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The purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution of “Matriarchy” to the entrepreneurship and family business literature. The literature on gendered aspects of entrepreneurship is expanding and maturing in its level of theoretical sophistication and subject coverage. At the same time, our nuanced understanding of how gender influences entrepreneurial action also expands, as does our appreciation of how men and women do entrepreneurship. It is widely acknowledged that although the theories of entrepreneurship and small business are cognate literature, entrepreneurship has primacy. The heroic male entrepreneur is the master narrative against which we measure other forms of entrepreneurship. The role played by wives, partners, family and employees is often left unstated. In our eternal quest to theorise and explain entrepreneurial action in its entirety, we seldom consider the explanatory power of the sociological theory of “Matriarchy”. Consequentially, in this theoretical paper, we present and discuss several important aspects of the theory which are applicable to our understanding of the diverse nature of gendered enactment within entrepreneurship and small business in which entrepreneurship provides the action to be measured and small business, the setting in which it is encountered. The work primarily concentrates on the theoretical aspects of Matriarchy as well as building upon the extant literature of entrepreneurship, gender and small and family business.

The literature on Matriarchy is presented and analysed in conjunction with appropriate texts from the above literature. The readings help construct a theoretical framework which is tested against narratives of Matriarchial figures encountered via research and written up using retrospective ethnography. This unusual qualitative methodology allows the author to test and develop the utility of the theoretical framework. The resultant narratives and vignettes are both illuminating and enlightening.

The stories of the Matriarchs illustrate how gender differences impact upon entrepreneurial identities and the everyday practicalities of doing business. While the male head of the family may be the titular business owner, many privately defer to the Matriarchal voice which acts as a positive driving force in business, binding a family together.

The theory of Matriarchy offers another powerful explanatory variable in how gendered relationships influence entrepreneurial identities and in making the theory the focal point, we can avoid some of the common assumptions we make when we concentrate on entrepreneurship as the key variable. In perpetuating heroic entrepreneurial narrative as success stories, we as the ultimate consumers of such socially constructed fiction are also complicit. This article, therefore, has the potential to influence how we as authors of such narratives narrate stories of women in family business.

The paper challenges the universality of traditional renditions of family businesses as entrepreneur stories. It re-examines and challenges accepted wisdom building up a discussion, which confronts accepted theories of entrepreneurship and family business.

This paper is an exploratory quantitative study aimed at providing the first overview of the incidence of female directors in UK companies, mapped against types of firms. It provides a unique quantitative perspective on the types of companies with boards on which female directors serve.

A quantitative analysis of a newly constructed database based on data for all UK companies (using Companies House Financial Analysis Made Easy data) was carried out to explore overall data for board membership related to gender, resulting in a new typology to describe firms with female directors.

The data supports earlier partial studies suggesting male dominance continues at senior levels. Although female directors represented one in four directors in UK firms, most companies remain male dominated. Women directors are generally found in smaller firms and only one in 226 of larger firms have a majority of female directors. The service sector remains the main focus for female firms, both business services and other services.

The study suggests that at the rate of progress achieved over the 2003‐2005 period, it will be the year 2225 before gender balance in company directorships is achieved in the UK. The study was based on Companies House data, where gender is a self‐reported variable; therefore, considerable work had to be done to identify the gender of directors in order to build the database. This is a limitation for others trying to assess female board membership. The study did not attempt to explain why these levels of female participation are observed – this is a necessary second step following this first analysis of the incidence of women on boards.

The data provides the first comprehensive picture of the senior positions of women across UK businesses as it relates to their positions on the boards of companies.

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.

If we lived in a matriarchy then my name today would not be Ildikó Asztalos Morell, but Ildikó von Hartentahl. My ancestor the pale Maria von Hartentahl would have inherited her parents’ beautiful palace. Instead she had to run away under the darkness of night with her secret lover and the fruit of their love in her belly to avoid the wrath of her family. She would have married the young and charming family “kirurg” (surgeon) and they would have raised many happy children. Instead they fled to the German colonies in Hungary where the “kirurg” slowly turned into an alcoholic, leaving Maria to struggle for the rest of her life against poverty and ill health while trying to bring up her son.

