Paper short abstract:

Family entrepreneurs recruit unemployed relatives and friends, placing them in dependent relations. The paper explores the factors that cause these relations to be accepted, maintained or rejected, and the social consequences for family enterprises, kinship and friendship groups

Paper long abstract:

From an anthropological perspective, economic uncertainty is seen not only as a feature of the labor market, but in much broader sense as a social reality associated with risk and instability that affects every step of people's struggle for livelihood. Since 1989, Bulgarian society has been undergoing permanent processes associated with multidimensional uncertainty - economic, social, and existential. One of the attempts to overcome the risks of social exclusion and marginalization is the establishment of small family enterprises. In these, family relations are intertwined with professional roles and a specific notion of work-kinship relations emerges. Many enterprises offer job to unemployed relatives, whereby the employees, whose status in the kinship hierarchy is higher, fall into dependent relations to their younger relatives. Similar relationships arise in the hiring of job-losing friends and former colleagues, even with higher education than the family entrepreneurs. In these cases, a direct dependency and close relations between the informal (friendship, kinship) sphere and the formal work environment emerges. The constitution, development and adoption of these new dependent relations, different from hierarchical kinship and egalitarian friendship ties, is one of the main research tasks. The paper explores the economic and social factors as a reason for accepting and rethinking, or rejecting these dependent relations, and the social consequences for the family enterprise, kinship and friendship groups. I will examine the imposition, development and transformation of personal leadership styles in small family enterprises through the construction of quasi-family relationships that seek to perpetuate dependent relations in working life.