ABSTRACT
'Family firm' is an expression which is commonly employed yet rarely defined. It is a label which has been applied to various kinds of owner-managed firms ranging from personal enterprises, in which owner control is dominant and where the owner is also chief executive, to entrepreneurial organisations: typically, owner-controlled firms which are staffed by managers and where the owners are essentially rentiers, lacking either time or inclination to manage. Three characteristics determine the points of focus for discussions of the family firm, although they are not necessarily related: family generations, family ownership, and family management. 1 In the motor industry, which had barely emerged by the beginning of the twentieth century, yet the economics of which required sizeable production units, even in Europe by the early 1920s, there is little scope for discussion of the significance of inheritance in relation to business and managerial development. Among the major mass producers of motor cars with which we shall be concerned, survival of family ownership and management for a period longer than a single generation was exceptional; for this reason family ownership and management will be regarded merely as a special case of owner management, in which the effective locus of control can be identified with a group of proprietorial interests.
