ABSTRACT
The archetypal corporate form of organization in Asia's rapidly developing economies is the family-controlled business group (FBG). In these organizations, transactions with business partners are governed by norms of relational contracting, and financial control is firmly concentrated into the hands of entrepreneurial founders and their extended families, an authority structure described as personal-rule (Üsdiken 2010). Managerial theories of the firm consider the persistence of personal-rule in large modern corporations as an anomaly, since the progressive bureaucratization of modern industrial economies is expected to depersonalize organizational authority, as represented, for example, by the displacement of founder entrepreneurs as the leaders of large firms and their replacement with professional managers operating at arms-length from shareholders (Claessens et al. 2000). In most of Asia's industrialized economies, neither the separation of ownership and control nor the depersonalization of authority has occurred in most major public corporations, with the notable exception of Japan.
