Primal Business:
Primal Business:
Evolution, Kinship, and the Family Firm
This chapter argues that scholarship on the family firm can benefit from evolutionary analysis and, moreover, that the family firm nicely illustrates the integrative capacity of evolutionary theory. I describe how how co-evolutionary forces shape our social institutions and the fate of business forms. I examine the role of kinship in evolutionary theory and the nature and status of the family as a vehicle for reproductive fitness. I discuss the role of the family dynamics of cooperation and conflict, how they are manifest in family firms, and their patterns of adaptive and maladaptive form and function. This chapter illustrates both the integrative capacity of evolutionary theory and how family business is a microcosm through which issues about the co-evolution of social forms and processes can be viewed.
Keywords: family business, evolutionary theory, co-evolution, family dynamics
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