Small proprietors are often told they are free because they are in charge. My work asks what happens when being in charge also means absorbing risk from everyone above you and translating it downward to everyone below.

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Small business ownership occupies a powerful place in American life. The small proprietor is often treated as the moral opposite of the wage worker: independent, self-directed, resilient, and responsible for their own fate. To own a shop, kiosk, restaurant, cleaning business, franchise, salon, studio, or family firm is often to be seen as someone who has escaped subordination.

My research begins from a more complicated premise: small proprietors are often both powerful and vulnerable. They may supervise workers, set schedules, discipline employees, negotiate with customers, and make decisions that shape other people’s livelihoods. At the same time, they may remain deeply dependent on landlords, franchisors, lenders, suppliers, platforms, family members, customer reviews, foot traffic, and larger economic conditions they cannot control.

I am interested in the social, emotional, and organizational life of this middle position.

Current Research Interests

My current work examines small proprietorship as a form of constrained autonomy: formal independence without full control over the conditions of survival.

I am especially interested in how small proprietors navigate:

• The tension between being “the boss” and being structurally dependent on more powerful actors;
• Family labor, succession, obligation, and guilt;
• Emotional labor, care, and boundary-setting;
• Perfectionism, overfunctioning, and the desire to “do it right”;
• Immigration, education, cultural capital, and class mobility;
• Relationships with employees, relatives, customers, landlords, malls, franchisors, and platforms;
• The ways risk moves downward through leases, contracts, debt, scheduling, unpaid labor, and self-exploitation.

At the center of the project is a question: What happens when people are asked to act like independent economic actors while remaining dependent on systems they did not design and cannot fully control?

Why Small Proprietors?

Small proprietors are often discussed in sentimental or ideological terms. They are celebrated as entrepreneurs, blamed as employers, pitied as strivers, or invoked as symbols in political arguments about work, regulation, immigration, and capitalism.

But their actual lives are more layered.

A small proprietor may be the person cutting hours, denying a raise, asking a child to help after school, or expecting a worker to stay late. But that same proprietor may also be carrying debt, working seven days a week, navigating a punishing lease, absorbing a supplier increase, worrying about payroll, or trying to preserve a business that has become inseparable from family identity.

I want to understand this position without romanticizing it. Small proprietors can exploit others, and some do. They can also be exploited, constrained, isolated, overburdened, and trapped by the very independence they were told would free them.

For Academics and Researchers

This project sits at the intersection of organization theory, economic sociology, work and occupations, leadership communication, emotional labor, family business, entrepreneurship, and business ethics.

The broader research agenda asks how owner-operated firms function when formal systems are thin and relationships are dense. In small firms, the owner’s habits often become part of the organization’s governance structure. Care, resentment, correction, availability, family obligation, and personal standards may substitute for formal HR systems, managerial hierarchy, or professionalized operations.

I am especially interested in developing the concept of affective governance in owner-operated firms: the ways emotion, attachment, obligation, shame, pride, and care organize decision-making, delegation, discipline, succession, and exit.

This work also connects to questions of risk transfer and responsibility. When landlords, franchisors, platforms, malls, lenders, suppliers, or lead firms control key business conditions while disclaiming responsibility for the consequences, small proprietors can become conduits through which insecurity travels downward to workers, relatives, and themselves.

For Small Proprietors

I am also interested in hearing from people who have lived this.

You may be a small business owner, franchisee, family-business successor, independent contractor, self-employed artist, shopkeeper, salon owner, cleaner, restaurateur, contractor, retailer, kiosk operator, or former proprietor. You may have built something successful, closed something painful, inherited a business, left a business, or found yourself in a role you never fully chose.

I am especially interested in stories about:

• What it felt like to have “your own place”;
• Moments when independence felt real, and moments when it felt like a trap;
• Conflicts with landlords, franchisors, suppliers, customers, employees, or family;
• The difficulty of setting boundaries;
• The pressure to be constantly available;
• What you learned too late;
• What outsiders misunderstand about small business ownership;
• What you wish researchers, policymakers, or the public understood.