When anthropologists have turned their attention to the study of both Western and non-Western versions of capitalism, they have frequently sought subjects with which they have an affinity, given their traditional interests, and the study of kin relations in family firms and businesses has been a natural here. Not only will such scholars be grateful for Sylvia Junko Yanagisako’s superb and meticulous case study of large and midsized family businesses in the silk industry of Como, Italy, but so also will others who have studied the intersection of kinship and business, including political economists, sociologists, historians, psychologists, and family business advisors and consultants in and outside of business schools.

Yanagisako remains true to, but also in constructive, critical conversation with, the classic British school of kinship and lineage analysis (e.g., Meyer Fortes, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, et al.) rather than to the cultural approach to kinship of her teacher David Schneider. A revision-in-use of classic social-structural thinking about kinship does seem more productive than trying to provide “a cultural (symbolic) account” of Italian kinship as manifested in Como’s family firms, given the move away from systemic or holistic constructions of culture that Yanagisako recognizes and affirms at the very end of her book.

Yanagisako’s analysis is built around repeated reference to the saying among Como business families “The grandfather founded (the firm), the sons develop it, and the grandsons destroy it” (ch. 2). This saying recapitulates remarkably well the folk social theory embedded in the better-known and widespread adage in the United States and Britain “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Not only is this ideology a virtual mantra when the topic of family businesses comes up in popular treatments and in discussions with members of business families but it also accurately reflects the temporal span of family firms in a variety of settings and pursuits. Here lineages end before they really get started, and this tension has broadly defined the core problem for ethnographers (and historians) of these families as well as for self-reflexive family members acting often as their own paraethnographers.

As Yanagisako’s study abundantly demonstrates, even for business continuity to reach and move through the third generation is a distinct accomplishment. Most family businesses break up through the difficult passage from founder to heir(s). Still, analysts perhaps cannot resist paying most attention to “successful” family firms that achieve the character of lineage and make it through what appears culturally to be the cycle that most family businesses, since the beginning of the 20th century, can expect or hope for in most places. Although he did not point specifically to family firms, Joseph A. Schumpeter undoubtedly had them in mind when he wrote about the “creative destruction” that was inherent in capitalist organization (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Harper, 1975[1942]). The system only thrives by the turnover of its units, thus, defining the difficulty of family firms surviving, despite their persistent frequency, beyond one generation, let alone an exceptional three.

Another major axiom that Yanagisako found articulated among her subjects as ideology-qua-paraethnography is that family issues and business issues should not, and do not, mix (pp. 180 ff.). This expression of the middle-class and bourgeois aspirant sensibility is widely articulated among business families. As Yanagisako argues, this sentiment of structural distinction is a mask for justifying and observing the propriety of both structured inequality and different spheres of influence marked by gender. Men rule over business issues, and women have strong influence in family issues. But these are hardly equivalent functions, nor are family and business issues clearly distinct. The effort to make them such normatively as a matter of observation or principle masks the characteristic conflicts that emerge in generational transitions. Typically, inside critiques that probe authoritative family self-understandings emerge in generational conflicts over resources, shares of wealth, and authority. These conflicts—sometimes reaching courts, and, in the United States, almost always involving lawyers and advisors—often begin in the insurgencies of dependent descendants and extended family members who try to pierce the ideological masks of family stories and the entwined realities and mystifications of business that give the family its practical reasons for solidarity (e.g., see my account of Sallie Bingham’s deconstructive and destructive challenge to her third-generation Midwest newspaper-owning family [“Endgame,” Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America, Westview, 1992]; especially in recent decades such insurgents have often been women, as the normative divide between the spheres of business and family has been breached to varying degrees in most places where capitalist enterprise has established itself). Such self-reflexive insurgents are the most astute of paraethnographers (amid the many who think about the self-conscious family–business webs in which they are bound) and are, thus, of great value to the anthropologist if she or he is able to establish a relation with them.

Although Yanagisako is keenly aware of the self-reflexive nature of business families, in which interests, emotions, sentiments, and calculation are always mutually implicated, her account tends to be structural and, therefore, functionalist in nature, albeit subtly so. Conflicts abound on the margins or between the lines of Yanagisako’s analysis (e.g., her wonderful counterintuitive insights about the consequences of betrayal among kin), and they are present in the quotations she offers, but she does not foreground these cases as vehicles of analysis. This could be a matter of limits on access or of ethical care, but in the vast popular literature on family businesses from many societies, fiction and nonfiction, narratives of conflict in generational transition and dissolution expose the most complex self-reflexive thought and action within them as a guide to ethnography.

Guided by such paraethnography, condensed in the adages or ideological principles on which she focuses to orient her own analyses as well as to give her readers a working conceptual compass, Yanagisako skillfully probes and maps the edges, the spaces of the unsaid in and around the stories that her subjects tell her, but she refrains with sensitivity and care from actually entering analytically into these spaces. Here lie the counterdiscourses of secrets, intimacy, pain and pleasure, the embarrassing, and the uncomposed. In most instances, direct exposure of these matters is not necessary for the purposes of structural analysis; distanced characterizations suffice.

