The affective extension of ‘family’ in the context of changing elite business networks

Abstract

Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively loaded ‘family values’ such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects.

Regional economic performance and the differential prevalence of corporate and family business

“…This paper thus provides a base to inform much needed future research on family firm concentrations, rather than a comprehensive appraisal of the issues researched. To conclude, this is a new family business 'in context' than 'by context' point of view (Bika and Frazer, 2020) that looks at the origins of family firm heterogeneity Jaskiewicz et al 2020) and moves the debate beyond simply understanding how the situational context informs both the nature and the characteristics of family enterprise activity.…”

“…Subsequently, a family and self-employment based clustering was sought to substantiate this study's claim about the importance of seeing family business in a wider context of socio-economic interconnections that goes beyond how family firms contribute or are affected by the context (Bika and Frazer, 2020). Cluster analysis is a well-known class of statistical techniques, which was used here to find similarities and differences among European regions on the basis of social, demographic and economic indicators.…”

“…In this fashion, we move beyond the small but important family business “by context” literature (Carney and Gedajlovic, 2002, 2003; Sasaki et al , 2019, 2020) that largely aims to understand how the context of family firms (from the spatial and institutional to the social) is a key influence on enterprise activity. Instead, we look at family businesses “in context” as a phenomenon that is historically specific and “bounded in space and time” (Jackson et al , 2019, p. 34) where the family SME concentrations “constitute” rather than (with the former “by context” conceptualisation) “respond to” the regional context (Bika et al , 2019; Bika and Frazer, 2020). In our conceptual framework, the regional context itself not only matters but also stands in the middle of our conceptual framework (Figure 1), is multi-dimensional and underpins our investigation on the effects of the different and fluctuating configurations of family and non-family businesses and their employment growth asymmetries.…”

“…They also highlighted an important problem of causality, whether economic development caused by external factors in less developed regions allows more family firms to develop (because large non-family firms do not tend to locate in poor economic environments) or whether family firms by their presence and interactions cause a negative effect on economic development outcomes (Morck and Yeung, 2004). This asks the question whether family firms respond differently by regional context or whether their regional distribution is part of the regional context in the first place (Bika and Frazer, 2020). The need for more research on family business regional trends for policy formulation is further emphasised in a report to the EU Enterprise and Industry Directorate General, which highlights the need to “mainstream family-business-relevant issues”, particularly “the role family businesses play “in the stability and long-term growth of regions” (European Commission Enterprise and Industry Directorate General, 2009, p. 23).…”

Celebrity Couples as Business Families: A Social Network Perspective

“…Instead, ours is a sample that permits us to observe social network dynamics of marriage within a project-based industry. The business family literature is sometimes concerned with marriages as a means of intergenerational wealth preservation and the perpetuation of elite roles in society ( Bika & Frazer, 2020 ; Landes, 2008 ). However, as noted above, business families are typically reluctant to disclose their practice; thus, scholars are blind to how marriage can promote positive outcomes.…”