Family Business and Sustainability Across Time and Space: Continuity, Culture, Governance, and Resilience

Family Business and Sustainability Across Time and Space: Continuity, Culture, Governance, and Resilience offers an original and wide-ranging reconsideration of family business as a historical, institutional, and comparative phenomenon. Bringing together contributions that range from the Neo-Assyrian world and Ottoman waqf structures to industrial Finland, Asian family enterprises, and contemporary debates on ESG, finance, digital transformation, and organizational resilience, the volume challenges narrow presentist understandings of family business and situates it within a much broader analytical frame. The chapters show that family business is not simply a question of ownership, succession, or firm performance. It is also deeply bound up with legal adaptation, cultural transmission, minority and diasporic networks, socioemotional wealth, strategic governance, and long-term institutional continuity. Across diverse settings, the volume explores how family-based economic actors preserve identity, manage uncertainty, negotiate change, and sustain organizational forms across generations. Interdisciplinary in scope and comparative in ambition, this collection speaks to debates in family business studies, economic history, management, sociology, political economy, and area studies. In doing so, it makes a distinctive contribution to scholarship on continuity and transformation by demonstrating that sustainability in family business must be understood not only in economic terms, but also through the interplay of culture, governance, memory, and resilience.