Women entrepreneurs and family networks in Andalusia (Spain) during the second industrial revolution

Abstract

This article studies the relationship between gender and entrepreneurship in Andalusia, a region in the south of Spain, between 1886 and 1959. The aim of the text is to answer the question: Were women active in entrepreneurship, or merely pieces in the economic strategies of the males who governed their families? To do this, a database built from the commercial registers containing more than 8,000 companies is used. The results obtained, by way of a combination of quantitative and qualitative research, as well as the application of the Social Network Analysis, indicate that the women who participated in the forming of multi-owner firms were subject to the decisions of their male partners, and hardly had any opportunities to develop an active business role. Female subordination is explained by the sociocultural characteristics of the institutional framework as well as the late economic development of the region.

Keywords:

• Female firm owners
• entrepreneurship
• business family
• Social Network Analysis
• Spain

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the comments they have received from the editor and reviewers of Business History, which have substantially improved the text, as well as from our colleague B. J. Von Briesen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A theoretical reflection on entrepreneurship in Cuervo et al. (2007).

2 Other authors, such as Shane (2003) defend the necessity to combine features from both tendencies to be able to explain in a convincing way the phenomenon of entrepreneurship.

3 See De Bruin et al. (2007).

4 Blondel and Niforos refer to women as ‘invisible pillars’ of the endurance of the family business. On the invisibility of women in the succession process in the family business, see Dumas (1989).

5 The ‘invisibility’ of women in family businesses, or, one could say, their presence in the shadows of the males in the family, makes it difficult to find sources that permit an analysis of the subject (Cesaroni & Sentuti, 2014).

6 Granovetter (1992) disputes the opinion of those who believe that business groups based on personal relationships disappear as markets become more complex.

7 It is normally assumed that the second industrial revolution took place between 1870 and 1914 approximately. For Andalusia, as for other Spanish and European regions, Parejo Barranco (2009) considers it more correct to use the period 1880–1960.

8 A prior bibliographical revision and a compilation of texts on the subject, for different latitudes, in Yeager (1999).

9 Studies on businesswomen in some Spanish Cities in (Nielfa, 1986), Romero Marín (2006), Pareja Alonso (2012) or Solà Parera (2019).

10 Between 1910 and 1940 the percentage varied between 12–13%.

11 The research into the role of women in Spanish labour markets has only taken place for two decades, see Sarasúa (1997) y Sarasúa and Gálvez-Muñoz (2003). There are also some studies of interest on the working conditions of women in large businesses (Borderías, 1985; Gálvez-Muñoz, 2000).

12 Besides the greater or lesser presence of women in the different phases of the educational system, the type of training they received must be taken into account. In university studies, women were concentrated in the subjects that were considered to be appropriate for women, especially those connected with care, namely education or nursing. In primary education, the legislation in force from the middle of the nineteenth century established education that was differentiated for girls, preparing them for domestic roles (Sarasúa, 2002).

13 An interesting study by Fernández Pérez (1997) on commercial networks relates the laws of Castilian inheritance, women and businesses in the Eighteenth Century. British law, for example, gave fed widows (Nazzari 1995). In France, after the enact of the Napoleonic Code (1804), inheritance laws were more egalitarian; however, if the husband died without testament, the widow could receive nothing (Khan, 2016).

14 The relationship between the Francoist regime and women, in Sarasúa and Molinero Ruiz (2009).

15 Cultural elements as an explanation for the gender-based division of work in Spain.

16 In 2021 Andalusia was one of the regions with the lowest GDP per capita in Spain, around 66% of the European Union average.

17 On the characteristics of the source, see Martín Rodríguez et al. (2003).

18 In Spain there is a source with characteristics similar to those of Business Registers, even richer from a qualitative point of view. These are the notarial protocols, which include the company creation agreements signed before a notary public, prior to their registration in the registries. The problem it presents is that its compilation is very complicated, so it is not valid for quantitative analysis such as the one offered in this text. However, for smaller geographical environments, Notarial Records has served as the basis for the elaboration of important investigations referring to the Seventeenth-Nineteenth centuries, for example those of Casey (2007) or Fernández Pérez (1997).

