The Development of Organisation Structure in the Family Firm

Abstract

T h e term family firm can obviously be used to cover a wide range of organizat ions, and the definition adopted by the writer is that of an enterprise that, in practice, is controlled by the members of a single family. T h i s includes both the private l imited company in which virtually all the shares are owned by the members of a single family and the publ ic company in which the dis t r ibut ion of the equity is such that the family has effective control. T h e writer became interested in family firms as social inst i tut ions in 1965 when he joined an Ashridge team working on an action research project in the p r in t ing industry. Th i s study (which was supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Counci l ) involved the researchers in three years' cont inuous close association with the senior management of a family business in coping with problems of organizat ion associated wi th growth and change . 3 O n complet ion of this project, the investigators were awarded a further Social Science Research Counci l grant to carry ou t a larger scale study of smaller enterprises. Part of this investigation included a series of twenty-five linked case studies d rawn from the p r in t ing industry and as, wi th one exception, all the firms included in the sample were—or had been at some recent stage in their development—family businesses, the oppor tuni ty was taken to ex-

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