Research | Funded Projects

FAMILY AND BUSINESS: A CROSS CULTURAL COMPARISON

Based on the transactional approach to family that conisder it as “a group of intimates who generate a sense of home and group identity, and who experience a shared history and a shared future” (Koerner and Fitzpatrick, 2004), it is needed to understand how the family is considered in literature, the first step is to perform a systematic literature review based on the following group of studies: family in business studies, family in sociological studies, family in cross-cultural studies. With the aim to deeper understand how the boundaries of “family” are socially constructed in different cultures, personal interviews to family owners it will be conducted personal interviews with family founders in different countries. The basic structure of interviews will be based on "the source of guidance" construct (Smith, P.B., Peterson, M.F. & Schwartz, S. Cultural values, sources of guidance and their relevance to managerial behavior: A 47 nation study. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 2002, 33(1), 188-208; Peterson, M.F. & Smith, P. B. Meanings, organizations and culture: Using sources of meaning to make sense of organizational events. In Neal Ashkanasy, Celeste Wilderom & Mark F. Peterson (eds.), Handbook of organizational culture and climate. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 2000, pp. 101-115). Once the cultural differences will be understood, a conceptual model linking "family" and "business" across countries will be formalized.