Familism as a context for entrepreneurship in Northern Italy

It would appear that the two simple dichotomies concerning the topics discussed in this article have been rejected in the last thirty years. The first is the assumption that preindustrial households were units of production, while industrial (urbanized and nuclear) households are mainly units of consumption. The second is the idea that the family enterprise, wrongly assumed to be an anachronistic form of the organization of production, should have played a marginal role in modern capitalism. The first dichotomy is briefly discussed by considering Parsonian and Weberian approaches that supported this view and its critique; the second is analyzed by looking at the shifting notion of industrial capitalism, from mass production to a less standardized and more flexible way of producing commodities in small firms. It will be argued that familism can still be regarded as a useful concept if deprived of its ideological connotation that can be traced back to Banfield’s questionable definition dating from the 1950s. Familism is the “missing link” between entrepreneurship and family enterprise. A case study in support of this view is presented by drawing on fieldwork research carried out in the Italian region of Lombardy.