S. Baines et J. Wheelock, Reinventing traditional solutions: Job creation, gender and the micro-business household, WORK EMPLOY, 12(4), 1998, pp. 579-601
There has been overwhelming interest in the numbers of jobs attributable to
the formation and growth of new small firms but comparative silence about
their working practices. We offer two novel, inter-linked approaches to thi
nking about work and employment in small firms. Firstly, we use a methodolo
gical approach which takes a household level analysis as a starting point,
making gender a foundation stone. Secondly, we use an institutional perspec
tive which focuses on power and power relations. From quantitative and qual
itative empirical work with micro-businesses in business services we show t
hat family work can be a vital resource. Yet there can also be severe costs
, particularly for the many women who participate in business alongside the
ir husbands as co-owners, employees and unpaid helpers. Gender divisions of
labour are, typically, reproduced in traditional fashion. Even when busine
ss owners bring in employees from outside the family, relations within the
micro-business are not fully market relations. Conflicts arise as business/
owners and their employees struggle to manage these partially decommodified
relations. The micro-business service sector actually represents a return
to traditional ways of organising business by integrating business and hous
ehold so that the traditional embedding of business and family of in-betwee
n pre-modern institutions is reinvented.