ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the efforts of Balmer and Burghausen and Balmer to engage with the foundational concepts of corporate heritage so as to establish further theoretical contributions on a solid basis. Building on the English literature and our own experience when importing corporate heritage in French scholarship, we detail this Francophone perspective of corporate heritage. The chapter addresses the semantic issues of the translation of heritage in French, related to the epistemological distinction between patrimoine and heritage. It presents the implications of such distinctions for corporate heritage, and illustrates them with the case example of Ferrero France. The chapter discusses the insights brought by the Francophone perspective for managers and scholars. Corporate heritage as a research stream has been growing fast since a triumvirate of scholars first made use of the concept while studying monarchies as corporate brands. The chapter suggests the concept of corporate inheritance to name this reality, quite different from the following phase.