Still, areas exist toward which the paraethnography of those in authority gesture in their self-reflexive adages, which they do not themselves wish to enter but which are areas for ethnographers to pursue fresh and germane insights. For example, Yanagisako probes the unsaid around the three-generation adage and the vivid stories that her subjects tell within its frame; she shows that both the stories of origin and dissolution of family firms are messier and more interesting sociologically than the stereotypic stories that family members tell. Yet few ethnographies actually enter these arenas to provide counter or alternative narrative frames to those that the families operate within. By moving into this delicate terrain, sensitive ethnography might proceed beyond the purview of paraethnographic subjects, who effectively define limits for their own and others’ inquiry.

By designing research strategies that risk the conventional narrative boundaries commonly found in fieldwork on family firms, that challenge the ideological frames of these families promoted by their own authority, the ethnographer has the opportunity to gain fresh perspective. For example, as Yanagisako points out, the topic of the dissolution of family firms has a certain value and form in the stories that are told, but in the broader arena of capitalist development, these same stories are of new beginnings or even continuities, of new sets of entanglements in which the family story is still not over (it is just over from the perspective of a particular three-generation experience with apparent perpetuation cut short). Consistent with Schumpeter’s vision of capitalism as creative destruction, family firms, more as businesses than families, are destined to dissolve, or morph, such that the power and glory of the family in the very long term depends on how the end of the myths and hopes for lineage are managed. The topic of decline is a fertile area of research for ethnographers toward which a sensitive reading, such as Yanagisako provides, of the unsaid on the narrative edges of subjects’ stories would lead.

Ultimately, the value of this study will depend on its placement in comparative analysis, in which its many fine-grained insights can most carefully be thought through. And the present is certainly propitious for undertaking such comparative work because a rich trove of both historical and ethnographic work on family businesses has appeared over the past two decades, especially for Europe (Robert Ulin’s studies of French winemakers and Antonia de Lima’s dissertation on a prominent Portuguese banking family come immediately to mind). For Europe and the United States a rich literature exists on the history of textile firms, and the literatures on family capitalism in services, manufacturing, and banking in Asia and Latin America are equally impressive.

Difference and specificity in the overall prospects for longevity as well as the shape of family conflicts and generational transitions depend significantly on the nature of the businesses that families have cultivated as well as the moment in the history of capitalism within a particular state or region. For example, banking, commodity trading, to some extent, publishing, and, until recently, merchandising and retailing are among businesses in which families have thrived, even beyond three generations. Manufacturing and craft production have fared less well as family pursuits with regard to longevity. Yanagisako expertly discusses how the trend of flexible production, pioneered in Italy during the 1970s in reaction to changing conditions that affected the price of labor, favored artisanal firms and furthered the prospects of Como’s family firms but still did not affect the expected process of devolution from an entrepreneurial founder. The economy does not care whether a family firm perdures as long as the family itself remains an effective “technology” of business organization. In this sense, a family’s own concern with perpetuation, or regrets when its enterprise is cut short, is perverse in terms of capitalist logic however much the family is a valuable source of entrepreneurship in building firms.

Given the importance of attention to the economic activity around which family firms are organized as a major axis of systematic difference in comparative analysis, the one major limitation to Yanagisako’s study is that she says relatively little about the culture and technology of the silk industry itself. Indeed, the industry could be the focus of another study, and this distinction between the culture of family and that of business might be considered more of a choice of emphasis than a difference in a very entangled reality. Nonetheless, to distinguish the culture of the business and to consider it alongside the culture of the family within the same analytic frame seem to me to be crucial to gain a fuller, bifocal vision of these composite forms of organization. Otherwise, distinguishing norms of kinship from norms of long-term business practices is sometimes difficult, as is making subtle distinctions about the character of kin relations even within the widespread “truth” of the three-generation adage. Recent advances have been made in the sociology of industries and markets, with the sensibility of ethnography in mind and coming from science and technologies studies (e.g., the recent anthropology of cultures of finance, the study of biotechnology firms, and computer technology industries, none of which are studied through an interest in family businesses, although some of them deeply involve the latter).

Yanagisako shrewdly observes that what is constitutive of kin relations in Italian firms is not some underlying ur-model of Italian family culture but a much more complex set of elements and activities tied to a labile, diversely sourced idea of “culture.” Indeed, parallel to the very private relations of family in certain firms are the traditions established over decades, if not generations, for participating in a certain business in which managing issues of trust, risk, and character are most at stake. These issues overlap with the concerns about relations within families but are also distinct from them and arise from the experiences of doing business as such. The distinctive relations of the silk industry—patterns of apprenticeship and learning, trading in raw materials, the uniquely technical nature of the business, the management of markets and price structures, deal making, generally—all exceed and also infuse sheer relations of family on which Yanagisako concentrates.

