Producing Culture and Capital

Family Firms in Italy

Sylvia Yanagisako

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691214221
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Producing Culture and Capital is a major theoretical contribution to the anthropological literature on capitalism, as well as a rich case study of kinship and gender relations in northern Italy.
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on thirty-eight firms in northern Italy's silk industry, Sylvia Yanagisako illuminates the cultural processes through which sentiments, desires, and commitments motivate and shape capitalist family firms. She shows how flexible specialization is produced through the cultural dynamics of capital accumulation, management succession, firm expansion and diversification, and the reproduction and division of firms. In doing so, Yanagisako addresses two gaps in Marx's and Weber's theories of capitalism: the absence of an adequate cultural theory of capitalist motivation and the absence of attention to kinship and gender. By demonstrating that kinship and gender are crucial in structuring capitalist action, this study reveals these two gaps to be different facets of the same omission. A process-oriented approach to class formation and class subjectivity enables the author to incorporate the material and ideological struggles within families into an analysis of class-making and self-making.
Yanagisako concludes that both "provincial" and "global" capitalist orientations and strategies operate in an industry that has always been integrated into regional and international relations of production and distribution. Her approach to culture and capitalism as mutually constituted processes offers an alternative to both universal models of capitalism as a mode of production and essentialist models of distinctive "cultures of capitalism."

CHAPTER ONE

PRODUCING CULTURE AND CAPITAL

Three stories have been told about the silk industry of Como, Italy. The first is encapsulated in an adage that I first heard from an industry official soon after I had begun my research in Como. “Il nonno fondò, i figli sviluppano, i nipoti distruggono”—The grandfather founded (the firm), the sons develop it, and the grandsons destroy it. This adage, which distilled local knowledge about the rise and fall of firms in Como, was subsequently repeated to me by several firm owners. A less frequently cited, but notable, variation of the adage ends “i nipoti mangiano.” In other words, the grandsons eat the firm. My translation of this adage is intentionally gendered. It could, after all, be translated “the grandfather founded [the firm], the children develop it, and the grandchildren destroy it,” because the plural nouns figli and nipoti can include both males and females. It was clear from those who elaborated the adage, however, that this was a story about grandfathers, fathers, and sons.

In this tale of patrifilial succession, one generation of men succeeds in carrying forward their father’s project, while the next fails. The grandfather is characterized as a “self-made man,” much like the founder of a silk dyeing and printing firm whose son described him in precisely these terms. This was a man who began working in arduous, laboring jobs at the age of nine, who acquired his vocation through practical experience and education in evening classes, who worked long hours and lived a frugal life while he built a firm that flourished because of his technical expertise and dedication. The founder’s sons, in turn, acquire their father’s technical know-how and discipline by working at his side in the firm. Having inherited the business reputation and contacts accumulated by their father, these sons have the social as well as financial capital to expand the firm. By the third generation, so the story goes, the drive and self-discipline that enabled the grandfather to build the firm no longer exist among the grandsons, who squander the firm’s assets in ill-considered schemes and frivolous expenditures. The picture painted is more or less one of dilettante bourgeois youths who prefer to sail the Bahamas rather than put in the long hours needed to advance the firm.

Like all adages, this three-generational tale of firm succession has a moral to it. And like all compelling moral tales, it leaves several things out. First, it leaves out history. Fathers, sons, and grandsons play out their generational destinies in a timeless tale of succession detached from any historical context. Second, and perhaps most obviously, it leaves out women. The exclusive concern with male productive force and its dissipation over time reflects a monogenetic theory of procreation (Delaney 1986), in which males alone supply the creative force that produces succeeding generations and, in this case, capitalist firms. It replicates in the profane world of business the cosmological model of male reproduction embodied in the sacred origin myths of Christianity. Finally, the adage leaves out gender. Not only are there no women in this tale, but the goals of the three generations of men are ungendered. Indeed, the self-evident character of men’s ambitions forecloses the possibility of asking why fathers would want their sons to develop the firm in the first place.

