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Entrepreneurs may wish to be selective about which relatives to include or exclude in their businesses. For example, their child might be inept but their niece might be outstanding. What aspects of kinship systems affect their ability to make these sorts of choices? What enables them to bend their ties of kinship and marriage to the interests of their business? Most broadly, what dimensions of kinship lend themselves to tactical or instrumental actions? This question is sweeping just as my meaning of “entrepreneurs” is very broad: those who take actions with the goal of growing their capital (Stewart, 1991). This capital may take the form of newly started ventures, dynastic firms, or even in precapitalist systems other social forms, for example, rural estates farmed by followers.

This essay brings structural intimacies – theorised as the meeting of social structural patterns with interpersonal lives – to the border to consider transnational LGBTQ kinships. Specifically, the paper considers ‘the border’ and its state-driven bio-regulations as a reproductive technology that produces LGBTQ, racial/ethnic and social class inequities through the consolidation of heteronormative, bio-genetic kinship institutions and ideations of family. Structural intimacies harnesses intimacy as both subject and as an analytic lens for queering reproductive sociology that insists on re-conceptualizing institutions central to our lives. Structural intimacies move our analytic gaze from how the border structures sexuality, and vice versa, to consider the border as at once a structural and an affective domain. Structural intimacies is a conceptual tool useful for cross-disciplinary inquiry into the social and structural contexts in which reproductive technologies render meaning, as well as produce families, and to illustrate the analytic necessity of storying both content and method as integral to queer/ing scholarship. Straddling the most proximal forms of daily care and labor patterning everyday intimacies with the policies and practices of the state, the concept of structural intimacies reveals moments of encounter between state institutions with the most intimate components of a person's life and identity, in this case amplified by the bio-politics of the border.

Less polemical authors have published useful overviews of scholarship and institutional development in family business (Chrisman, Kellermanns, Chan, & Liano, 2010; Heck, Hoy, Poutziouris, & Steier, 2008; Schulze & Gedajlovic, 2010; Sharma, 2004). I take this as license for hyperbole. In such a vein, I am skeptical eight times over: that the field can be objective, that it can be defined, that “family business” is the right label, that it will find useful theories, that kinship exists, that if it does exist (all right, I do believe it does) we really observe it in action, that the field can progress without regressing, that it can be relevant, and that it can find its niche in universities. “Skeptical” has a nice ring to it. I confess, though, that my concerns are worries more than a lack of willingness to believe. After all, I hope that the papers in this volume will goad us into avoiding pitfalls as the field develops.

The development and practice of school leadership in the Philippines is influenced by a rich history that has helped to shape policy and education in a diverse cultural landscape. Periods of Spanish and American colonization have challenged core Filipino values of community and kinship and shaped the way contemporary school leadership preparation and development occur in the Philippines. The role of school leaders in the Philippines is further framed by kinship dynamics, which have been consistently integral to the Filipino concept of self and to the way individuals interact with others. Kinship is the nucleus of the Filipino social organization, from indigenous groups to colonial aristocratic ethnic and social groups. The Filipino concept of leadership is derived from a value set that rests on both biological and ritual forms of kinship, which in turn drives leadership practice in communities and schools.

Are the social domains of kinship and business on balance complementary or contradictory? Do ventures that invest heavily in both – conventionally referred to as “family firms” – bear a net gain or net loss? We are scarcely the first to raise these questions. How then will we try to contribute to an answer? We try this in five ways, all of them based on previous literature. First, we develop the dichotomy of kinship and business by taking seriously the metaphor of yin and yang, merging it with the anthropological constructs of structural domains such as “domestic” and “public.” This metaphor proves to shed light on the relevant literature. Second, we provide a qualitative survey of the costs and benefits of kinship in business. Third, we summarize the empirical work that addresses the performance outcomes from family involvement. Fourth, we consider the practitioner implications of these studies. Finally, we ask if scholars are as yet in a position to answer these questions.

Students of kinship or of gender have to confront a similar problem. Their inquiries are made possible by the hard fact that human beings reproduce sexually. The two sexes have complementary and immutable functions in the reproductive process; that is, men impregnate and women gestate and give birth to infants. Therefore, each human child owes her existence to and, we say, is related by birth to, at least two other persons, who are, we say, his or her parents, and who themselves have two parents each, and so on ad infinitum. These relations are the stuff of kinship, which is often described by anthropologists as the social recognition or reinterpretation of the facts of biological reproduction.

Kinship structures in Ambridge have been analysed using social network analysis (SNA) showing a network of a ‘small world’ type with 75 individual people linked by birth or marriage. Further, the network shows four major cliques: the first two centred on Aldridge and Archer matriarchies and the second where through the marriages of the third generation the Grundies, Carters, Bellamies and Snells connect together. The chapter considers the possible futures for kinship networks in the village, arguing either a version of the status quo or The Headlam Hypothesis through which Archers assume less importance and the strength of the weak ties in the network assume more prominence.