IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/eurchp/978-3-319-39919-5_42.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Specific Features of Family Businesses: A Contribution to Literature

In: Financial Environment and Business Development

Author

Listed:
  • Elena Cristiano

    (University of Calabria)

Abstract

The family business represents a subset of the whole range of enterprises, and, therefore, it has all the essential requisites of them. However, it is characterized by the strong relationship with one or more families which, by providing the risk capital, constitute it. Consequently, its functionality strictly depends on the evolution through which these family units go and on the decisions that they make inside of them. Italian and international scholars had devoted particular attention to small- and medium-sized businesses, often considered as transitional phases for a dimensional development of the enterprise. The empirical evidence has actually disproved these assumptions, leading to the conclusion that even small- and medium-sized businesses can achieve high levels of success without necessarily increasing their dimensions. Starting from the eighties of the last century, business studies have considerably developed in this respect. The family business has now assumed an important role in the national and international scene, thus attracting an increasing interest in the theoretical and empirical research. The wide and rich literature on family businesses has highlighted a variety of topics, such as the understanding of the success and development factors of family businesses, the peculiarities of their management models, their corporate governance, their valuation, and, generally, the specificity of small- and medium-sized businesses. Today, a definition of a family business, which is unanimously accepted by the scholars of the field, is nonexistent. Therefore, this work aims at identifying those aspects, which are typical of a family business. Moreover, the abovesaid paper highlights too some other aspects, useful to identify family businesses from nonfamily ones. Finally, the paper wishes to examine how the identified variables (such as the ownership, dimensions, succession, and involvement of family members) affect the family business performance.

Suggested Citation

  • Elena Cristiano, 2017. "Specific Features of Family Businesses: A Contribution to Literature," Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics, in: Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin & Hakan Danis & Ender Demir & Ugur Can (ed.), Financial Environment and Business Development, pages 577-600, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:eurchp:978-3-319-39919-5_42
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39919-5_42
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:eurchp:978-3-319-39919-5_42. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.