheritance for women and men, provided the nest-egg with which people started their own family farm upon marriage. In the 1980s, the economic situation made emigration difficult and the families began to feel the need to provide jobs on the family farm for young men who were not yet ready or able to marry and become independent farmers. At the turn of the century, these farmers who stayed in the village are using their family farms to provide their children with cultural capital that will enable them to find jobs outside of the village rather than on the farm. Thus, the way these rural families use the family business to position their children as players on the social field is shown to be flexible and to vary according to the perception of the circumstances.