The second story told about the Como silk industry is a prophetic account of the coming of a second era of industrial capitalism. In a book widely read in the 1980s, The Second Industrial Divide, the economist Michael J. Piore and the sociologist Charles F. Sabel herald the coming of a new epoch of industrialism based on innovative small firms. According to the authors, the limitations of an industrial system based on mass production in vertically integrated firms, which emerged in the nineteenth century, have become apparent in the wake of political and economic events that transformed the international market in the early 1970s. The most promising alternative to mass production lies in the networks of technologically sophisticated, innovative small firms that rely on craft forms of production. The flexible specialization of these firms has enabled certain industrial districts, including those of northern and central Italy, to ride the rough economic waters of the 1970s and 1980s and to usher in a new era of industrialism.

In contrast to the adage, Piore and Sabel’s account situates this shift in a specific historical period of industrial capitalism. Moreover, it pays heed to the crucial role that politics plays in this transformation, recognizing that neither firms nor industries are autonomous from broad social and political movements. In their model of flexible specialization, “it is hard to tell where society . . . ends and where economic organization begins” (1984, 275). Thus, they highlight the political ideas and developments that created the preconditions for the emergence of such networks of flexible firms.

Like the adage, however, Piore and Sabel’s account leaves out gender. There are no women, wives, daughters, mothers, or sisters, or for that matter men, husbands, sons, fathers, or brothers, in their industrial history—only artisans, subcontractors, skilled craftsmen, and other occupationally defined social actors. The political ideas and commitments that Piore and Sabel identify as having made possible the emergence and survival of flexible manufacturing include the struggle by nations for a place in the international order, by states to establish their power, and by Italian migrants to define a place for themselves in the large factories of the north. The politics of gender go unmentioned. Kinship, on the other hand, is attended to, as Piore and Sabel are aware that the innovative small firms in these industrial districts are predominantly family owned. They treat the “tradition of familialism” on which the firm owners draw, however, as a stable cultural resource rather than a historically situated, negotiated process that is itself continually being produced.

The third story is one in which Como’s silk industry plays only a cameo role. The geographer David Harvey (1989) has fashioned an encompassing narrative linking an array of recent shifts in cultural life around the globe to structural adjustments in capitalism. Harvey attributes the rise of postmodern sensibilities and tastes in domains of cultural consumption as wide-ranging as art and architecture, cinema and coffee drinking, to the emergence of a new regime of capital accumulation—that of flexible accumulation. Like Piore and Sabel, Harvey identifies the early 1970s as the moment when new political and economic conditions necessitated the shift in capitalist strategies of accumulation from a Fordist regime of mass production and mass consumption to a late-capitalist regime of decentralized production and differentiated (lifestyle) consumption. In Harvey’s thesis, however, the primary impetus for this shift comes from above—driven by capitalists’ need to develop technological and organizational innovations to enhance profits and to control workers by undercutting their bargaining power (103). A key shift in industrial organization entailed in this new regime of accumulation has been increased subcontracting, which has both opened up opportunities for small business formation and “in some instances permits older systems of domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and paternalistic (“godfather,” “guv’nor” or even mafia-like) labour systems to revive and flourish as centrepieces rather than as appendages of the production system” (152).

Harvey’s thesis of the postmodern consequences of late capitalism brings in kinship only marginally, treating it, like culture, as a dependent variable. Flexible accumulation has broad and pervasive cultural effects on people’s political identities and commitments and on their perception of time and space, but is itself not shaped by culture. “Cultural life” is pervaded with the logic of capital circulation and held within the embrace of the capitalist logic of our times, but capitalist production is itself outside the embrace of culture. As in most models of the global economy, late capitalism and the new institutional structures it has spawned are portrayed as acultural forces relentlessly bent on penetrating local communities and absorbing them into homogeneous regimes of accumulation. Local communities with culturally specific ways of life may mediate the effects of capitalism, but capitalism itself is not envisioned as shaped by cultural meanings and processes.¹

