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About MARIAL MARIAL in the News The Growing Allure of Entrepreneurship in Barbados Knowledge@Emory Knowledge@Emory : Can you briefly discuss the basis for your study? Freeman: I’ve completed over a hundred hours of interviews with Caribbean entrepreneurs, and I’ve looked at how they are juggling their personal and work lives. Many of these individuals left esteemed jobs in companies or in the public sector to opt for more risky self-employment. My sample included about 75 entrepreneurs (35 men, 40 women) and for the purposes of comparison, a smaller sample (10) of salaried professional women in the public and private sectors. I was surprised to discover that even though only 23% of the adult population of Barbados is married, in my sample, a majority of the entrepreneurs (60%) were married. Specifically, I wanted to look at how the Barbadian entrepreneurs are dealing with life demands, especially those juggling families and new businesses, and what initially influenced their decision to become an entrepreneur. Knowledge@Emory : Can you explain the benefits of anthropology and an interdisciplinary approach to research, such as yours? What can the business community (academia and corporate leaders) take away from a study such as this? Freeman: Anthropology can offer an understanding of the local permutations of globalization. It can contribute a vital comparative lens, as well as a deeper understanding of cultural specificity and difference. Anthropologists help to explain why culture and history matter in our attempts to understand and work within today’s global economy—why enacting the same business model or the same development initiative in different countries or regions often gives rise to radically different results. By combining different research methods—ethnography and survey data, micro and macro analyses, and working across disciplinary traditions, a project such as this offers powerful knowledge that is relevant to both local (Barbadian) and comparative contexts (e.g. other small economies, other former British colonies, like India, etc.) Understanding how women and men in other world areas are managing the juggling act of family and career, and understanding the deeper cultural underpinnings of these structural arrangements can prove useful to policy makers and scholars alike as we try to make sense of the contemporary American context. Knowledge@Emory : You say that the legacy of colonialism fostered a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality among the Barbadian people, along with a strong emphasis on the civil service bureaucracy, put in place by the British. Can you explain why that perception is now changing? Freeman: Today, business is becoming a significant realm of economic growth and prosperity for a new and aspiring portion of the Barbadian middle class. In the past, entrepreneurship was seen as a form of economic survival, especially for the lower classes—a way to get by in the face of few economic options. But business carried with it a pejorative association—on one hand being an option for those who didn’t perform well at school, and on the other hand, as the tight-knit world of a nepotistic white elite. The traditional channels for upward mobility were associated with the civil service and through higher education. With independence from colonialism, free education, and a well-organized state structure, the traditional paths of upward mobility have been either the professions or the civil service. Caribbean political leaders were typically foreign-educated intellectuals as well as politicians. In the past few decades, that has really changed in ways that are intimately related to the neoliberal global economy. Ask the Barbadians whom they see as a role model, and they will mention Bill Gates now vs. a former Oxbridge educated prime minister who they may have selected in the past. Knowledge@Emory : So, just what other changes can be felt in the country? Freeman: In Barbados, about 95% of the population is black and the political structure is predominantly black. However, the dominant corporate structure has been white. But things are changing and young black entrepreneurs are saying so. Their parents may be upset by their kids leaving good jobs in private companies or the civil service for entrepreneurial work, but the outcome is that a new generation is creating niche services. They are tapping into needs in the tourism arena. They are relying on new technology and tapping into markets that expand beyond Barbados. Interestingly, white women who found few opportunities in the civil service traditionally are also finding entrepreneurship to be critically important in getting ahead. I found that while a great deal of attention has been paid to the question of race and the challenges to entrepreneurial success in the Caribbean, less has been written about the gendered dimensions of these efforts. Women are still confronting hurdles at banks in getting loans and the support they need for their businesses, in ways that I think are less difficult for men. Knowledge@Emory : What is the status of working women in Barbados today? Can you shed light on the nature of work-life balance there? Freeman: It is important to realize that more than 40% of all households in Barbados are headed by women, so single motherhood is not stigmatized as it may be here in the U.S. In fact, from what I have learned studying both lower and middle class women in Barbados, it sometimes seems that the unmarried mother receives more extended family support than the married woman in a nuclear household. There is, on one hand, an idealization of marriage, and yet the demands for married women juggling family and entrepreneurship are great. There is the dual demand of income earning and household/family duties. As well, with more working women, there is less of an availability of extended family members taking care of the children of relatives. The traditional