ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the intertwined nature of ownership and management in small family firms by linking corporate governance to strategic change. The concept ‘corporate governance’ did not exist in the English language twenty years ago (Zingales, 1997) but since the mid-1980s the field of corporate governance has been the subject of great interest from scholars, practitioners and public policy-makers alike. However, little attention has been shown to the particular governance problems faced by family firms with concentrated ownership and where the shareholders are directly involved in the executive management (Turnbull, 1997; Huse, 1998). The literature on corporate governance might thus be misleading for a serious analysis of family firms, where the control over both ownership and management rests in the hands of a given family.
