The affective extension of 'family' in the context of changing elite business networks
The affective extension of 'family' in the context of changing elite business networks
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DOI：
10.1177/0018726720924074
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发表时间：
2020-05-22
期刊：
影响因子：
5.7
通讯作者：
Frazer, Michael L.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bika, Zografia;Frazer, Michael L.
这项跨学科的研究利用了49次对苏格兰家族企业所有者兼经理的口述历史访谈、6次关键线人访谈和二手资料来源，分析了20世纪80年代前后亲属关系的衰落和新型精英网络的出现。在此期间，由于社会经济环境的迅速变化，主要建立在字面上的家庭纽带上的合作不可能不发生变化。精英网络不再是通过生物合法的家庭关系来寻求团结，而是开始重新定义他们的“家族企业”，用充满感情的“家庭价值观”来定义，比如忠诚、关怀、承诺，甚至“爱”。有意识地培养“像家人一样”的情感和伦理联系是一种心理上的有效方式，可以将那些不一定分享先前存在的生物合法亲属联系的网络成员聚集在一起。“家庭”的这种延伸所涉及的社会心理过程，可以用苏格兰启蒙运动中最早发展起来的道德情操理论来理解。这些理论表明，当环境顺从时，家庭般的情感纽带可以通过同情那些与你没有字面意义上的亲戚关系的人来延伸。由于这种“情感的进步”，一个人现在在苏格兰的家族企业中赢得了一席之地，不是通过继承或嫁给它，而是通过执行受共同道德和情感驱动的类似家庭的行为。
Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their 'family businesses' in terms of affectively loaded 'family values' such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even 'love'. Consciously nurturing 'as-if-family' emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the 'family' can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this 'progress of sentiments', one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects.