Description: 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.
Brief description: Andrea Colli is Professor of Economic and Social History in the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. He is a member of the Editorial Review Board of Family Business Review. He is the author of Business History: Complexities and Comparisons (with Franco Amatori, 2011).
Review Quotes: "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