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During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a hundred years after his death. The unfinished biography covers Carl Menger’s family background and his life through early 1889. In this chapter, the authors discuss the biography and the most valuable new insights it provides into Carl Menger’s life, including Carl Menger’s family, his childhood, his student years, his time working as a journalist and newspaper editor, his early scientific career, and his relationship with Crown Prince Rudolf.

This paper presents a three-generation migrant analysis, comparing the relative economic performance of various migrant generations to the native population. We develop a theoretical model to explain the relationship between the different earnings of the migrants over three generations and relate the model to the results in the literature. The empirical analysis explores the suitability of the theoretical implications based on data from the 1995 Israeli Census. We show that assimilation of the third generation into the local population is far from clear.

Using a life course perspective, we develop a theoretical model of how parents can influence their children's propensity to enter self-employment. We draw on the sociological, economic, psychological, and behavioral genetics literatures to develop a model in which parental influence occurs in different ways, depending on someone's stage in their life course. We review and summarize existing findings for parental influences on entrepreneurial entry using a three-part life course framework: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. We also analyze new data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics on the extent to which children were involved in their parents’ businesses. From our review, we propose strong effects from genetic inheritances and parenting practice (during childhood); moderate effects from reinforcement of work values and vocational interests (during adolescence); and little influence from financial support but stronger effects from other tangible means of support (during adulthood).

Mentoring is an intense relationship between a senior experienced individual who is the mentor and a less experienced individual who is the protégé. Mentors provide counselling, guidance, advice, support and feedback for the protégé's personal and professional development. With the well-being of the family as the central issue in family firms, mentoring is often seen to be akin to a parent–child relationship. In Bangladesh, paternalistic and informal parental mentoring is the norm for grooming children both morally and professionally. Using six caselets of large family firms of Bangladesh, this chapter provides insight into the paternalistic style of mentoring, and also the generational differences in mentoring between the firm's owner and his successor.

This chapter expands our understanding of daughters’ inclusion in family business succession, analyzing why and how it can and does take place. Our work reveals that things are much more complex and diverse than research tells us in terms of daughters, their families, and their businesses.

Daughters are not only “in” or “out” of the family business. They can be included in a variety of ways, at different moments, following different paths, in a diversity of contexts. Based on 10 years of qualitative research data on family business succession, we explain and discuss how gender dynamics in the family and the business systems affect succession practices and outcomes, beyond the individual level analysis.

We used six selected and contrasted cases to illustrate the influence that gender, birth order, family inherited culture, business hierarchies and history, interpersonal relationships (parents-heirs-other stakeholders), as well as ownership transfers, governance rules and management procedures have on intergenerational succession, and particularly in daughters’ family business inclusion. From our findings, readers can draw practical recommendations for family business owners, managers and successors.

This paper analyzes changes in property rights, land uses, and culturally based notions of ownership that have emerged following privatization of communal land in a Samburu pastoralist community in Northern Kenya. The research challenges the strict dichotomy between private and collective rights often found in property rights literature, which does not match empirical findings of overlapping and contested rights.

Part of a long-term ethnographic project investigating the process of land privatization and its outcomes, this paper draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted by the author in Samburu County in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Interviews focused on how land is being used post-privatization as well as emerging social norms regulating its use.

Privatization privileges male household heads with powers including rental, sale, and bequeathal of land. However, informal rights to land extend to women and other household members. Exercise of legal rights is frequently limited due to knowledge and resource gaps. New rules regulating land use have emerged, some represent sharp divergences from past practice while others support shared access to land. These changes challenge Samburu cultural notions of individuality, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.

This research illuminates complex changes following legal shifts in property rights and demonstrates the interactions between formal laws and informal social norms and cultural beliefs about land. The result is that privatization does not have easily predictable outcomes as some theories of property would suggest.

Empirical investigation of the effects of legal changes enables fuller understanding of the implications of policy changes that many governments are pursuing privatization with limited understanding of the likely effects.

The rapid growth of mass incarceration in the United States means that a historically unprecedented number of children are exposed to paternal incarceration. Despite a growing literature investigating the intergenerational consequences of incarceration, little research collects information from the children who experience paternal incarceration. In this chapter, we describe an ongoing data collection effort, the Jail & Family Life Study, a longitudinal in-depth interview study designed to understand the consequences of paternal incarceration for families and children. Part of this study involves conducting in-depth interviews with 8- to 17-year-old children of incarcerated fathers during and after the father’s incarceration. First, we document the challenges and strategies to gaining access to children of incarcerated fathers, paying particular attention to the role of children’s mothers and caregivers in facilitating this access. Second, we document the challenges and strategies to developing rapport with this group of vulnerable children. Third, we describe the opportunities that children can provide for researchers. Taken together, these findings suggest that it is both challenging and imperative to incorporate children into research on the collateral consequences of incarceration.

The importance of family firms for the development of capitalism, both past and present, has in recent years become widely recognized. Today there is a fast increasing body of literature about forms of family business and variations in family capitalism. Despite this new interest, few of these studies have made the family itself the focus of enquiry – and how different types of family structures and cultural traditions may influence the strategies and development of the family firm. Such connections are explored by comparing and discussing two cases of family firms and their history, set in Norway and Italy, respectively. It is argued that these two cases may be seen as examples of quite different ‘modes of familism’, with different implications for the running of an economic enterprise. These differences concern, first and foremost, cultural conceptions of gender, forms of inheritance, and the role of marriage in constituting the family firm.

This chapter aims to delineate the indigenous pattern of parental involvement in Taiwan by investigating the effects of specific practices in schools and in the family, such as school selection, school involvement, preparing a study place at home, and providing nutritious food.

We use two waves of data from the Taiwan Youth Project (2000, 2003) to examine how parental involvement varies between dual- and single-earner families, and we further demonstrate how sons and daughters have different access in terms of recognizing their parents’ effort, and how children’s subjective appraisals promote their academic performance with respect to test scores.

We find that dual-earner families have higher incomes, higher educational levels, and have fewer children than single-earner ones. Our multivariate analyses show that parental involvement does increase youngsters’ Basic Competence Test (BCT) score. However, we are unable to find any direct or indirect effects from parental employment status on BCT scores. Further analysis indicates that the relationship between parental school involvement and BCT score is only significant among dual-earner families, but not for the single-earner ones. In addition, our multiple group analysis reveals that sons’ BCT scores are affected more by parents’ school involvement, whereas daughters’ are affected more by special home provision. Our findings from adolescents’ subjective responses imply that sons may be more responsive to a non-familial context in contrast with daughters, who react more positively to familial provision.

This chapter illuminates the central role of kin networks and the routines they construct to maintain family ties and support young fathers in jail. Recent research demonstrates variation in incarcerated fathers’ contact with children. There is less focus on variation in contact with extended kin networks and how kin networks contribute to father–child contact during an incarceration period. Forty-three incarcerated young fathers (ages 19–26) in three Southern California jails, 79% of whom self-identified as Latino, were interviewed to explore fathers’ descriptions of family contact during jail. Incarcerated young fathers rely on kin networks to coordinate routines for contact during jail, including father–child contact. Father inclusion in family life during jail depends not only on the mother of the child but – perhaps integrally – extended paternal kin. Available paternal kin can facilitate connectedness between children and incarcerated fathers in family contexts of complicated parental circumstances (e.g., parental relationship dissolution). Family members mitigate family challenges to maintain ties despite carceral policies meant to isolate fathers from families and children. A continued focus on kin networks and their role in maintaining family connectedness is crucial to understanding and reducing the collateral consequences to family members and incarcerated persons following release from jail.