19 See, for example, Garrués-Irurzun et al. (2002).

20 Does not include all the firms: excluded many businesses dedicated to agriculture, which tended to be one individual running a business, and some large companies both Spanish and foreign, which were registered in cities like Madrid, Barcelona or Bilbao, despite basing their activity in Andalusia.

21 On the development of the SNA and its application in social sciences, see Freeman (2004) and Kadushin (2012).

22 The article that is usually considered pioneering as an application of the SNA to History is the one by Padgett and Ansell (1993) on the relations of the Medici family in medieval Italy. Today the importance of ARS in the field of History is growing, as evidenced by the existence of research groups like Historical Network Research (https://historicalnetworkresearch.org/), Réseaux et Historie (https://reshist.hypotheses.org/) o The Connected Past (https://connectedpast.net/) that have specific publications and hold workshops and regular meetings.

23 On interlocking directorates in economic history, see David and Westerhuis (2014).

24 Casson has also called for more attention to network configuration, which leads directly to SNA (Casson & Giusta, 2007).

25 The network of entrepreneurs is reconstructed through the presence of the same person in the constitution of a minimum of two companies. It is an exercise that requires more work, because it is necessary to extract and homogenize the names of all the founding partners of companies, while in the case of interlocking directorate studies, they usually work only with a selection of the largest companies in a nation, which means considering a much smaller number of actors.

26 In a study carried out from a sample from the same source, Hernández Nicolás and Martínez-Rodríguez (2019) conclude that this is the most common case among widows who appear in the constitution of mercantile companies; much rarer would be those women who participated actively in the decision-making of the company.

27 Other works permit the calculation of the importance of women in business sectors and certain cities, see Solà I Parera et al. (2016).

28 Sarasúa and Molinero (2009) compared the Francoist legislation in relation to women with that of fascist Italy, less flexible than that of nazi Germany or Vichy France, who were in need of labour.

29 One of the main banking houses which operated in the region in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Bank Rodriguez Acosta, originated in the business affairs of a female entrepreneur, Teresa de Acosta, begun in 1831.

30 To identify the relationship between the women and the remaining partners of the more than 1,400 companies that feature at least one woman, different sources have been consulted. Among them, besides the inscriptions in Registers, local and sectorial history books, bibliography, and genealogical webs have been utilised, as well as obituaries and news in the press.

31 Degree $C_D)$: is the number of actors in the network with whom an individual has a direct relationship. Here it is presented as a normalised degree (nDegree), that is to say, as a percentage of the number of actors with whom the person is directly related, compared to the total number of participants in the network. $$C_D(V_K)=\frac{{\displaystyle \sum _{i=1}^{n}a(V_i,V_K)}}{n-1}$$

In the formula of the nDegree ${(C}_D)$ a is the number of connections and v the actors or vertex.

32 Betweenness $C_B$: is the number of geodesic paths that pass through a node; it measures the capacity of a player to connect with others, to be an intermediary in the flow of information. Like the degree of centrality, it is presented as a percentage (nBetweenness). $$C_B(V_K)={\displaystyle \sum _{b\ne j\ne k}\frac{{\sigma }_{b{K}_{(j)}}}{{\sigma }_{\mathit{\text{bK}}}}}$$ where ${\sigma }_{\begin{array}{c}\mathit{\text{bk}}\\ \end{array}}$is the total number of geodesic paths between the nodes b y k, y ${\sigma }_{\begin{array}{c}\mathit{\text{bk}}\\ \end{array}}(j)$ the number of these that pass through j.

33 In these networks there were 217 men, the women made up 3.5% of the total.

34 One of the networks with the highest presence of women is shown in Appendix 2.

Additional information

Funding

This work has had the support of the ECOTRANHIS Research Project (PGC2018-096640-B-I00) funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Government of Spain).

Notes on contributors

Juan A. Rubio-Mondejar

Juan A. Rubio-Mondejar is Assitant Professor of Economic History at the University of Granada (Spain). His main scientific contribution is the application of the Social Network Analysis methodology to the study of the long-term entrepreneurship and spanish corporate power.Josean Garrués-Irurzun is Professor of Economic History at the University of Granada. Prof. Garrués’ research focuses on the changes in industrial organization that occurred during the 20th century, with a regional and international comparative perspective. He has paid special attention to the electricity sector and social networks in the Spanish business elite.