Happy Families or Poor Relations? — An Exploration of Familial Analogies in the Small Firm

RUTH HOLLIDAY IS WITH THE University of Central England in Birmingham and Gayle Letherby with Staffordshire University, England. The empirical data for this paper were collected as part of a wider project looking at the nature of operations management in the smaller manufacturing firm. The study uses ethnography in a number of small companies for periods of up to two months at a time. In these companies references by both owners and employees to the company being like a family were frequently made and this led the researchers to wonder why the analogy was used and what exactly was meant by it. Much work exists which either states that small firms are like "a happy family" or that they are "not happy and are therefore not like a family". The researchers thought that perhaps the family analogy was a useful one and could be used to explain authority structures, working relationships and exploitative practices within the small firm, particularly where these are to the detriment of women workers. They found that the description was small firms being "like a family" usually appeared to be used in a positive sense but as in the family the reality of daily life did not meet the ideal.