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Family businesses (FBs) are said to treat their employees with unusual consideration to form a cohesive internal “community”. They are also claimed to develop deeper, more extensive “connections” or relationships with outside stakeholders. Both behaviors may increase the viability of a business intended to support an owning family and its later generations. Such social linkages, we believe, may compensate for the lack of capital, product and labor institutional infrastructures in dynamic emerging economies. This survey study of a most challenging emerging-market sector, namely Korean high-technology businesses, argues three major points. (1) Relationships of community and connection will be more common in FBs than in non-FBs. (2) These relationships will enhance performance in emerging-market high-technology sectors, which, because of their competitive, complex, and ever-changing nature, rely on significant expert knowledge and social capital within and outside the organizational community. (3) The performance of FBs will benefit more from these community and connection relationships than the performance of non-FBs, because in these personally intimate settings employees and external partners will be especially likely to return the generosity of a visibly active owning family, or to penalize its selfishness. Significant empirical support was found for most of these hypotheses. Journal of International Business Studies (2009) 40, 802–817. doi:10.1057/jibs.2009.11
Article
The common perception of family-controlled businesses (FCBs) is that they are subject to stagnation, clannishness, cronyism and rash leadership. Yet many FCBs are highly successful. This paper is based on a study of 46 successful and 24 struggling FCBs to determine how they differed in their strategic, organisational and leadership priorities. It identifies four main priorities which it calls “the 4 Cs”: continuity, community, connections and command. Each of these priorities contains advantages, but they also have their downsides. While the successful FCBs effectively exploited the Cs, the unsuccessful companies manifested these priorities and practices less frequently, and fell victim to their negative aspects. Citing examples of FCBs, this paper offers an analysis of each of the 4C priorities and the lessons that can be applied to FCBs and non-family companies.
Article
Two major perspectives can be construed in the literature concerning the nature of family owned businesses (FOBs). The first implies that these enterprises have unique characteristics of stewardship. FOB owners are said to care deeply about the long-term prospects of the business, in large part because their family's fortune, reputation and future are at stake. Their stewardship is said to be manifested by unusual devotion to the "continuity" of the company, by more assiduous nurturing of a "community" of employees, and by seeking out closer "connections" with customers to sustain the business. The second perspective is less flattering. It proposes that FOBs are unusually subject to stagnation: they are said to face unique resource restrictions, embrace conservative strategies, eschew growth, and be doomed to short lives. This paper develops and examines the merits of the two perspectives, neither of which has been systematically articulated or researched. It does so in an empirical study of only small firms that are owned and managed by their founder. Within this sample, it compares firms that are FOBs, that is, family owned and managed, with non-FOBs, that is, owned and managed by a founder with no other relative involved in the business. The findings show significant support for all three aspects of the stewardship perspective of FOBs, and no support for any elements of the stagnation perspective. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.
Managing for the Long Run
  • D Miller
  • I Le Breton-Miller
n Miller, D. and I. Le Breton-Miller. Managing for the Long Run. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005.