This book focuses on family business in historical and comparative perspective. Its main aim is to examine through time the evolution of family businesses against varying political and institutional contexts, and to evaluate the performance of family firms in comparison with other forms of business organisations. The ultimate aim is to highlight the contribution of family firms to the evolution of contemporary industrial capitalism. Today, the concept of family business has partially lost its association with the negative notions of backwardness, paternalism, primitive technology, simple organisational structures, and commercial and distributional weakness. Despite the competitive advantages accruing to capital-intensive industries from technology, scale and scope economies, horizontal and vertical integration, and the enlistment of professional managers, since the early 1970s the evolution of knowledge-based industries has emphasised the role of small and medium-sized family businesses. Even if globalisation substantially reaffirmed the key role of the large corporation (Chandler and Hikino 1997: 50ff.; Chandler 1997: 83ff.), the family enterprise has persisted – dynamic, specialised, innovative, flexible, and adaptive to a rapidly changing environment, firmly rooted in regional, often local, entrepreneurial communities, and present in world-wide markets.

This renewal of interest in the virtues of family firms has been accompanied by a growing volume of theoretical and empirical research; the relevance of such firms to the wealth of the nation is illustrated by a growing number of MBA courses in European business schools that address the various aspects of family business management (Corbetta 2001). Likewise, consultants are increasingly specialising in the field.