The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategies of managerial control which are used by the proprietors of family-owned business enterprises. Interviews with the proprietors and senior managers of businesses in the building industry illustrate the 'quasi-organic' nature of management structures. These grant some autonomy to senior managers without threatening proprietorial decision-making prerogatives. Although the family firm has certain distinctive features, similar control strategies designed to ensure that delegated decisions are 'reliable' and 'responsible' are evident in various types of business enterprise. There is, then, scope for further comparative research within a conceptual framework which does not entirely divorce the family firm from other business organizations. INTRODUCTIOX

For managers in large-scale organizations, careers have traditionally provided a set of organizing principles around which they have been able to structure both their private and professional lives. Through them, they have been able to experience a sense of security, stability, and order. Personal feelings of growth and advancement have been achieved through jobs which provide not only the opportunities for the completion of specific tasks but also a mean whereby longer-term personal goals can be achieved. Indeed, the combined promise of job security and advancement within corporate hierarchies-as linked with incremetal increases in authority, status, and pay-have constituted the major rewards of the modern managerial career. It has been largely through these mechanisms that large-scale organizations have been able to obtain the motivation and commitment of their managerial staff. During the 1980s, however, a variety of technological, organizational, and broader social changes have led many observers to suggest that the nature of corporate careers has fundamentally changed. In this paper we explore the attitudes of managers toward their careers in the context of restructuring processes which limit opportunities for hierarchical advancement and which also reduce job security. In particular, we discuss the ways in which those whose career expectations have been frustrated develop coping strategies. These can have important implications for their attitudes and behavior both within and beyond their employing organizations.

Over recent years some sociological attention has been devoted to the position of women in the labour market and in the domestic sphere. However, the study of women as business proprietors has been almost entirely neglected. ^ This is a serious omission beca\ise the ownership of small businesses could become an increasingly important area for female economic achievement within 'no-growth' industrial economies. 2 Further, as trends in the United States would suggest, female proprietorship may have important implications for developments within the women's movement. 3 On the basis of interviews with a small number of women business owners, we explore the personal motives for and consequences of proprietorship. We suggest that although women may be compared to many other subordinate groups in their expectations of the gains to be derived from proprietorship they encounter, as women, quite distinct experiences and difficulties. Business ownership, then, does not offer a straightforward solution to women's subordination. Further, claims that female proprietorship merely incorporates a minority of women to the disregard of the majority appears, on the basis of our evidence, to be misleading. Female proprietorship and the women's movementThe women's movement may be regarded as a collective response to gender-related experiences of subordination and deprivation. The movement has a loi^ history and it incorporates a diversity of ideological themes, ranging from liberal/reformist to revolutionary objectives. * Universal suffrage was the first achievement of female collective action in many countries. But this has now often been reinforced by shifts towards greater formal or Uigal equality in such areas as education, employment, property rights and husband-wife relationships. ^ We emphasise the formal and kgal nature of these changes since substantieUly, severe gender-based inequalities persist in .50Robert Goffee and Richard Scase eadi of these s{^eres.« Because of this, many groups widiin the women's movement have emphasised the indfectiveness of legal reform and stressed the need for a fundamental restructuring of societal institutions as a means of eliminating gender-based inequalities and the subordination of women. Hence, the need for collective action; indeed, female solidarity represents a fundamental principle of the women's movement. As Mitchell, for example, has stated, it is women as a group that are oppressed ... all Women's Liberation politics act on the basis of developing collective work-This ... countermands both the hierarchic nature of the oppressive society and the isolation and/or subservience that women are forced into within the home and in their personal relationshipsWorking together with other women in a united struggle overcomes this isolation and competitiveness The basic unit of organisation ... is the small group ... [which] is the means of bringing women into close personal solicbrity and friendship with each other ... women's problems are not private and personal, so, neither is their solution...

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