Abstract

Development involves the acquisition of assets.  This paper models the family-firm in India and reveals the operation of patriarchy in its original sense - the control of younger men by older men.  A number of paradoxes both for economic and human development - in particular for women�s life chances - posed by these gendered governance relations are explored.
 

Introduction
The late Ester Boserup started her germinal work Woman�s Role in Economic Development with a depiction of development which is as relevant to the current era of globalisation as it was in 1970:  �(e)conomic and social development unavoidably entails the disintegration of the division of labour among the two sexes traditionally established in the village.  With modernisation of agriculture and with migration to the towns, a new sex pattern of productive work must emerge, for better or worse.  The obvious danger is, however, that in the course of this transition women will be deprived of their productive functions, and the whole process of growth will thereby be retarded� (1989, p5).  Hers is an attempt to trace the distinctive regional patterns of this transition.  Our objective is to elaborate some consequences of this transition to productive deprivation, consequences moreover which are not confined to growth.  First we need Boserup�s account of the South Asian pattern in order to situate our argument.

Boserup�s story begins in the Indian village in which types of women are defined through their work.  The highest status woman is veiled and non-working; the second, confined to domestic work; the third is active on the farm and an occasional wage worker and the last and lowest in status is an independent wage worker.  They are a �microcosm�, reflecting respectively Middle Eastern, Latin American, South East Asian and African female work patterns (p70).  At the same time the entire subcontinent can be divided into two regions, the north, redolent of the Middle East and African work patterns, where female agricultural wage labour is supply constrained; and the south, similar to South East Asian work patterns, where there is female farming and participation.  However when Boserup reasons through the progressive deprivation of productive work for women, neither the status categories nor the agrarian regions play much of a role.  The process of deprivation proceeds from the agriculturalisation of the peasantry and the stripping of crafts from the work of agricultural households.  Craft production becomes specialised.  It increases in scale, production being organised either in households (and according to household divisions of task and authority) or through male wage labour.  As the division of labour deepens and exchange becomes fundamental to social reproduction so tasks are progressively defined by categories of worker, in which skilled categories are dominated by men (pp69-76).  Boserup then shifts set to towns.  South Asian towns are male domains, either through selective male migration or because of the seclusion of women, or both.  The prospects for women�s work in towns is related to the rural gender division of labour in the non-farm economy so that while in north India �men even do the shopping� (p 86), in the south, in what she recognises as a �semi-male town� retail trade may be in the hands of women.  However, �to most Hindus the idea of female participation in trade is an abomination� (p 87) and �modern sector� bureaucracy, industry and markets are dominated by men. Even in South India, she recognises a �deepening cultural resistance to women�s participation in trade� (p98).  Female work is then confined to unsecluded women from the lowest castes who provide artisanal, home-based, petty production plus a variety of services.  Boserup shows convincingly that women are progressively marginalised from wage work in factories and that female activity rates decline with development (p192).  Both demand and supply factors play their role in this.  Employment regulations for women increase their cost while the inflexibility of modern industrial discipline is incompatible with the rearing of children (pp110-17).  She reaches a powerful conclusion.  �If women are hired at all... it is usually for the unskilled, low-wage jobs, men holding skilled jobs.  Thus the roles assigned to men and women even in the modern sector indicate a widening difference between the productivity and earnings of each� (p139-40).  Though she follows the implications of this conclusion for growth (arguing unconventionally that increased urban (educated) female employment would i) reduce male migration, putting men to productive use in the rural economy; and more conventionally that it would ii) reduce the per caput cost of provision of urban infrastructure and iii) lower birth rates), she also explicitly recognises that the structural transformations due to industrialisation and urbanisation would produce gendered tensions in �modern�, urban households.  Tension would result from the burdens of urban women being lighter than those of urban men (p186).  However Boserup does not pursue the implications of such tension.

Boserup�s gendered economic history, geography and sociology are both stylised and steeped in modernisation theory in which migration, structural and sectoral transformations and the scaling-up of occupation and enterprise play central roles.  In the process, the significance of the noirth-south culture regions for the progressive productive deprivation of women disappears, the implications for class formation of the �microcosm� based upon work patterns is lost and the progressive deprivation of the productive functions of women is sought in male control of the �modern sector� in its entirety.

Thirty years later, the productive deprivation of women remains a fundamental developmental tension in gendered relations of production and distribution.  In this tribute to Ester Boserup�s work, I want to explore in greater detail than that of her project the consequences not only for growth (as did Boserup) but also for wellbeing (neglected by Boserup, apart from womens� education) of the gender dynamics of the family business.  The family business provides much of the kind of employment which marginalises women in her account of the transition to modernity.  In family businesses and business families, relations of control of men over men (neglected not only by Boserup but also by most theorists in feminist economics ) are of paramount importance to this analysis.  The family business is the concrete extension into the market economy of the unit of reproduction, which is also the unit of control over technology and money, a �combat unit designed for battle in the market� (White, 1993, p8).  I will use Boserup�s method of stylised descriptive modelling, but here it is developed at the micro level whereas Boserup�s own models were regional and global in their scope.  Case material will be drawn from two sources:  first a field study of the reproduction of elite businesses in a South Indian town (where a random sample of businesses, stratified by ward has been questioned every decade from 1973); second, demographic and livelihood data from rural households in three of 11 randomly selected villages in the two surrounding districts whose development has also been followed since 1973.
 

The Gendered Structure of a Family Business
Figure 1 shows the division of labour in a family business.  The typical �unorganised� firm has a labour force divided by its extent and kind of security.  Family labour will be described in the next section.  Wage labour is divided between permanent and casual.  Casual labour is gendered.

Being part of the permanent labour force is here a condition to be aspired to, in contrast to being permanent labour in agriculture where it is one to be shunned.  Labourers are selected by origin (local), caste (usually not scheduled) and gender (male).  Permanent work offers a diversity of livelihoods ranging from the night watch to accountancy but all requiring individual trust. Contracts are individualised and verbal.  They vary in their periods of payment and of notice of dismissal, the one delayed (sometimes pay is yearly) and the other instant.  Some permanent jobs can be part time, some seasonal.  Many bosses agree to time off for employees to work their own land or to do periodic trade, or they make working on the owner�s land integral to the factory or workshop �contract�.

A primitive form of occupational welfare is usually extended to this part of the labour force.  Employers will give loans and also �gifts� of petty cash for purposes such as medical expenditure, education and marriages.  At one and the same time these acts parody state social protection and reveal how employers tie up labour they do not wish to lose.

In stark contrast, the casual labour force is characterised by low and fluctuating pay, higher turnover and no security.  While labour recruiters may be given annual bonuses and lent small sums of money, attempts are made to turn labour over so as to reduce its customary entitlement to annual gifts and to avoid protective obligations.

Male casual labour is occasionally unionised.  Yet the multiplicity of unions invites the political mediation of disputes, which are rarely resolved in favour of labour.  The labour laws tend to be enforced not by unions but by the state.  Factories Acts inspectors with huge territories to cover and few resources with which to enforce the law are more often than not found to be implicated with bosses in a nexus of corruption around the evasion of labour protection laws and the erosion of labour rights.

Female casual labour is subjected to extremes of casualisation, negligence and harassment and to unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, their wages often being reported by bosses as �pocket money�.  In such firms, work has for decades been subcontracted, often exported to rural sites to avoid inspection and to profit from cheap or unwaged family labour, from low rents and from the ease of evasion of any �welfare� obligations and taxes.  So capital uses informal practices and the idiom of social protection highly selectively so as to render the majority of the workforce insecure and a small minority less insecure.

Table 1, tracks change over 20 years in a South Indian market town and administrative and service centre (specialising in the wholesale trade of rice and groundnuts, in sari weaving and the crafting of gold ornaments) with a current population exceeding 100,000.  It shows that the mass of businesses are small family firms with an elite of the type described.  The average number of livelihoods (7 - 8 per firm) has not changed much over the period 1973-93.  The proportion of small and purely family businesses has risen from 28% to 35% over the period, while the proportion of family labour in the entire labour force has remained static at around a quarter.  While all the owners of capital are active workers, the composition of this work force has altered slightly owing to the entry of a very small number of female family workers.  They are hard to locate - working as washerwomen, tailors, jewel workers, sewers of leather goods in process-specialised flexible production, deep in the interiors of their homes.  Casual labour however has increased from 23% of jobs to 57% between 1973 and 1993.  Forward Caste control over business is stable in absolute terms and their apparent proportional decline masks the massive increase in concentration of their capital.  Backward castes have gained ground as owners while Most Backward castes and Scheduled Castes are around 80% of the casual labour force.  Ten to 15% of firms only employ labour of their own caste.  So, counting in firms without any wage labour, half the firms are still single caste.  In the other half, including larger businesses, workers form an emulsion of caste, though some employers still refuse point blank to hire scheduled caste labourers.  Urban assets inequality has increased out of all proportion to that in villages.  Whereas in 1973 the ratio of assets owned by the top 10% of businesses expressed as a multiple of those owned by the entire lowest 50% was 13 : 1, by 1983 it had widened to 66 : 1 and by 1994 to 117 : 1.
 

The Gendered Governance of the Family Firm
We can now turn to the family labour force.  Its structure is modelled in Figure 1 and its relationships over the life cycle of a business family in Table 2.  The family firm is controlled through flexible, cross-generational configurations of agnates. Irrespective of living arrangements, men negotiate authority based on the division of tasks and skill among them while also deferring to authority based upon age.  Tasks are divided between these men:  accountancy, purchase, sales (and the negotiation and enforcement of contracts and credit relations) and the supervision of labour. �It is usual for a man to recruit his partners, managers and technical experts from among his close kindred� observed M.N. Srinivas of industrial entrepreneurs near Delhi over 35 years ago and this practice has changed but little, if at all.

These joint family firms can be explained in transactions costs terms:  as lowering the costs of acquiring - and the risks of keeping - trade secrets, information, accounts and trustworthy relations.  A few business heads can and do calculate both the transactions costs and the opportunity costs of their male-family-based forms of management and find them to be cheaper than market alternatives.  At the same time, family firms are authoritarian units of capital and labour.  Information cannot be assumed to flow entirely freely inside a family business and its business family.  Opportunism (at any point in the hierarchy) cannot be assumed to be non-existent.  Nevertheless the gains from co-operation and compliance with authority prevail or else jointly managed male firms would not be so very common.  Factors such as a collective and individual interest in accumulation across generations, the security of employment, non-economic gains and the deterrent effect of patriarchal, social and economic sanctions on alternative wage work explain the prevalent supply of male labour at notional nominal rates which are well below those of the market.

Accumulation is therefore the result of an intensely male, concentrated and specialised set of relations of co-operative control for the production of the managerial labour which also owns capital, sometimes in substantial conglomerates networked by kinship.  Within these businesses, relations between men are carefully, almost �naturally�, constructed so as to nurture co-operation and control - control over other men within and outside the household. It is by means of thiscontrolover men that control over capital is concentrated.  Co-operation conceals control. Conflict between men is the most threatening aspect of the management of a family business.  The partition of a family business is as vulnerable a moment in the development of a firm as is the initial start:  not so much because of risks with labour relations or with contacts for commodity supplies but rather because of unclear property rights and brotherly conflict over finance and market shares.

Rapid demographic change has intensified these relations of control.  Increases in the age at marriage and the general halving of completed family size within a generation give rise to a deficit of brothers/sons.  The �deficit of brothers� can be shown to affect starting capital, firmsize and the ease of entry into trade or business of a young male adult.  As a result, business coalitions between agnates and affines are having to become more common.

Marriages and alliances are carefully controlled to create and protect the resource flows crucial to capital accumulation. Laidlaw�s description of Jain practice is worth quoting because it is widely relevant.  A family�s �credit� in business �is its stock in the broadest sense, which includes social position, its reputation and the moral and religious as well as the business conduct of all its members.  When a family contracts a good marriage, its credit increases... (t)he potential impact on business confidence of particular potential alliances are explicit factors for consideration... because business practice depends... so much on trust, moral conduct and financial standing.   This means that a family�s credit lies not only in the hands of the men who are actually engaged in business, but in that of its women too.  When sons succeed automatically to their father�s position in the family firm, the future of the business enterprise is, quite literally, in the women�s hands� (Laidlaw, op. cit., p355-6).  The piety of their women then has implications for business.

So the role played by gender in the accumulation of capital, involves a hierarchy of power based upon the male control of both male labour and male and female sexuality and social behaviour.  In this arena of power, not only are women subordinated to men but young men are subordinated to older men.  We find patriarchy in its original sense - the governance of male society by its elders.  These �male relations of patriarchy�, relations among men in which gender identity is important, have consequences for development and for wellbeing which actually reinforce the productive deprivation of women in the class controlling capital, and they do so by a variety of means.
 

Paradoxes of Economic Development
Under these alignments of governance, gender relations are allocatively inefficient with complicated and contradictory consequences.  Capital is controlled but less efficiently than it might be if women were able to work - as Boserup advocated - on terms commensurate not even (yet) with men but merely with their education.  But as a result of such inefficiency, the local economy is more labour intensive than it otherwise might be because the need to keep capital under tight patriarchal control discourages the business elite from sending sons (implicated in the ownership of firms by the time of their early adulthood) far away to higher education and out of direct male parental reach.  They therefore lack the technical knowledge required to foster innovation.  So technical change, generally capital biased, is retarded.  The need to keep capital under tight patriarchal control also leads to unrisky diversifications, local in space and narrow in their commodity composition.  This is one of several reasons for the intense commodity clustering apparent in the Indian economy.  That strangers are generally still not welcome to co-operate follows from the structure of governance of family business.  Lastly, the impacts of family firms governed in this way affect allocative efficiency.  Competition between firms (superficially independent entities) networked by kinship is frequently suppressed.  Collusive oligopolies can be enforced.

We would not wish to do more than speculate on how distinctively �Indian� these male patriarchal arrangements are.  In his treatise on �Trust�, Fukuyama (1995) distinguishes France, Italy, Taiwan and Hong Kong from the US, Germany and Japan on the basis of general levels of trust.  The first group, being societies with low levels of trust, have economies with a preponderance of relatively small scale firms based upon male family labour.  Even in large corporations and public companies, the promoter family�s shares constitute a large proportion and professional managers are comparatively rare.  The �glass ceiling� on accumulation constituted by family forms of accumulation is associated with decentralised and flexible, network-based forms of economic organisation.  India is very conspicuous by its absence in �Trust� but would belong to the low trust group.  With respect to the Chinese commercial dispora, Greenhalgh (who examined family firms as part of her critique of the revisionist emphasis on (Confucianist) culture to explain East Asian capitalism (1994)) found inter alia the same kind of structuring of male family labour as we have described here with authority vested in male age and with females severely subordinated and exploited in the effort to keep production costs low, confined to non-managerial and part time work and excluded from inherited property relations.  So in neither of these respects is India to be considered uniquely distinctive.  India�s distinction relates to the demographic consequences.
 

Paradoxes of Human Development
There are three, all serious matters for male and female wellbeing and agency.  First, the reinforcement of patriarchal relations in the class controlling local capital has contradictory effects on the welfare of women.  These have been theorised as positive for the female work force or for upwardly mobile subaltern social classes but negative in the heart of the local business class itself. Second, the agent of what I have called elsewhere female �gender-cleansing� is itself female, for it is women who neglect or kill their daughters.  Third, the increasingly male-biased and gendered concentration of capital has an impact on wellbeing which is concealed by the analytical attention paid to income and which can work irrespective of other ways the economy is structured (e.g. by caste and religion).

Concerning the first paradox, survival chances are normally theorised in terms of returns to work (either by the flat binary category of �economic participation� or by proxies for �income� or by relative incomes themselves).  The orthodox hypothesis relates wealth to withdrawal of women from economic participation in the interest of the status of the household, a public attribute reflecting primarily upon men.  Accumulation and seclusion have also been accompanied by the diffusion from North India of the dowry, not vested in the bride but taking the form of an unmediated transfer from bride givers to bride receivers. As the economic costs of women rise, their economic benefits fall, so does their relative status and thus their survival chances. These propositions have received much attention in the literature on the economics of the household.

Agnihotri, exploring an alternative hypothesis that there is a U-shaped curve in the relation of the sex ratio to income has discovered a few cases of kinks in the generally downward sloping relationship (after which point the ratio of females to males recovers).  But these inflexion points are at levels of income or wealth (land) which exclude all but the tiniest minority of the elite population and their �liberated� men and women (some of whom will be readers of this paper).  In general the sex ratio becomes ever more adverse to women as income or household wealth rises.  The slope is steeper in urban cases than in rural ones, and is steeper for children than for adults meaning that the association between development and disadvantage is worse where wealth is most concentrated and is anyway worsening over recent time.

Case study research in rural and urban S. India (which provides insights into process which may be statistically - but are certainly not demographically - significant) has revealed complex economic logics at work among the poor.  Complex logics specific to class and to gendered wage work are likely to be required to explain survival differentials elsewhere.  As total wealth increases in landless households so the survival differential reduces.  But in landed households, increases in wealth serve to bias the sex differentials in life chances increasingly against girls.  Prosperity reduces the survival chances of girls not when it is in the form of income but when it takes the form of property.  As returns to land and non-land assets increase (in this cross sectional data), so, significantly, do adverse female survival differentials.  Recent historical research shows that this latter effect has appeared only recently and is intensifying as property ownership becomes more extensive and the possibility of inheritancediffuses.  Economic development and the amassing of inheritable property even ifon a small scale, actually act so as to disfavour women in certain class positions, in this instance most intensely those women belonging to the numerically small class of the propertied elite.  My own work on the local rural landed elite of the dominant agrarian caste yielded an under 7 sex ratio in 1993-4 of 645.  That on the local agro-commercial elite gives an under-15 sex ratio in 1994 of 784.  This is extremely low. It would seem that one in five girls there has been denied the freedom to live.

Concerning the second paradox, we have to explain the act of maternal neglect of their girls, of women�s hostility towards womanhood.  Of this, Ashis Nandy writes: �(m)an�s cruelty towards man is exceeded only by man�s cruelty toward woman. But even man�s cruelty toward woman is no match for the cruelty of woman toward woman� (1990, p34).  He argues that such behaviour results not from low self valuation but rather from women�s turning against themselves and identifying with aggressive men.  Women are then active agents in their self-repudiation (they value the act of self-repudiation; they have reasons for it) as well as being psychological victims of male aggression and male supremacist ideology.

Which brings me to the third and final problem.  The use of continuous economic variables such as landholding, expenditure or income to explain sex ratios does not illuminate the full range of patriarchal logics that may be brought to bear on women�s life chances.  Consider dowries (regarded at least as a disabling economic shock to parents of daughters - at most a potentially mortal burden to daughters and anyway a massive threat to the latter�s relative status).  Among local business families, if income is derived only from a salary, the ratio of dowry to household assets is likely to be high and the conventional cost/benefit calculation may indeed account for sex discrimination.  By contrast, in the households of local elite business families, where income comes from capital, if total dowries ever disbursed for daughters are compared with net total assets for male family members, the ratio will be much lower - my estimate of the dowry: assets ratio for elite business families in 1994 was 1:12.  In these circumstances, dowries are then neither particularly burdensome (nor are they in any sense a pre-mortem inheritance on a par with that of sons).  Here dowries enter the explanation at the level of discourse.  If they have a real role as a disincentive for females it is ideological.  That ideology may have powerful material consequences is not in dispute.  Nor is the fact that women can be complicitous with an ideology which undermines them.  Beneath or alongside ideology, however, is the demand for male labour in the family firm in a context of rapid fertility decline.  This provides a material disincentive to the local elite for having daughters.  Yet neither the gendered transfer of assets between generations nor the gendering of the division of managerial labour by themselves explain such female disadvantages in life chances under conditions where total resources are relatively abundant.  The cultural transfer from the north of dowry (replacing bride price or small reciprocal transfers at marriage as an idiom of modernity) battened onto customary norms barring women from managing family businesses underwrite these material practices.

The relative deprivation from productive functioning and the exclusion of women from the ownership of capital is one of the many ironies of India�s development.  The creation of wealth means the expansion and diffusion of the male family business. Women are excluded from family business and the role they play in business families - though it is a significant social role - actively threatens their wellbeing.  Their dowry is not theirs to control and it is a far smaller part of their natal family�s capital than that the portion accumulated for males.  It is now not Indian kinship practices so much as Indian capitalism mediated by kinship practices and their own psychological complicity that endangers women.
 

References
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TABLE 1:  CASTE AND GENDER IN THE BUSINESS ECONOMY OF A TOWN IN SOUTH INDIA, 1973-93
 
 

In percentages of total work force
Source: Basile and Harriss-White, 2000

TABLE 2 : GENDER ROLES IN FAMILY BUSINESSES
 

Males

Females

FIRM Management and Control by Male Family Members Permanent labour force (clientelised, males) Casual labour force (sometimes unionised, males) (largest single element of productive labour, deliberately casualised, female)

HOUSEHOLD Strategic control by men   Tactical control and socialisation by women Female/child wage labour in domestic service Occasional male labour in domestic service

LIFE CYCLE

YOUTH (Work) shop and home-based socialisation into management of capital and labour

FORMATION Home-based socialisation into management of household (children, food, ceremony)

APPRENTICESHIP  (sometimes elided with schooling) Skills, contacts, networks, individual and collective elements of reputation (Higher education may be threatening)

APPRENTICESHIP  Educated for marriage alliance

ENTRY INTO BUSINESS As member of family firm, with division of tasks based on male authority As �independent� firm closely financed and controlled by male elders

MARRIAGE Durables in dowry crucial to groom�s status in family firm Fungibles in dowry contribute to groom�s starting capital  Household reproductive labour

DEATH OF PATRIARCH Splitting of family firm Vulnerability of property rights, finance, conflict over sites and rights

Production of male labour crucial a) to power relations in division of property and b) to size of family firm

CONSOLIDATION OF BUSINESS Growth of firm Formation of conglomerates with brothers and sons Complex overlapping forms of ownership Subcontracting, casualisation of labour (esp. female labour) Amassing of dowries for daughters Investment in land

CONSOLIDATION OF BUSINESS Social work Management of household Reproductive work