Morality at Work: Understanding economic motivations in small-sized businesses

The central aim of this project is to understand the entanglement of historically formed moral concepts, values, and entrepreneurial motivations in small-sized (family) enterprises. Working with the common framework of the REALEURASIA project, Szücs critically engages with Max Weber’s concept of the economic ethic and the anthropological literature on moral economy. Building on this theoretical background, the project offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of how post-socialist entrepreneurial practices are shaped and produced and how they change over time in a semi-peripheral urban context. 

The project is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Szeged. Szeged is the third-largest city in Hungary with a population of about 160,000. Its location in the southern part of the country close to the borders of Serbia and Romania on the banks of the river Tisza have helped make Szeged into an international cultural hub. The majority of residents belong to the Roman Catholic Church, with a significant Protestant – both Calvinist and Lutheran – minority community.
The research has an empirical focus on small-sized businesses, which is particularly relevant to Szeged, where a high number of micro- and small-sized enterprises contribute substantially to the viability of the local economy. The empirical data consist of participant observation in various workplaces, qualitative interviews, and a questionnaire survey with about forty business owners who are active in various sectors. Taking into account the political economy of Hungary, Szücs’s project also aims to understand the country’s neoliberal transformation from the perspective of small-business owners and looks at the economic and social processes in which petty capitalists emerged after the regime change in 1990. The focus on the daily practices and experiences of both employers and employees of small-sized businesses provides a fresh analytical angle on labour and class relations and ultimately on how capitalist order is maintained and reproduced in the post financial crisis era.

 

Cooperating Partner:

University of Szeged (Dr. Bertalan Pusztai PhD)