22 Traditional Authority in Social Context: Explaining the Relation between Types of Family and Types of Family-Controlled Business Groups

Sacralization and the Intergenerational Transmission of Values in Cadbury

“…In Silicon Valley, for example, we see firms that have successfully fused libertarian and capitalist values (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996), and in firms such as Lululemon, we see the syncretization of capitalism and eastern mysticism (Munir et al, 2021). Family firms and family-controlled businesses also demonstrate considerable variation in both their authority and value structures (Suddaby, Jaskiewicz, et al, 2023). Sacralization is a construct that leans heavily on metaphors and assumptions of religion to achieve integration of different value sets.…”

“…Syncretism can also result in the formation of organizational roles, positions, and organizational artifacts that synthesize secular and sacred values. So, for example, Suddaby, Jaskiewicz, et al (2023) demonstrate how the formal organizational structure of family-controlled businesses in different cultural contexts reflects the authority structure of the family, as imposed by religion and culture. The integration of sacred and profane values can also occur in formal codes of conduct, an organizational artifact in which organizations seek to embed sacred values of honesty and integrity by creating an honor code, which embodies a set of formal rules of appropriate behavior and both incentives and penalties for good and bad behavior.…”

History-Informed Family Business Research: An Editorial on the Promise of History and Memory Work

“…Family business scholars have mounted a powerful defense to this critique, noting that family businesses are both more prevalent than non-family businesses in the global economy and account for the majority of contributions to annual global gross domestic product (De Massis et al, 2018). Others observe that the distinction between the family business and the corporation is ideological, based on ideal types that rarely occur in pure form and, instead, obscure a messy empirical combination of family control and corporate structure as exemplified in chaebols, kieritsus, grupos economicos , and other hybrid manifestations of family-controlled corporations (Suddaby, Jaskiewicz, et al, 2023).…”