From a family‐owned to a family‐controlled business: Applying Chandler's insights to explain family business transitional stages

The purpose of this paper is to provide a meaningful, integrated, and re‐interpreted framework of Chandler's ideas regarding corporation's growth, offering an understandable conceptualization of how these insights are applicable to explain family firm's transitional stages – even when, in 1977, Chandler was not aware of it.

Grounding ideas on Chandler's insights regarding corporate firm's growth, and drawing on Gersick et al. family ownership evolutionary model, this paper develops an integrated framework of family‐controlled corporation's growth which allows family business researchers to reconcile with Chandler's perspectives, recognizing that his ideas contributed a lot to the family business literature.

Chandler's ideas regarding family firm's management are based on a narrow definition (and perspective) of family firm ownership. When allowing not only family‐owned firms, but also family‐controlled ones in his capitalism classification, his developmental stages make perfect sense when applied to family enterprises.

This paper intends to reinterpret Chandler's views on family firms, stating that the processes described for corporations are also applicable for family enterprises – when their definition becomes broader (including not only family‐owned, but also family‐controlled firms). The latter, bridges the gap between Chandler's envisioned historical evolution of corporations, and the development, professionalization and survival of family firms.