This edited book examines business families as culturally embedded kinship and ownership groups that create cohesion, succession and transgenerational continuity. Bringing family business research into dialogue with kinship anthropology, family sociology, economic sociology and social systems theory, it develops the "Doing Business Family" model to analyse how families are made, organised and sustained across generations.

Drawing on qualitative research and cross-cultural comparison, the chapters investigate business families in Germany, Peru, Russia, India, China and Bahrain, with further discussions of Latin, Arab and Japanese contexts. Topics include business-family identity, narratives of crisis and responsibility in German family firms shaped by the Nazi period, women’s involvement and succession in India and Japan, knowledge and value transmission in Peru, socialisation in China, Germany and India, Chinese family governance, Arab networking and connectedness, nonfamily CEOs and family strategy.

The volume contributes to interdisciplinary debates on family firms by shifting attention from the firm alone to the family behind it. It shows how relatedness, property, embeddedness, emotions, values, governance and relationship management shape business families in different cultural and institutional settings.

Tobias Koellner is a social anthropologist and sociologist at the Witten Institute for Family Business, Witten/Herdecke University, Germany. Connecting economic sociology and kinship anthropology, he leads research on the social and cultural embeddedness of family firms and business families. He is the editor of Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Sociology of the Business Family (with Heiko Kleve, 2023).