The Family Business Tradition in Britain and Norway

Abstract

We offer a comparison between micro businesses operating in the business service sector in Britain and family fishing businesses in Norway. This is used to challenge the conventional focus of business research on the entrepreneurial individual and his (more recently, also her) responses to risk. Both studies arose from our interests in the impact of economic restructuring on households and families. The family proved to be an important part of business behavior and organization in each of these sectors. Once the significance of the family for embedding business is understood (Granovetter, 1984), it is not enough to consider the ways in which business owners handle risk: Family responses to the insecurity of household livelihoods must also be taken into account.