Each of these three stories offers useful perspectives on the economic, political, and social forces shaping the silk industry of Como. Each contributes to the analytic narrative of this ethnography. Each, however, overlooks the cultural forces that incite and shape capitalist production and capital accumulation in the industry. In placing the local adage of generational succession alongside the two scholarly theses of the post-1960s transformation in capitalism, my aim is to expand and enrich the theoretical narrative to include what they leave out: an analysis of the sentiments, desires, and meanings of kinship, gender, and capital that are crucial to the production of the industry at a particular historical conjuncture. Like the local adage, my primary concern is with the character and motives of the people who own and manage the industry’s firms. Like the adage, I situate them in families. In constrast to the adage, however, I am interested in understanding how these individuals have arrived at the sentiments and desires that lead them to pursue the particular entrepreneurial projects that, in turn, have shaped both their families and the silk industry of Como.

Toward a Cultural Analysis of Capitalist Action

This ethnography of Italian family firms eschews a model of capitalism as an economic system governed by universal laws. If we define capitalism, as did Marx, as a mode of production that is constituted by the class relation between capital and wage-labor,² then a universal model of capitalism entails two assumptions. First, we would have to assume that those who own and control the means of production and purchase labor power everywhere engage in the same “economic action” in pursuit of the same goals. Second, we would also have to assume that workers who sell their labor power are everywhere endowed with identical motives and subjectivities. In other words, a universal theory of capitalism is predicated on a universally homogeneous bourgeoisie and a universally homogeneous proletariat. As several recent historical and ethnographic monographs (Chakrabarty 1989; Rofel 1999; Donham 1999) have persuasively demonstrated, labor is never abstract, but is always provided by people with particular social identities and histories. Workers are always constituted through historically situated cultural processes as particular kinds of persons whose labor is employed, extracted, valued, and commodified in particular ways. This ethnography demonstrates that, like labor, capital also is never abstract, save in economic theory. Like workers, capitalists are always constituted as particular kinds of persons through historically specific cultural processes. As a consequence, capital is accumulated, invested, dispersed, and reproduced through historically specific cultural processes.

Among the refinements in cultural theory that the turn away from structuralism has enabled is a recognition that people’s sentiments, identities, and social agency are not dictated by culture but are formed through everyday practices that are themselves culturally produced. It follows from this that bourgeois selves and orientations are constituted through these everyday practices, including what are conventionally construed as “business” practices.³ For the most part, these “business” practices have been treated by social scientists as forms of “economic action”; in other words, as utilitarian actions aimed at singularly material ends. But this assumes that people organize their thoughts and actions according to the analytic abstractions (institutions and domains) of social theorists.

Building on Weber, whose theory of economic action I discuss at length later in this chapter, Parsons’s (1955) division of modern society into the logico-meaningful and functional domains of economy, family, religion, education, and politics has led to an institutionally based theory of social action in which analytic abstractions (institutions, domains) have been mistaken for the actual processes through which people formulate action. The Parsonian model of institutional domains too readily grants cultural significance to the observer’s analytic categories without adequate ethnographic evidence as to how people actually organize their thoughts and actions. While this institutional model can be a useful analytic device, it also has profound limitations, because people do not necessarily organize their everyday actions according to institutional domains. Instead, people think and act in ways that crosscut institutional boundaries.

All social action is constituted by a multiplicity of discourses and meanings. Consequently, cataloging and explicating these discourses and meanings will not, by itself, enable us to understand their articulation in the formation of social action. Such an understanding requires knowledge of the ways in which people in specific circumstances connect these discourses and negotiate their complex meanings. Rather than succumb to the temptations of a utilitarian-reductionist logic, I ask instead how capitalist strategies and actions are negotiated and forged by the members of entrepreneurial families who have heterogeneous desires, sentiments, and goals; how these change over time; and how they produce capitalist firms that are complex relations of love and profit, accumulation and distribution, communal solidarity and individual achievement.

