Search results

Purpose – This chapter explores the m+eaning and significance of family business social responsibilities (FBSRs) using a metasystem approach, placing emphasis on the role of the family.

Design/Methodology/Approach – We employ a revelatory case study to investigate the complexity of family business (corporate) social responsibility. The main case, a German shoe retailer, is supplemented by other case illustrations that provide additional insights into FBSR.

Findings – To fully understand social responsibility in a family firm context, we need to include social initiatives that go beyond the actual family business as a unit. This FBSR connects family members outside and inside the business and across generations. As FBSR is formed through individual and family-level values, its character is idiosyncratic and contrasts the often standardized approaches in widely held firms.

Practical Implication – Family businesses need to go beyond the business as such when considering their engagement in social responsibility. Family ownership implies that all social initiatives conducted by family members, regardless if they are involved in the firm or not, are connected. This includes a shared responsibility for what family members do at present and have done in the past.

Recent empirical and theoretical developments related to the microprocesses of institutional logics have helped to cultivate a powerful theory of agency. We build on these developments to show how the institutional logics perspective can shed light on important questions related to frame construction and how institutions matter. In particular, we show how the emergence of an economic democracy frame in post-war Sweden generated different efforts to define that frame with concrete ideas and practices linked to different logics – socialism and neoliberalism. We show how socialists tried to define economic democracy as requiring a radical transformation in the nature of ownership and control embedded in the innovative financial practice of wage earner’s funds. In contradistinction, conservatives drew on neoliberal ideas and extant mutual fund practices to construct alternative meanings and practices related to economic democracy that enrolled citizens in Capitalism without challenging extant Capitalist ownership structures. While mutual funds and wage earner’s funds initially existed in a state of parabiosis – existing side by side without much interrelationship – struggles over the meaning of economic democracy led these practices to become competing solutions in a framing contest. Implications for the study of institutional logics, frames and the social organization of society are discussed.

A review essay on Ronald Findlay, Lars Jonung and Mats Lundahl, eds. Bertil Ohlin: Centennial Celebration (1899–1999). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 546. $60.00. The Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin was born in 1899 and died in 1979. Less than half of his professional life he spent as a full time academic scholar in economics. He was a student at the University of Stockholm and was supervised by his teachers, Gustav Cassel and Eli Heckscher. In 1922, Ohlin presented his licentiat thesis where he set out the ideas later conceptualised as the Heckscher-Ohlin model. Two years later, in 1924, he took his doctoral degree under Cassel with a dissertation simply called Handelns teori (The Theory of Trade). A longer version of this dissertation was later published in English as Interregional and International Trade (1933). This work made him a famous trade theorist in a line of tradition going back to Ricardo and Torrens. Paul Samuelson in 1941 coined and immortalised the term “the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem” which he and Wolfgang Stolper developed further in a famous article in the Review of Economic Studies (1941) entitled “Protection and Real Wages.” Already at the age of 26 the bright young man Ohlin became a professor in economics at the University of Copenhagen and five years later he was appointed to a chair in the same subject at Handelshogskolan (The Stockholm School of Economics) in Stockholm.