Sociology of the Business Family - Foundations, Recent Developments, and Future Perspectives

The entrepreneurial family has hardly been a topic of family sociology so far. Precisely because more than two-thirds of all companies are family-run, it is surprising that sociology has not yet discovered the entrepreneurial family as a field of research. With this book, it is made the content of systematic family sociological reflections.
A central point of departure for theorizing and research on entrepreneurial families is that this form of family has to deal with special social challenges because it structurally combines, mixes, and couples two social spheres that are generally pulled apart in the course of the modernization of society, namely families as part of the private life world and companies as the formal organization of the economic system.


This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was also carried out by the authors and a native speaker.

Heiko Kleve is Academic Director and holder of the Endowed Chair for Organization and Development of Business Families at the Witten Institute for Family Business (WIFU) at Witten/Herdecke University. His work focuses on the business family from a psychosocial perspective.
Tobias Koellner is a Senior Research Fellow at the Witten Institute for Family Business (WIFU) at the Witten/Herdecke University. Currently, he is principal investigator of a research project that analyzes structures and dynamics in the business family in a cross-cultural perspective.