ABSTRACT
Neoliberal theory assumes that the owners of family businesses are entrepreneurs who, because of the extent of their involvement in new venture creation, should have benefited most from neoliberal policy. Chapter 8 sets out what has happened to family businesses over the 40 years and discuss their fortunes in relation to the thinking and policies of international organisations such as the ILO and the World Bank. Defining family-based enterprises as those employing family labour (rather than by ownership alone, since all artisan firms would be family firms under the ownership definition), the evidence shows that there is no correspondence between family-based enterprises and home-based enterprises, that the concepts that are applied by the international organisations are more confusing than helpful, and that the variations in the fortunes of home-based and family-based working were not as expected. Instead of the emergence of artisans out of their homes into independent and expanding workshops and factories, artisans were more likely to locate their workshops inside the home during the neoliberal phases, precisely because times were hard. It was only in the initial years of the oil bonanza and the period when globalisation and neoliberalism were rejected that home-based working declined.
