This book offers a ‘contemporary’ understanding of families in business and serves as a springboard for ongoing evolution of families, their composition, transformations, and activities.
The first chapter in this volume highlights the different approaches to family and concludes that identifying and understanding the entity ‘family in business’ is the cornerstone to understanding behaviours of family businesses. The concept of ‘family in business’ as a socially constructed entity allows for not only a broader scope of the concept to include individuals who share a faith (chapter 2), but also multi- generational families and chosen families. Narratives, or stories, are means for families in business to mark the boundary of the family in business (chapter 3), because not all members of the family are necessarily members of the family in business. Families and their businesses influence each other (chapter 4) and engender the family influence on the firm (‘familiness’) and firm influence of the family (‘enterpriseness’). The last two chapters are dedicated to transgenerational family businesses, with a focus on learning between generations—chapter 5 highlights the importance of unlearning (to learn new knowledge and different ways of conducting business) and the final chapter focuses on what knowledge is actually transferred relative to initial plans.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of
Entrepreneurship & Regional Development.