The value of values: Sufficiency among single-person businesses in the United States

Abstract

According to the cultural consensus model of business ownership in the United States, business entities seek to grow both in organization size and in revenues. To borrow the framing used by Patrick Bigger and Morgan Robertson (2017), business firms create value for their owners and/or shareholders through growth and maximization of profit, but the underlying societal value of business growth is the foundational semiotic value of the orderly conduct of US society, which, it could be argued, flows from the moralized, economic value (Braverman, [1974] 1998) of human material well-being. In this article, I examine nonemployer (single-person) businesses in the context of the economic values of capitalism and the fundamental societal values underlying the capitalist values. In doing so, I ask: What is the noneconomic value contributed to the United States by its 27 million nonemployer business firms? What value does the operation of a nonemployer business firm offer to its owner? My research suggests that nonemployer business firms, through practices of sufficiency, create both economic and social value for their owners. Their foundational societal semiotic value is self-produced, material self-sufficiency, which flows from the almost-mythically American values of independence, freedom, and humility.