Continuation, Alienation And Rationalization

Kinship is a virtually transparent code of the first laws of human order, and kinship modernization is one of the key indexes of industrialized society. Empirical studies based on western societies indicate that kinship modernization is differentiated across social strata, and the kinship change of entrepreneurs, promoters and practitioner of industrialization, is a microcosmos of transition from pre-industrialized to industrialized societies. The evolution of business management is related to kinship modernization. Western capitalism market economy, individualism and modern company are affiliated to each other, and so are China’s socialism market, familism and small-and medium-sized company. The developmental history of family business and the kinship change of entrepreneurs are the two interdependent sides of one coin, the kinship change of entrepreneurs offer a unique perspective for sociologists and anthropologists to understand family business.Based on the data from field survey and interviews collected around eight entrepreneurs in Jiangzhen, the dissertation employs symbolic analysis to study three research questions about the kinship change of entrepreneurs. The research questions focus on the differential influence to the kinship of entrepreneurs exerted by the distinctive control of re-distributive power, the interplay of gender and kinship and the evolution of meaning of kinship system. The data include kinship genealogy, life history, and business history, field data of the business niche. The symbolic analysis synthesizes views of both the Cultural and Social Schools, abstracting the symbolic system first and then applying it to the process of social action. The departure point is social order, which is constituted by symbols.The dissertation has reached the following three conclusions.First, from the structural perspective, kinship modernization is not validated in Jiangzhen. The re-distributive power produces cheap laborers by destroying the family structure and functions of specific social groups. According to the anti-family principle, the gendered market economy produced family diaspora. When the entrepreneurs and their kin employees have to disembed out of the time and space of the perceived ethic mode with differential association, the couples are separated and their kids grow up in abnormal families, which make it impossible to raise capable business inheritors. The competition-cooperation within the extended kinship group indicates the strategic practice of formal kinship in different environments. In the environment without sufficient socialized capital, entrepreneurs mobilize various capitals at the conjecture of kinship and market economy, and the entrepreneurship training within family business has led to entrepreneur cluster. In industrialized society, extended kinship solidarity is based on exchange, and of organic nature in a non-hierarchical social order. Capitals have great potentials to transcend the ascribed constructs of kinship to symbolize the big man in modern society, and the capitals are in Bourdieurian sense with heterogeneity. The assembly, dispersal and extension of kinship group have exhibited the strategies of practical kinship:people get their individualized interests in the combination of righteousness and profit.Second, from the perspective of meaning system, the entrepreneurs suffer blurring identity, thwarted self categorization and fragmented meaning system. Family ethic is Chinese dominating meaning system, which pushes the entrepreneurs to leave their hometown for family welfare, not personal welfare. The entrepreneurs examine market needs, seeking market resources and produce new goods, service, jobs, fortunes and ideas, and the role differentiation of the reality world gives rise to the categorization of entrepreneurs. Their experiences across bottom, middle and upper classes, and across market and officialdom shapes them into creative destroyers of the old social order. In the economic sector dominated by the redistributive power, the entrepreneurs are in the blurring margin of market and officialdom, and the observable micro conflicts between money and emotion, between enterprise and family refers to macro political corruption and gender inequality. Political taboos provide the local knowledge about the border between market and officialdom, and breaching it would lead to political and market disorders. The high profits from power-brokered business do not guarantee the entrepreneurs’freedom from moral torment and emotional annoyance, which is represented by the word "dirt". To get rid of "dirt", the entrepreneurs and the society as well have to reconstruct the economic environment. No matter the volume of wealth brought by business management, the family ethic has not yet become the residua of the meaning system, and the mental trauma caused by marriage disintegration and discredited kids serve as a foil of powerful family ethic.Third, family feminization—business masculinization renders business family into a low-lying land in gender equality. The official ideology of gender equality is cryptically neutralized by the gendered market institutions of political asceticism. The masculinized market institutions have given rise to a gender hierarchy composed by man-man, man-woman and woman-woman relations. The first dyad is the dominant relation and the second and the third are secondary relations. Though businessmen and officials belong to different professions and interest groups, they are identical in a superordinate category: man. Masculinized market institutions tend to suppress women’s economic talents, and the entrepreneurs attain improved economic status at the cost of enlarged income gap within the family and gender domination. When the redistributive power makes family diaspora a basic living condition, marriage life disappear, family morality and social order will degenerate to disorder. Sexual capital enters market economy with the characteristics of degression by time and unilaterality in exchange; the ideology of gender equality and the reality of gender domination will inject tension and conflict into business family.By inheriting and developing anthropological research on entrepreneurs, the dissertation derives its academic creativity in combining "structure" and "process","function" and "meaning". The static paradigm of structuralism employed by classic anthropological research on China is outdated to understand China’s social transition. By embedding the entrepreneurs in a micro-, meso-and macro nesting doll system, the dissertation describes observable social action, and interprets the hidden meaning system. The concepts such as "big man entrepreneurs","family diaspora" and "entrepreneur cluster" are theoretically valuable to understand entrepreneurs’kinship and the founding, development, bankruptcy and scale economy of family business.