The Elementary Structures of the Family Firm: An Anthropological Perspective

A majority of the companies in the world, including approximately one third of the S&P 500, can be defined as ‘family firms.’ Yet, in mainstream management education, research, and publishing, family businesses are woefully under-represented. this paper attempts to understand the elliptical status of family firms in mainstream management thought via structuralist and poststructuralist analysis. It is suggested that, because family firms resist participation in the symbolically potent space of ‘public’ finance and capital markets, they exist, at a certain level, outside of the ‘masculine’ arena of competitive capitalism. Because they compete with other public firms, family firms’ (implicit and culturally constructed) association with the ‘private,’ ‘domestic’ domain complicates their positioning in the economy and necessitates the development of multiple logics that must mediate ‘hearth’ and ‘market.’ Critical management theory (CMT) is introduced to provide a framework in which to make sense of the ‘subve...