This editorial aims to investigate the interface between gendered processes and family business by exploring the extent to which gendered processes are reinforced (or not) in family business operations and dynamics. This approach will complement the agency and resource-based view theoretical bases that dominate family business research (Chrisman et al., 2009) and further contribute to extending gender theories.

Acknowledging that gender is socially constructed, this editorial discusses the interface between gendered processes and family business within entrepreneurship research.

Despite a growing interest in gender and family business, there is limited literature that explores gender theory within family business research. A gender theory approach embracing family business research contributes to a needed theoretical deconstruction of existing perspectives on the operations, sustainability and succession of family businesses in the twenty-first century.

This editorial makes a contribution to extant scholarship by extending gender theories through an exploration of the gendered processes in family business research.

As a network analyst, I am fascinated by social interactions. The ways in which people connect with one another and exercise power and authority by deploying different forms of capital. This piece returns to the underlying and changing kinship network structure of the village of Ambridge over time, explores the role of ‘kin-keeping’ as deployed by the matriarchs Peggy and Jill. I am most interested in the ways in which gender as performed by the women of the village intersects with abundance or lack of other forms of capital, and how far inequalities persist and why. It is clear that there is an intergenerational power dynamic at play in the spreading or hoarding of the various dimensions of power layered together and how forms of capital intersect for protection or precarity. Social and cultural capital at birth in the village is defining in terms of both ‘serious’ life outcomes as well as how more minor infractions and foibles are viewed. Further, I return to discuss how my various network-based predictions have fared over time. The Headlam Hypothesis and the fate of Ed Grundy – King of Ambridge are revisited and their durability explored.

This chapter examines the connections between race and class divisions and examines how they shape racial inequities in the distribution of resources, power and privilege. Throughout history, racial identity has been a key factor in determining a person's position in modern capitalist societies. As such, issues of race and class have preoccupied sociologists and other scholars with diverse ideological orientations. This is highlighted in debates around the nexus of race and class in the production of racial structures, laws and institutions that legitimate and perpetuate the normalisation and centrality of whiteness. This chapter summarises some of the historical and ongoing debates, providing a synthesis of how race and class divisions continue to shape contemporary intergroup relations and social policy. It delves into racial capitalism and how race intersects with other social identities to determine socio-economic hierarchy in many western countries.

Purpose: The overall purpose of the chapter is to begin development of a frame of reference that encompasses all gender constructs. This chapter focuses on gender constructs in relatively small-scale, sub-national ethnicities. These peoples represent a major focus of strain in the processes of national development and consolidation. The emphasis here is on the cultural (in this case gender oriented) variations that are preserved by their persistence.

Methodology/approach: The chapter is primarily a review of ethnographic literature, focusing on selected case studies that illustrate both the gender variations that exist and some of those that have already been lost.

Findings: The varieties of gender constructs that exist make it clear that the current binary social science paradigm for organizing our knowledge of gender is inadequate.

Value: This chapter is a reminder that rampant globalization threatens the survival of a variety of ethnic patterns and in reducing them to nameless, faceless cogs in a consumer-driven structure, cultural evolutionary potential for adapting to unforeseen conditions is lost.

Limitations: The data cited do not represent a systematic sample of existing variations. They have been chosen to illustrate the range of data existing outside the commonly accepted patterns.

The concept of patriarchy, one of the key thinking tools of the 1970s women’s movements, has been used and critiqued in many current and historical projects. This chapter enters the debate in an unorthodox way. Rather than define, defend, or critique the concept of patriarchy, it focuses on its capacity to articulate historically specific forms of relations between gender and generation.

The body of the chapter notes the continuities and differences in the way mastery and social infancy were connected in several episodes of thinking with patriarchy in Western social and political thought. Attempts to bring Roman law into a coherent system in early sixth-century ce, debates between defenders of absolutist rule and proponents of democracy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, nineteenth-century reconstructions of human pre-history and resurgent twentieth-century women’s movements have all left traces in ways of thinking about gender and generational relations today.

In the last two decades, new forms of activism and scholarship drew on the conceptual toolkit surrounding patriarchy. The last section of the chapter highlights two of these areas: research on child rights governance and the total social organization of labor, and writings on patrimonialism. Key insights from this work, the chapter concludes, can be used to argue that a focus on historically specific forms of the interface between gender and generation constitutes a useful aspect of thinking with patriarchy.