The Endurance of Family Businesses
The Endurance of Family Businesses
The Endurance of Family Businesses is a collection of essays offering an overview of the importance and resilience of family-controlled large businesses. Much of economic and business history research neglects family businesses, considering them an inefficient form of business organization. These essays discuss the strengths of family businesses: the ways family firms have managed, financed, and governed their corporations, as well as the way in which they structure their relationship with the external environment, from the government to the company's stakeholders. Family businesses have learned new ways of organizing their resources and using their accumulated know-how for new markets and institutional environments. This volume combines the expertise of well-known scholars who specialize in business history, economic history, management, and consulting, to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on family businesses. Contributors provide a global view by taking into account Asian, American, and European experiences.
- Brings together well-known family business experts from around the world in a variety of disciplines, including family business studies, economics, finance, business history, psychology and philosophy
- Analyses the full complexity of the silent transformation of traditional family businesses into global family business players
Reviews & endorsements
"Family business is everywhere but remains an elusive subject for researchers. The essays in this volume provide a refreshingly broad perspective by engaging deeply with the historical, global, cultural, and gender complexities involved in understanding this vibrant form of business ownership."-Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School
"This volume provides a relevant contribution in the field of family business studies. Bringing together the longitudinal approach of traditional business history with the analytical focus of management studies, the book provides an important overview of the most recent research in the study of family firms. The essays assembled here are particularly relevant for those interested in issues such as the evolution of the forms of big business enterprises and, the longevity and endurance of family firms, as well as their management, ownership, and governance models. There are additional insights in the interdisciplinary debate concerning 'varieties of capitalism.’ In short, this book can be labeled an essential instrument that will enhance our knowledge of the modern enterprise and the special role that family businesses play.” -Franco Amatori, Professor of Economic History, Bocconi University (Milan, Italy)
"This book combines the research of business historians and management scholars to help us understand why, despite some critics’ claims to the contrary, family businesses constitute an enduring form of organization. By exploring how family businesses from around the world have evolved in response to changing socioeconomic trends such as globalization, the convergence of gender roles, or the generalization of the availability of educational opportunities, the different chapters build on one another to support the editors’ thesis that we are witnessing a ‘global revolution’ in the way that families manage and govern their businesses." -Belén Villalonga, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, NYU Stern School of Business
“Comprehensive and detailed, this is a definitive scholarly resource for family business historians and field practitioners alike. This book shows how family business worldwide did not go extinct, as predicted in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, its contributions to the twenty-first-century global economy have only grown more important. It makes an excellent scholarly case for what business families and their advisors want and need: institutions that make more and bigger investments in the field of family business studies. A better understanding of family business will not only be good for every country where these economic activities thrive but will be essential for sustaining the global economy.” – John A. Davis, Chairman, Cambridge Institute for Family Enterprise
Product details
September 2013Hardback
9781107037755
308 pages
231 × 155 × 33 mm
0.57kg
10 b/w illus. 10 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: a global revolution: the endurance of large family businesses around the world Paloma Fernandez Perez and Andrea Colli
- Part I. Theoretical Issues and Debates:
- 1. The emergence of family business studies: a historical approach to pioneering centers, scholars, and ideas Paloma Fernandez Perez and Nuria Puig
- 2. Family firm longevity: a balancing act between continuity and change Pramodita Sharma and Carlo Salvato
- 3. Family values or crony capitalism Harold James
- 4. Risk, uncertainty, and family ownership Andrea Colli
- Part II. Exogenus Factors: The Environment:
- 5. Entrepreneurial spirit in the evolution of Swedish family businesses Hans Sjögren
- 6. Cultural forces in large family firm persistence: a model based upon the case project Vipin Gupta
- 7. Family firms and the new multinationals: evidence from Spain Mauro F. Guillén and Esteban Garcia Canal
- 8. Finance and family-ness: a historical overview of assessing the economics of kinship Christopher Kobrak and Pramuan Bunkanwanicha
- Part III. Endogenous Determinants: Inside the Black Box:
- 9. The women of the family business Christine Blondel and Marina Niforos
- 10. The role of values in family-owned firms Remei Agulles, Lucia Ceja and Josep Tàpies
- 11. Managing professionalization in family business: transforming strategies for managerial succession and recruitment in family firms in the twentieth century Susanna Fellman.
