FAMILY FIRMS AND FAMILY BUSINESS: A CONCEPTUAL APPROACH ABOUT THE AMBIGUITIES, PARADOXES AND UNIQUENESS OF FAMILY BUSINESSES

Family businesses are and have been vital in the European’s socioeconomic contexts. Notwithstanding their relevance and growing interest in academy, as well as in the institutional rationale, the study of family businesses is still a field that lacks autonomy and finds itself embedded in ambiguities, paradoxes and inconsistencies. This lack of systematisation not only compromises the process of data collection and research and consequently a better understanding of this phenomenon. In this article, our purpose is to discuss the constructs of family firm and family business. Based on the assumption that family firms are usually conceptualised as owned, totally or partially, by members of a family and are potentially intergenerational systems, with a perimeter of variable geometry, but usually rooted in a location, we aim to discuss the concept of family and distinguish between the constructs of family firm and family business. Methodologically we carried out a literature analysis or review, based on Bourdieu’s (1972) “Theory of Practice”, an approach that aims to overcome dichotomies in social theory, such as micro/macro, material/symbolic, empirical/theoretical, objective/subjective, public/private, structure/agency, and focuses on the understanding the practical logic of everyday life and understand relations of power, which enabled us to overcome the ambiguities and paradoxes that academically and institutionally surround the use of these constructs – family firms and family business. Our findings took us as a conceptual “leap forward”, the family firm becomes a family business when it becomes more strategically business-oriented. As an open system, the firm has a flow of inputs and outputs of members, which generate its unique configurations over time and potentiates intra and inter-clan conflicts and political and power struggles between family members and or among family members and their relatives and tends to create formal organisational structures and or boards to assure its continuity and growth. In this context, when the above-mentioned criterion is met, the family business only exists from the second generation onwards.