This paper's point of departure is that business families are permanently confronted with a dual function: They engage in typical family relations yet also have formal decision‐making processes for business and family strategy. However, large business families—which may consist of several hundred shareholders who own one or more family businesses—are confronted with an additional challenge. Alongside being simultaneously a family and an organization, they also have to establish and maintain notions of membership and modes of communication between distantly related shareholders. This we have called family network or family 3.0. The challenges involved in initiating, shaping and maintaining such networks require new strategic reconsideration in the family itself and an extension of the existing theoretical observations regarding family businesses, thereby establishing the basis for a better understanding of large‐scale business families. For this, we try to combine family business research, organization studies and systems theory.
PurposeThis conceptual article aims to contribute to the design of a theory of family-influenced firms by a framework for the management of business-family dilemmas.Design/methodology/approachIt combines systemic principles with the tetralemma, a tool from ancient Indian logic that families and businesses can use to manage and reframe dilemmas without dissolving the dilemmatic tensions or blurring their boundaries.FindingsIn applying the tetralemma, the article offers a range of suggestions, such as observing business and family as two discrete, yet codependent, social systems and envisioning conceptual and methodological imports from codependency research and therapy into family business research and practice.Originality/valueThe article proposes a framework for the selective and flexible navigation of family-business tensions without dissolving them or blurring their boundaries.
Beginning in the late socialist years, the religious situation changed massively and local authors describe this phenomenon as religious renaissance (renessans) or religious rebirth (vozrozhdenie) (E. Arinin, 2005a, 2005b; V. N. Konstantinov, 2003; L. A. Fevraleva, 2005). The widespread romantic picture of a religion that survived in remote places, however, is misleading because the recent revival of Orthodoxy largely depends on religious and political centers like Sergiev Posad, Vladimir or Moscow (M. Benovska-Sabkova and al., 2010). In my research I focused on the middle-sized city of Vladimir, which is situated about 180 kilometers to the East of Moscow. Due to its historic importance, Vladimir and the surrounding region played an important role for the Orthodox religious revival in Russia. Not only the city itself, but also the close-by towns of Suzdal or Rostov the Great and famous monasteries (Bogoliubovo) or old churches (Church of the Intercession on the Nerl) are considered to be part of the Orthodox heartland. Therefore, at particular events Vladimir is referred to as the "heart/soul of Russia" (serdtse/dusha Rossii). Not only the level of religious affiliation changed considerably but also the way how people practice religion, relate to priests and participate in parish life. In this way, the ethnographic material presented here reminds in many details on the material presented by Jeanne Kormina (2010). Like in her case, believers in Vladimir were not content with their faith alone but wanted to practice religion. However, many believers practiced a kind of "user friendly" version of Orthodox Christianity (see J. Kormina, 2010: 280f). While in J. Kormina's case the temporary community of pilgrims was preferred to the permanent community of the parish, in my case believers do become part of a parish. Participation in parish life, then, is reduced to a minimum and the
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