This study draws on a second refinement in cultural theory that has been strengthened by the poststructuralist turn: the concept of culture as a process rather than a stable structure or system. If we think of culture in these terms, it makes little sense to speak of culture as something outside of “capitalism” or of capitalism as something outside of culture. A nondichotomous processual model of culture and capitalism treats capitalist action as culturally produced and, therefore, always infused with cultural meaning and value. It enables us to transcend the limitations of a passive concept of culture as either a resource to be used in the advancement of capitalist goals or a constraining system that must be broken through if capitalist logic is to be actualized. Treating capitalism as a culturally enabled process through which people continually rethink and reformulate goals, meanings, and practices allows us to better comprehend the creative, unfolding dynamic of capitalist action.

In proposing a model of culture and capitalism as mutually constituted processes rather than as distinct structures or institutions, I argue against Harvey’s conception of capital as a logic that lies outside culture. According to Harvey, “because capitalism is expansionary and imperialistic, cultural life in more and more areas gets brought within the grasp of the cash nexus and the logic of capital circulation” (1989, 344). For Harvey, capital is process and cultural life is that which has been pervaded by the logic of capital. Yet the logic of capital lies outside the embrace of culture. As an alternative to Harvey’s concept of the logic of capital, I argue that all capitalist practices are the product of historically situated cultural processes. The historical phenomenon that Harvey identifies as capitalism has certainly been expansionary and imperialistic, but it does not follow that it has been structured by a single “capitalist logic” or even that it is a single historical process.

I view capitalism as a complex and uneven historical process that entails heterogeneous capitalist practices shaped by diverse meanings, sentiments, and representations. I argue for a model of culture and capitalism that posits neither the existence of a single homogeneous capitalist mode of production nor culturally specific capitalist modes of production that are enacted by culturally distinct groups located in different national or regional spaces. I am not interested in salvaging the concept of culture as a distinctive system of symbols and meanings in the hope of discovering the distinctive characteristics of “Asian capitalism” and “European capitalism” or “Italian capitalism” and “Japanese capitalism.” Instead, I leave open the possibility of the coexistence in any geopolitical space—whether local or translocal, national or global—of heterogeneous capitalist practices, all of which are culturally mediated. In other words, the model I propose is not one of distinctive “cultures of capitalism” or “capitalist cultures” but one in which diverse capitalist practices coexist in the same geopolitical spaces and flow across their boundaries. The forms that these diverse capitalist practices take and their articulation with each other must be empirically investigated rather than assumed.

Beyond Capitalist Interest: Sentiments as Forces of Production

A key issue in the study of capitalism has been how and under what historical conditions the working class comes to realize its collective class interests. Indeed, a century and a half of Marxist theory and historiography has been devoted to the question of the relation between proletarian class interests, subjective consciousness, and collective political action. The class interests of the bourgeoisie have received considerably less attention. It has been more or less assumed that we know where bourgeois interests lie—namely, in accumulating capital, maintaining control of the means of production, and establishing and reproducing bourgeois political hegemony. While the proletariat must struggle to break through the mystifications of capitalist hegemony to realize their collective interests, the bourgeoisie apparently do not. Their class interests are transparent enough to be obvious to anyone, even themselves. While the French bourgeoisie may have engaged in self-deception “to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their enthusiasm on a high plane” (Marx [1852] 1963; 17), they appear to have been well aware of their political interest in the French state.

The problem does not lie in the Marxist theory of the inherent structural conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but in the slippage between a theory of class interests and a theory of capitalist subjectivity and motivation. An abstract model of collective class interests may be useful in understanding why and how the bourgeoisie or any of i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Producing Culture and Capital
• Chapter Two The Generation of Firms
• Chapter Three Patriarchal Desire
• Chapter Four Betrayal As a Force of Production
• Chapter Five Capital and Gendered Sentiments
• Chapter Six Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index