From vineyard workers to globalized merchants

Abstract

This paper is a historical ethnography of a medium sized Chilean family firm. The work shows how the enterprise’s family capital control, organized around a lineage, has helped the firm to compete fairly in the corporation oriented globalized Chilean economy. The paper is also about the owner’s family history in the context of Chilean economic development, providing a diachronic ethnography that shows the relations between economic development, the firm and the family.