extended family network has historically been a vital institution across the Caribbean region. However, changing patterns of work and also increased suburbanization—moving away from the traditional village pattern of residence—have complicated this, as family members are not as physically available as they use to be. Knowledge@Emory : What are some of the initial conclusions of your research? Freeman: First, that entrepreneurship is posing a new set of opportunities, a new trajectory for upward mobility, and encouraging the development of a new fraction of the middle class in Barbados. And for many of these businesspeople, marriage is an important part of that picture. For these couples, marriage is viewed as more of a partnership than a patriarchal, hierarchical institution. Entrepreneurship also appears to be influencing the form the marriage is taking. Some of the entrepreneurs I studied describe their spouse as someone that they couldn’t do without in business. Of course, tensions emerge along the traditional divisions of household labor—grocery shopping, taking care of young children, and things of that nature. Generally, these sorts of activities fall on the shoulders of mothers, regardless of how busy they are in their own businesses. Knowledge@Emory : So, how are women entrepreneurs dealing with the pressures of home and work? Freeman: Interestingly, in Barbados, the marriages that survive even in the face of the major family pressures created by busy dual entrepreneurship seem to be facilitated by the increasing reliance on paid domestic labor that picks up the slack. This may be an interesting point of comparison between developing countries like Barbados and the U.S. Many have noted the fact that across the developing world, the professional success of middle class women is typically predicated upon the hidden labor of lower class women who keep their domestic spheres running smoothly. In the Barbadian context, what I am seeing is that not only are domestic workers critical to the success of new entrepreneurial ventures, they are also a critical ingredient in the “partnership” marriages of these entrepreneurs. Knowledge@Emory : When you mention neoliberalism in the Caribbean, you mean the political and economic philosophy that rejects government intervention. How does this play into globalization? Freeman: Neoliberalism is typically associated with the primacy of the market, the emphasis on flexible labor (the ability to hire and fire at will), the winnowing of the trade union movement, retrenchment of the public sector, and the free movement of capital. In a developing country like Barbados, neoliberalism and the expansion of the global economy have led the government to pursue participation in a new regional trading bloc (the Caribbean Single Market Economy), paring down what has historically been a robust civil service, and simultaneously encouraging entrepreneurship. Knowledge@Emory : So, with global influences and historical traditions blending, entrepreneurship is now viewed as a positive and acceptable career path. Can you elaborate? Freeman: In Barbados, the need to “cut and contrive” or be economically creative, resourceful, and often to engage in multiple occupations at the same time has been an economic strategy of men and women across the class spectrum. In some ways, the current emphasis on neoliberalism is tapping into longstanding cultural traditions and giving them some new meanings. Many advocating the expansion of a neoliberal economic approach have assumed that this “flexibility” and the emphasis on the global marketplace preclude cultural specificity. “Flexibility” in economic practices is not merely a new emphasis being imposed by the foreign agents of neoliberalism, but it is a highly valued and deeply entrenched dimension of Caribbean culture that grew out of conditions of plantation slavery. Knowledge@Emory : What was the genesis of this research? Freeman: I have been studying globalization and the transformation of work in the Caribbean since the late ‘80s. My first book was about the employment of Barbadian women in what was then the new offshore informatics industry—now a heated issue in the U.S. in relation to India. That project raised a number of questions about the relationship between people’s work and their class identities. In that case, repetitive low-level jobs became transformative in women’s lives in part because of the office-like setting—the “white collar” feel of the workplace and the possibility to imagine themselves as something other than “factory” workers. That research forced me to think critically about class and class practice—to look at what middle-class truly meant in Barbados. Since joining the MARIAL center, I have been inspired to return to the field and examine more closely the particular challenges faced by entrepreneurial couples and families, with an eye toward comparing some of the trends we see in the U.S. with those unfolding in Barbados. Knowledge@Emory : Considering your recent findings, what do you see as the next step in this research? Freeman: I am continuing to think critically about middle class identity and what that entails in light of the form of work that people do, the modes of consumption they engage in, the institutions with which they are affiliated, and the relationships they develop along the way. I’ve studied economic development and been struck by the fact that when people do make strides and become upwardly mobile, sometimes they seem to become less interesting to social scientists, even though the acknowledgement has long been made that without the expansion of a local middle class, economic development is impossible. I am interested in the fact, for instance, that much of the heated debate about “outsourcing” hinges on a struggle between the middle classes—the expanding middle class in India, for instance, and what is seen as a simultaneous threat posed by job losses within the American middle class. < More MARIAL in the News |