Enterprising culture: Middle class women's businesses in Sri Lanka

This dissertation is an anthropological study of entrepreneurship among urban, middle class Sinhala women in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Women's businesses emerged in the 1970's and 1980's after more than a decade of intense social and economic disarray and nascent globalization. Traditionally the guardians of cultural heritage in the home, women have found an economic niche as reinventors and keepers of culture for an increasingly de-traditionalized middle class, producing garments, housewares, and a variety of services including event planning and catering. Businesses provide traditional ethnic experiences and connect Sri Lankans with global, middle-class consumer culture by producing economical alternatives to old-fashioned services and foreign goods.; Motivations to start a business include economic independence, family welfare, and an emerging clientele. Unlike family-owned or male run businesses, small and medium sized women's enterprises are shorter-term products of cultural change focusing on upward social mobility for their families. Entrepreneurship impacts the marketplace, bolsters a struggling economy, empowers women in their household, and makes them cultural brokers in society. The new middle class in Sri Lanka arose simultaneously with women's business and the two phenomena nurture each other.; Women find clients, suppliers, and opportunities through their networks, a foundation they always used to conduct the business of family. Networks and trust relationships include school associations and social service groups. They revive and foster networks to assist their businesses, and also develop important non-kin trust relationships with their non-relative employees that are however described in fictive kinship terms. Sri Lankan women's businesses follow a model similar to Southeast Asian businesses, where more fluid family ties and a bilateral kinship system mean fewer parental expectations of children taking over enterprises and therefore weaker business organization, which leads to more short-lived firms.; This study contributes to social science research by examining how gender roles, access to power, and women's work became critical foci in a newly globalized and middle class dominated Asia. Because of women's role in cultural redefinition and their mediation between the traditional and the global, gender has been a critical component of middle class identity creation, especially during a time of uncertainty and ethnic strife.