Hi, there was a book written by a few Harvard professors - The India Way which talks about how the family owned businesses in India built the economy. I believe one of the chapters dealt with similar topic. You may want to check it out. In the country that I live, many family owned businesses have become conglomerates. While there are no specific mechanisms that I know that can be used to identify family owned businesses, if we look into history, companies like Sony, Goodrej, Murugappa Bicycles, Genting Berhad all began as family owned or individual owned businesses before becoming century-old or conglomerates. Hope this perspective helps.

The attached article proposes a method for assessing the extent of family influence on any enterprise on a Continuous Scale rather than as a Yes/No variable. The standardized and validated instrument includes 3 sub-scales: power, experience, and culture.

Not yet work on this topic but I think this is a very good research work to carry out. I am very much interested in this research work.

Hi, I have been researching regarding Family Business, and the most simple accepted parameter is:

1) The Family has the control of the company

2) One of the family members manage the company

3) There is more than one family member in the business.

Some clarification: the control of the company could be done by having majority of ownership (could be as low as 5% for example) but have the share voting control.

The company could be managed from the Family board, Directors board or as a CEO.

Hope is helps

In my opinion, you'll have to look beyond the ownership and organizational structure by looking at how operations are managed at the organization.

How to identify whether the business/company is family owned or not? See the shareholding pattern. If majority of shares are held by family members, it will be called a family business. You don't need any papers to tell you this.

Only you need to ask for the participants in the research about the shareholders patterns in a legal document. This could be a requirement to participate in the research.

A family owned business in Nigeria cuts across all levels of business enterprise such as Micro, Small, Medium and Large organisation as defined by Government Policy on MSMEs by Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency (SMEDAN) in 2005 where the number of employees excluding land and buildings are excluded to define each of the businesses categories. Recognising family business can be traced to Micro, Small and Medium enterprises. A large size business should go beyond the family ownership in order to ensure good Corporate Governance and less corruption. Checking annual reports is beyond some small and medium enterprises that will want to cover up their success routes and failures. Don't forget your SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats) in business analysis. Your competitors are watching. I have not done any work on family business yet.

Hey, Kanimoli Ramaiah Thank You for the kind suggestion and detailed overview. I will get through the book soon. Really appreciated it.

Maris Martinsons Thank you so much for the paper.

Thank you very much Ricardo Bolanos for the methodology. It will help a lot. But I would like to mention that the country I'm living in has no such authority that keeps the ownership history for each and every firm. One way I have figured out to find that weather the company is family owned or not, is to go after surnames. I have established a rule of thumb for it. If there are multiple surnames one has to consider it a family business otherwise no. But the tradition of having family surnames is not that popular here which makes it sometime difficult to recognize it.

Kaukab Abid Azhar thank you for the nice suggestion. It would be great addition to it but for now it is beyond the scope of my study. I am very much looking forward to consider it for another paper in the near future.

Dinesh Kumar thank you for the answer. Yes, you are absolutely right. But to identify the shareholder is in itself a big issue. I have decided to go after surnames. But many don't have their surnames either.

Mauricio Umana Thank you for the kind reply. I'm looking into it.

Stella TOYOSI Durowoju thank you very much for the detailed answer and your time. I really appreciated that. The nature of doing business in my country is bit different than yours. Second, my sample is corporations or listed firms for this study. But your suggestions or quite thoughtful and suggest a new dimension to it. Thank you again.

Ashfaq Ahmad Khan, maybe I assume you have contact with the company. If you do not have contact with the company it would be difficult to investigate if it is family owned or not. If you have contact with them, should turn as easy as ask them if they have the ownership majority.

If you share the problem or the research focus, I could give you some suggestions. I have some experience in finding out information in countries that do not have official published a lot.