Likewise, in a Jewish banking and merchant family with whom I worked in Galveston, Texas (Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America, Westview, 1992), the strong influence of aspects of a particular business culture had become legible at the heart of family relations in the third and fourth generations. This family was in transition to fourth-generation leadership, and it had long since diversified but had amassed its fortune in cotton factoring, a very old and traditional area of trade prominent in the global history of capitalist development with a culture and set of required skills in human relations as demanding as those required in the management of relations within ambitious families. What I first mistook for mainly “ethnic family culture” I was able to trace to the experience of family leaders and aspirants to life in trading rooms and the intricate deals, judgments, and preferences that generate markets of long standing in human terms. As the family aged, the “feel” of the culture of an ancient business became a basis for managing a family of proliferating descendants and beneficiaries. I would not have seen this had I not delved into the parallel culture of business distinct from and entangled with how kinship is transacted in a family and that is always present as the silent partner in even the family’s most intimate realms. Something similar seems to be at work in Yanagisako’s case study, but the missing ethnography of the silk industry makes it impossible to do this sort of ethnographic reading of her material.

Finally, the formulation of the comparative project in which Yanagisako’s might profitably be embedded depends on how one thinks about the concept of “culture” itself, and here the last pages of Yanagisako’s work are particularly relevant. In the era when kinship theory was still a major concern of anthropologists (the 1940s trough the 1960s), and especially in U.S. cultural anthropology, culture writ large, as a coherent, distinctive system, would play a key role in defining comparative perspective on family firms. For better or worse, this construction of the idea of culture as a major axis for defining difference in comparisons declined through periods of critique during the 1980s and 1990s focused effectively on the conceptual languages of anthropology, including the culture concept itself, but without replacing or doing away with the necessity of the continued use of culture as naming anthropology’s primary object of study. This has had frustrating consequences with which anthropologists have had to deal ever since. For example, although distinctly Italian things go on in Yanagisako’s family firms, to think that a determinate model or logic of Italian familism is operating here would be a mistake. The old culture concept, thoroughly critiqued as such, is too blunt an instrument to deal with culture in pieces, in flux, and entangled with other things that are not culture—in short, with culture as heterogeneity. Not even culture as a derivable system of logic or logics with complex variants could satisfy the more deconstructive tendencies in thinking about the concept. Thus, the structural dimensions of kinship with which Yanagisako deals are heterogeneously determined and irreducible to tokens of underlying and systematic cultural logics. Furthermore, one cannot possibly, at least in the domain of family firms, give Italian kinship, a “cultural account” (e.g., in the style of Schneider) and still explain how it manifests itself in hybrid relation to capitalist organization and practices. The result, then, is that even though Yanagisako successfully conveys an Italian sensibility within her material, what impresses me more is how much her case is like family capitalism elsewhere, especially in the United States and elsewhere in Europe in the same historical period of modernity. Is this significantly an effect of the inadequacy of the culture concept, once critiqued, to convey difference sufficiently well, or is it a result that only becomes clear when the complex partiality of culture mixes with the powerful pressures that capitalist enterprise exerts on the limited number of forms that family firms can take? Both are true, but I tend to favor the latter implication more.

Yanagisako leaves little room for a systematic cultural framework. Characteristic of the theoretical style with which we do anthropology now, Yanagisako argues that “neither families nor capitalism in Italy are products of Italian culture. Italian culture, after all, is merely a heuristic device” (p. 188). Continuing change is the one certain factor, and accounts of it must remain open to combinations of elements that used to vie as components of analytic–descriptive models or underlying structures. Even in structural accounts, the job is no longer to construct these kinds of conceptual things. Within the single case study, the idea of heterogeneity, flux, antistructure, and the caution of reification can be sustained. The problem of requiring something more arises when case studies are prepared for participation in comparative analyses, in which they find their special value. Here, more and alternative conceptual work is required. Nowhere in anthropology does this challenge have a solution, but it is being addressed (see, e.g., Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Blackwell, 2005).

Rather than with a plea for comparison, Yanagisako concludes by noting that the end of reifying ideas of culture does not mean the end of a usable notion of “culture” and, thus, the consequent urge to replace it with something else, like the equally reifying behemoth of global capitalism. She, thus, ends pragmatically by calling for more local analyses in which culture is implicated but in the complex unresolved and underdetermined ways that it is in her own exemplary study. I agree with this pragmatic approach in producing basic ethnography while hoping for alternative concepts and ways to do comparative projects that give the more difficult and complex current understandings of culture their due. In my view, for the topic of family firms, only in the meeting points between family and specific sorts of businesses can this be attempted. Yanagisako’s is a model study of the family in the firm, deserving closer study and replication, and as such, is halfway there.