Familia y empresas un análisis desde la antropología social

Abstract

The work highlights the topics, tools-methods, and categories of analysis that social anthropology, specifically Latin American, contributes to the study of the firm and entrepreneurs. Some topics are the incidence of the family in the construction and survival of companies, the world system in the constitution of periphery firms, the cultural analysis of elites, and the relevance of knowledge and technology. Regarding the tool methods, perhaps the most important is the ethnographic one, which involves the dense description, as Geertz (1987) points out, of the culture of companies and entrepreneurs and the analysis from an emic perspective. The contributions of company anthropology to the advancement of the discipline are also highlighted. The method used was a review of the literature on firms and entrepreneur’s anthropology, especially those works of and about Latin America. The main authors referred to in work are those who have made reviews on the anthropology of the company, starting with the classic work of Holzberg and Giovannini (1981) and those of Latin America, such as those of Perez-Lizaur (2010), Basaldua (2005) and Urban y Koh (2013). The main contribution of the work is to show how anthropological studies have contributed to explaining the socio-cultural particularities of Latin American companies Keywords:  anthropology, business enterprises, family, Latin America.