Small Is Good

In a neoliberal market economy, small, independent businesses represent an alternative to large corporate enterprises. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city, this book explores the lives and social values of small, independent business owners, most of them shopkeepers. Owners organize their firms according to a morality that deviates from capitalist norms by aspiring to create inalienable commodities within networks of meaningful economic exchange. Their success in doing so is explained through in-depth analysis of contemporary household organization.