Chinese Family Firm

            The article written by Susan Greenhalgh “De-Orientalizing the Chinese Family Firm”, she talks about family businesses and how family is involved in these businesses. She did her field research based on a historical study on 25 Taiwanese-run, manufacturing-based businesses; her primary focus was from the late 1970’s. The majority of the information Greenhalgh gathered came from a series of lengthy and intensive interviews conducted with the entrepreneurs and members of their families (1994: 752). The 25 businesses looked at were from a wide range of size classes; there were five sizes, microenterprises (1-19 workers), small in scale (20-99), medium sized (100-499), large (500-999), and finally very large (1,000 or more employees). Within these 25 businesses Greenhalgh looked at how families were involved and how many were involved depending on their different sizes (1994: 752). In the article table 1 shows how many family members worked within the different companies on average though it was found that each business employed 5.0 family members however it was found that the smaller the business the larger the family work force. The numbers diminished significantly between micro and small-scale businesses from 6.1 to 4.3 in very large businesses, most businesses was also predominantly male oriented, very few women worked in the businesses it went from 2.6 in micro and small-scale to 0.9 in very large businesses (1994: 753).

 

            Greenhalgh goes on in her article to describe how there were many gender differences were apparent in the conditions and rewards in the family business, virtually all male kin would work full-time whereas only one out of two female kin worked on a part-time basis. The majority of men received salaries whereas among the females in the businesses only unmarried daughters and married women working on the production line regularly received monetary compensation and even with this most of the men would work on a full-time basis whereas for married women their work was like an extension of their reproductive activities, part-time and uncompensated labor (1994:754).

After reading this I found it quite disturbing how female workers were treated and even more so since the majority of these working women had kinship ties to the businesses how they received little to no compensation for the work they put it. This article seems highly inaccurate in the portrayal of how female family workers are treated mainly I think because she only looked at 25 family run businesses which isn’t really enough to be able to do any kind of accurate research surrounding the topic. I hope that since this research and field work was conducted that things have changed for females working within the family business because there is no equality in their treatment regarding pay and work conditions.

Image Source:

Men: http://www.japanfocus.org/data/2_sino.jpg

Family: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/data/13030/57/ft3q2nb257/figures/ft3q2nb257_00012.jpg

References:

Greenhalgh, S. (1994). De-orientalizing the chinese family firm. American ethnologist, 21(4), 746-775. doi: 10.1525/ae.1994.21.4.02a00050